A small, but vocal, group of folks have been clamoring for color eReaders for years, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Sure, Amazon and a few other companies continue to crank out both entry-level eReaders and high-end models with premium specs, but they all tend to have grayscale displays.

But that doesn’t mean color ePaper is dead. Pervasive Displays just unveiled a new 12.2 inch electronic paper display that supports color… and by color, I mean it uses E Ink’s Spectra technology to do black, white, and one other color… in this case, red.

So what would you use this low-power, high-contrast, sunlight readable display for? Signage, most likely, with Pervasive Displays suggesting it could be used in retail, point of sales, office automation, or healthcare applications.

The display has a resolution of 960 x 768, which means it has just about 103 pixels per inch. It’s

The pixel density and limited color support mean that this isn’t a display you’d really want to use for digital magazines, color eBooks, or other entertainment applications. But the extra color could add a bit of pop to signs.

And since the screen is easy to read in sunlight and doesn’t use any power to display a persistent image, it could be used for outdoor signage or for public transit or other devices that are in motion through a range of environments and lighting conditions.

But if you want to read full-color content on a handheld device, you’re probably still best off with a tablet rather than an eReader.

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3 replies on “Pervasive Displays launches 12.2 inch color ePaper display… but probably not for eReaders or tablets”

  1. The red color choice makes sense for displaying numerical data when you want to show negative values as red text. So this type of display could be used in spreadsheet applications and such. Or any application where you might want to use red to indicate a warning.

    1. When I was a kid they advertised those “new, colorful GameBoys” and by colorful, they meant the case could be red or yellow or blue. The screen was the same. Disappointment of a lifetime.

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