Yes, it has been nearly 15 years since the birth of Kindle, but Kindle has always been "knowing white and keeping black" and never knew "green, fat, red and thin".
Color electronic ink screen is not a fantasy technology. 20 19 E Ink Thai technology, which produces ink screens for Kindle, has launched printing color electronic paper, allowing users to get rid of the shackles of black and white ink screens and browse color content.
Nowadays, color e-readers have been everywhere in the market, but compared with the traditional black-and-white ink screen, color ink screen seems to be less popular than expected.
In addition to the high price of color e-readers, it is also related to hardware defects such as insufficient color and low resolution. After many years, it seems that the color ink screen can't wait for the first year of the outbreak.
But don't be discouraged. E Ink has recently brought a big wave of color ink screen technology updates. The "color Kindle" you are thinking about may really become this time.
Friends who are not familiar with ink screens may wonder why color displays such as LCD and organic light-emitting diode are so mature, and color electronic ink screens are still so difficult to make.
To answer this question, we have to start with the imaging principle of electronic ink screen.
Unlike the LCD screen composed of RGB pixels, the electronic ink screen used by Kindle is actually composed of tiny ink microcapsules.
There are pigment particles with different colors in each microcapsule, and the arrangement of the particles can be changed by applying different voltages up and down, thus displaying specific contents.
One of the most common black and white ink screens is composed of black and white pigment particles. Every time the ink screen is refreshed, it is actually to rearrange the black and white pigments of microcapsules to form a new pattern. Therefore, the ink screen also has the characteristics of no light and no self-consumption.
At present, there are two mainstream methods to make the ink screen display colors: one is to add a color filter layer on the display screen, so that external light can enter the ink screen and reflect, and then a specific color can be displayed.
Secondly, simply and directly adding more color pigment particles into microcapsules can directly display a variety of colors.
The two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of color richness, refresh speed and resolution. The color of the former (4096 colors) is far less than that of the latter (more than 40000 colors), but the refresh speed is much faster. At present, most color e-readers on the market adopt color filtering scheme, that is, E ink Kaleido series technology.
However, although the color filter brings color to the black and white ink screen, it is not perfect. Comparing the color e-reader with the iPad, you will obviously feel that the "color" of the color ink screen is not only more dull, but also less clear.
This is related to the physical structure of the color filter.
Due to the limited filtering effect, the number of colors that can be displayed on Kaldor screen is far less than that of self-luminous liquid crystal. The existence of the filter layer also makes the resolution of the screen somewhat compromised. The PPI of ordinary black and white ink screen can reach 300, and the highest PPI of kaleidoscope is only 150.
In the past two years, E ink has made the color of kaleidoscope screen more accurate and saturated by adjusting the distance between filter layer and ink layer. However, in order to completely reverse the color disadvantage of color ink screen, we have to rely on another technology-e ink gallery.
E ink Gallery adds cyan, magenta, yellow and white electronic ink pigment particles to the ink bag, and can achieve full color gamut color display effect through pigment combination. From the actual perception, it is closer to the familiar color display screen.
However, because the pigments in E ink Gallery are much more complicated than traditional black and white, the screen refresh speed is much slower.
The first generation of E ink Gallery only needs 2 seconds to refresh black and white pages, and it takes 10 seconds to refresh color pages, which makes E ink Gallery basically not used for e-readers, but only for outdoor large billboards.
At this time, you may be thinking, if E ink Gallery can speed up the refresh rate, can it "die"?
This time, E ink really did it. E ink recently officially released the third generation E ink gallery technology, and E ink gallery 3 has made remarkable progress in refresh speed.
E ink said that the black-and-white refresh rate of E ink Gallery 3 has been shortened to 350 milliseconds (1 sec = 1000 milliseconds). Depending on the color mode, the color refresh rate can be shortened to 500 milliseconds at the earliest, which is very close to the level of ordinary black-and-white ink screens.
At the same time, in the standard color mode, the color refresh rate of E ink Gallery 3 can be controlled within 750- 1000 milliseconds, while under the best color display effect with the highest quality, the refresh rate is 1500 milliseconds, which is still significantly improved compared with the first generation 10 second.
Although the refresh rate of E ink Gallery 3 at 60Hz or even 120Hz is not as good as that of a tablet computer, it is a milestone leap enough for it to cross the threshold of usability and be applied to e-readers.
In addition to greatly shortening the refresh rate, the resolution of E ink Gallery 3 has also increased from the first generation of 150 PPI to 300 PPI, which makes up for the lack of fineness of the previous color ink screen. The improvement of resolution also means that the color ink screen finally has the opportunity to be applied to devices with larger screens, which was a great pity in the past.
Only from the parameters, E ink Gallery 3 should be the "dream screen" in the hearts of electronic paper book lovers, which can prevent it from competing with liquid crystal technologies such as organic light-emitting diodes, and probably only the cost of components.
Also announced at the same time as E ink Gallery 3 are two cutting-edge electronic paper book technologies that E ink is currently studying, namely color folding ink screen and color scroll ink screen.
Using flexible folding technology, e-readers can be more portable. When the iconic action of "turning pages" is also engraved by electronic paper books, the revolutionary pace of electronic paper books replacing physical books will go further.
But the question is, even if the electronic paper book can use colored ink and folding screen, are you still willing to hold it?
It is an indisputable fact that ink screen e-readers are not as popular as they were 10 years ago.
This is not to say that the e-reader market is facing a shrinking crisis. On the contrary, compared with the past, the e-reader market is much more lively.
Although the Kindle is still the only one, the addition of manufacturers such as aragonite, Palm Reading, Huawei and Xiaomi has made the equipment types of e-readers richer than before. From 6 inches to 13.3 inches close to the size of a notebook screen, you can find an ink screen that is more suitable for you.
However, the story of "putting a bookstore in your pocket" described by Kindle is not as attractive as before. Idle Fish 202 1 released the top ten "useless" goods list at the end of the year. E-readers like to mention the position of "exploring flowers" and become frequent visitors to second-hand trading platforms.
E-readers are annealed because people no longer like reading?
Maybe not. China Digital Reading Report 202 1 published by China Audio-Visual and Digital Publishing Association shows that the per capita electronic reading in China is 1 1.58, which is much higher than the per capita 9. 1 in 2020.
Another set of data may better explain why e-readers are hot.
According to the results of the 19th national reading survey released by China Press and Publication Research Institute, in 20021year, 45.6% people tended to read paper books, up 2.2% year-on-year. "Mobile phone reading" accounted for 30.5%; Reading on e-readers accounted for 8.4%, a year-on-year decrease of 0.2%.
In contrast, people are more enthusiastic about listening to books. 7.4% people tend to "listen to books", up 0.7 percentage points year-on-year. This proportion is rapidly catching up with e-readers, so people may simply stop using e-readers.
The weakness of e-readers such as Kindle has little to do with hardware, but more to do with reading environment.
Books represented by "kindles" are no longer the only entrance for us to consume content and acquire knowledge, nor the symbol of "holding a book anytime and anywhere". The convenience of our access to content has reached an unprecedented peak. At this time, if "kindles" can't bring service innovation, it will be difficult to attract people to hold it again.
Just as smartphones need the next "iPhone", e-readers urgently need the next "Kindle"-not Amazon's new reader, but a product that can innovate services again.
The success of Kindle lies not in the innovative launch of ink screen products. Before Amazon launched the original Kindle, Sony had launched an e-reader called Librie.
From the hardware point of view, the original Kindle is not as refined as Sony Librie, but as Jeff Bezos said when launching the Kindle, "this is not a device, but a service".
Kindle beat Librie by a complete software and hardware experience. Through the seamless integration with the online bookstore, Kindle can not only let users read books anytime and anywhere, but also buy books at any time, and obtain an almost unlimited handheld library.
Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst at Citigroup, once said that the real change that Kindle brings to users is that people can finally buy books anytime and anywhere, which is also the secret of Kindle conquering the world like iPod, Walkman and even iPhone.
Service is more important than the device itself, which is the most valuable successful experience left by Kindle.
Therefore, if Kindle people want to restore people's love for e-books with color ink screens, then product managers have to think about a question-what kind of "color service" do people need?
Perhaps when the right answer is found to this question, the next Kindle that can change reading again is not far away.