E Ink Updates Its Color ePaper Offerings with Brighter, Larger, More Colorful Kaleido Plus
Revised bonding process improves color brightness and widens the gamut, while the size is bumped from 6" to 7.8".
E Ink has announced the launch of its latest color electropheretic display, the E Ink Kaleido Plus — and says its new variant offers brighter colors, triple the color gamut when front-lit, and is available in a larger 7.8" model.
Electrophoretic displays, generically known as ePaper, are remarkable devices: Once set to display an image, they'll continue to do so until told otherwise - even when the power is cut — and are easily viewable in direct sunlight. The technology, pioneered by E Ink, saw early use in electronic book reading devices, where its slow refresh rate and two-color - black and not-quite-white — palette weren't an issue.
Last year, E Ink announced the Kaleido, bringing color to its offerings by using a smart filter layer in front of the still-black-and-not-quite-white base display. The technology, though, has its drawbacks: Functional resolution drops considerably in color mode compared to traditional grayscale, and the colors are considerably more muted than a conventional power-hungry LCD panel.
Kaleido Plus aims to fix at least some of these drawbacks. "We took our customer's feedback from our initial launch, and incorporated it into this upgrade, bringing a new level of color saturation to our color devices, and we look forward Kaleido Plus being adopted in the eTextbook market in the future," says E Ink chief executive Johnson Lee. "We are proud to have the support of our leading customers, PocketBook (InkPad Color) and Onyx (BOOX Nova3 Color), for this launch."
The new Kaleido Plus displays increase the maximum available size from 6in to 7.8in, and come with the promise of a color filter layer bonded closer to the underlying electrophoretic ink display to boost color brightness and text rendering. When used with a front-light system, the displays are also claimed to offer improved color saturation with triple the gamut of its previous-generation equivalent.
The underlying specifications, however, remain unchanged: The electrophoretic ink system is capable of displaying 16 shades of gray, switching to 4,096 shades of color with the filter system enabled. Doing so, however, comes at a cost of dropping the resolution to just a third of its grayscale mode: 1,404x1,872 at 300 dots per inch grayscale becomes 468x624 at 100 dots per inch color.
More information on Kaleido Plus, which is also being sold under the name New Kaleido, can be found on the E Ink website.