Several companies recently announced plans to release eReaders with color E Ink displays this year, and at least one smartphone with a color E Ink screen is set to go on sale in China next week. But so far we haven’t seen many details about the technology used in those color displays.

Now we know a little more — thanks to a video of the upcoming Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader and some details compiled by Nate at The Digital Reader.

First up, it looks like the new display technology is called Kaleido, and it will combine an E Ink Carta HD screen with a color filter layer that allows the displays to show up to 4096 different colors.

But you’ll have to sacrifice some sharpness to get that level of color.

An E Ink Carta HD screen can display 16 shades of gray at 300 pixels per inch. But each color pixel will actually be made up of multiple grayscale pixels — which means that when you’re viewing color graphics you’ll probably be limited to 100 or maybe 212 pixels per inch.

There seem to be conflicting reports about the actual pixel density for color displays, so we may have to wait for an official statement from E Ink to know for sure — but for what its worth, Nate reports that the Pocketbook Color is expected to have a 100 ppi color display (or 300 ppi for black and white imagery).

Anyway, if you’re wondering what this looks like in action, the Onyx Boox Poke2 Color video shows an electronic paper screen capable of showing photographs, drawings, and eBooks, and video games in color. While the color depth is obviously a lot lower than what you’d get from an LCD or AMOLED display, and the colors look a little dull, it definitely adds some flare to the E Ink display and makes images and graphics stand out a little better.

The screen refresh rate seems to be a bit higher than usual for an eReader, but scrolling is still a little janky and I’m not sure I’d want to watch a video or play any high-action games on this screen. Card games and crossword puzzles should work well though.

While all of the color eReaders announced in the last month have 6 inch displays, the upcoming Hisense A5C and A5 Pro smartphones have 5.84 inch color E Ink displays. So while I suspect these will also be Kaleido screens, I don’t know that for certain yet.

 

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5 replies on “More details about E Ink’s new color displays for eReaders (and maybe smartphones)”

  1. I’ve been waiting so long for legit color e-ink. I’m excited for this.

    The only question is, jump in now, or wait to see if Amazon will hop up off that bed of laurels and put out their own color product… or if Boox plans to put out a Color Max. Digital comics, especially those designed for older newspaper color printing would be fantastic on that.

  2. i’m hoping this lowers the price of the B&W Hisense A5 was originally supposed to be 100 euro, but ballooned into like $250

  3. I miss when several companies were competing to create outdoor/sunlight readable low power displays for devices beyond eReaders. I had hoped to buy a UMPC at the time with one of those displays. Too bad they never took off technologically or commercially.

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