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Could PixelQi competition be partly why E Ink sold out to PixelQi at a bargain price?
June 8, 2009 | 9:28 am
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By David Rothman
Could PixelQi’s screen tech be partly why E Ink sold out to PVI for a relatively low price of $215 million?
Might the e-reader market’s tiny size not count quite as much as some say?
And competition matter more?
I’m just curious—no other reason for this question, beyond the low costs and the reported performance of PixelQi tech. PixelQi offers both a color mode and a black-and-white reading mode.
Risk to Kindle, too
Granted, Amazon’s Kindle uses E Ink tech. But what happens when color readers with other technologies like PixelQi hit the street, increasing their usefulness for display of magazines and newspapers, as well as in ed apps? Young children respond much better to color than to simple black and white, judging from the experiences that Jon Noring and colleagues had when evaluating hardware years ago. Might Jeff Bezos or future suppliers of his end up doing business with PixelQi or a similar company?
E Ink will gain color in time, probably, very nice color, I’d think—but meanwhile what happens to the company’s cashflow if technologies like PixelQi are stealing the action?
From an e-book feature chart distributed by Forrester Research and found via Gigaom (click image for more detailed view), you’ll see that color is two years off—eons in e-book terms. But wait. Almost surely Forrester meant color E Ink. Color LCDs with black-and-white e-book modes, PixelQi’s approach, used previously in the OLPC laptop, are already reality.
Detail: I did read somewhere of a $200 PixelQi display. But that’s probably either a misprint or a price of a prototype. More likely $20?
Related: Video of Jkkmobile’s hands-on with PixelQi-enhanced laptop. Also see Joanna Stern’s Laptop Magazine piece. Plus a summary of a Forester report on the growth of e-reading gizmos.
Stats from Jkkmobie: “When backlight is turned of, Pixel Qi screen uses only 0.8 watts compared to typical 2.5 watts. Their aim is to bring the drain down to 0.2 watts in next 6 months. When backlight is on, it is uses same amount of power as a normal screen but is much brighter. When backlight is turned of,Pixel Qi screen is black and white.”
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Comments:
That $200 figure comes from the Time magazine article, one that is unfortunately riddled with errors. In the video interview with Mary Lou Jepsen, she says it was a ‘misunderstanding’ and that her company is aiming at $200 as the price for the whole netbook including the screen. A small correction that makes the XO2′s goal of an ‘eventual’ $75 double-screen model somewhat more feasible.
As for Amazon, I have no doubt whatsoever that color screens are on their radar screens. I’m a bit surprised they don’t have an lcd-based color, cheaper Kindle already; all I can surmise is that Bezos & co. have determined that (so far) eink screens are so much more readable that it’s worth it to stick in that space. On the other hand, we have a raft of netbooks and touchbooks or ‘smartbooks’ coming, many based on low-power ARM cpus, designed with telcos in mind. Hook up a $99 netbook and carrier subscription with whispersync, and you have a killer kindle-reader.
Heh… Old children respond better to color over B&W, too. And young adults. And old adults. And whoever’s left!
PixelQi is still in prototype mode, so talk of a $200 ereader device from some vendor buying screen tech from them, while possible, is still premature. PixelQi has said they are going to manufacture the screens, not devices. They still have not mentioned any device makers that have signed any agreements with them to produce an e reader, or any other device. While I have every confidence that is their goal, and there is sufficient interest in the market place to make it a reality, everything being said today is pure speculation based on the very meager information PixelQi has put out so far.
The headline reads, “sold out to PixelQi”. I think you meant to write, “PVI”.
I thing the apt comparison is monotone laser printers versus color ink jet printers. If all you need is black and white, for instance to print business papers, the laser printer does that better: more contrast, crisper edges and detail, faster printing, no wavy paper from wet ink in dark parts of the page, no runny ink when it gets wet.
If the Kindle is mostly used to read mass market paperback, those are black and white to begin with. They’re going to be black and white even on a color e-book device. You get your color fix from the covers on the screen if you buy your books from a PC rather than from Whispernet.
Color would be great if there were no trade-offs, but there will be. Price, lower contrast for monochrome pages, and who knows what else.