E Ink Gallery: 50,000 color screen to rival LCD and OLED screens

With the third generation of Gallery technology, E Ink sees all the colors. Fifty-thousand, to be precise, twelve times more than the previous technologies of the American-Taiwanese company which dominates the “electronic ink” market. “A significant step forward”assures CEO Johnson Lee, who promises a proliferation of color reading lights.

Gallery technology is built on the platform ACeP, which combines four primary particles (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), like the sub-pixels of an LCD screen. Although it is able to reproduce the chromatic scale, it remained confined to commercial uses, because it took about ten seconds to refresh the display.

Instead, the eReaders used Kaleido technology, which places a colored filter above a monochrome screen. Operations are much faster, but the definition of the colored screen leaves something to be desired (100 dpi), and the colors are washed out. While a handful of manufacturers have embraced this technology, Amazon and Kobo ostensibly steer clear of it.

Vivlio Color: test of the first color reader with the E Ink Kaleido screen

E Ink hopes that will change with the third generation of Gallery technology, which can refresh the display in 1,500ms when quality is preferred, and even 500ms when speed is preferred. The definition reaches 300 dpi, and the color saturation does not depend on the brightness, even if the screen is flanked by a ComfortGaze lighting system.

This technology will do nothing for notebook manufacturers, like Noteworthy Where Boox, which rely on speed to compete with tablets capable of refreshing their display in 16 ms. However, it could change things for e-reader manufacturers, who see the digital book market stagnating, except in the more colorful area of ​​manga and comics.