E Ink has announced the new generation of color electronic paper Gallery 3. It has several groundbreaking updates that bring the appearance of color screens E Ink in smartphones or tablets.
There are currently several versions of colored electronic paper tablets based on another E Ink technology – Kaleido. These include a pretty good PocketBook Color and Boox Nova3 Color, which is slightly inferior to it.
Kaleido was the first attempt to create an E Ink color screen for mass gadgets. It was based on a traditional black and white screen, on which a color filter with red, green and blue pigments was applied.
Although this allowed you to view colored covers or comics, regular black-and-white pages looked more blurry and greenish-gray due to the use of a filter. Colors (a total of 4096) could be seen only when the lights were on or in direct sunlight. The resolution was also low – from 100 to 150 dpi.
In Gallery 3, the manufacturer has removed the biggest shortcomings of Kaleido. The novelty can show 50,000 colors with a resolution of 300 dpi. No backlight is required, although according to press release Gallery 3 will have a front LED backlight that will reduce blue light.
Previous versions of Gallery already had a similar number of colors at a similar resolution. However, they were not suitable for consumer devices due to slow operation – to “turn” a full-color page, the predecessor of Gallery 3 took 10 seconds. Instead, Gallery 3 does this in 1.5 seconds in a mode where quality exceeds speed – and in 350 milliseconds when speed is more important.
E Ink can’t compete with displays that update 60 times per second or even faster. However, the manufacturer has demonstrated a huge leap in technology that will allow E Ink products to compete with OLED and LCD technologies, such as in wearable devices.
Due to the fact that E Ink is more pleasing to the eye, lasts longer on battery power and better displays content in bright sunlight, it could be ideal for tablets – if the pages can be updated quickly enough. The manufacturer also demonstrates how the screen with E Ink technology can be folded into a scroll, or bent, flipped like a real book.
It is unknown whether manufacturers are ready to use the new Gallery 3 for phones or tablets. However, Boox and PocketBook are ready to experiment with the novelty and find out what you can do with it other than read a book. It is possible that announcements from these companies or other manufacturers of tablets with E Ink technology from China will appear by the end of this year.
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