Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.

50% contrast improvement is significant, but it’s from a base of only around 1:10, so will still be fairly low in absolute terms.

If you don't want colour then any discussion about the shortcomings of this tech are moot, as you will use a display with much higher contrast.

I find e-ink screens infinitely more pleasant to look at than *LED

I know that’s the point, but I also know some people care more than others. I happen to be one of those who cares a lot.

What do you mean - the color part? That is for information density.

Do you mean the e-ink part? That is for natural-light readability w/o requiring backlight, and for power-efficiency w/o requiring a heavy battery/frequent charging.

In theory they should be amazing. Full color, looks like paper, basically an interactive magazine!

In practice the color isn't great, the screens are slow to refresh in an annoying way, and the resolution is a noticeably worse than an iPad. I also find that apps not explicitly made for e-ink are generally garbage when used on an e-ink device.

So far I have personally been incredibly disappointed with e-ink devices outside of e-readers. I want them to be good but the experience is just so much worse than an iPad.

Me too. But it’s better than wanting a megayacht or some other more ridiculous affliction, isn’t it?

I justified one to myself to read papers that have colored plots. Eink performance is still so marginal that the experience is too frustrating to rely on, and I would rather use a tablet.

Maybe if you wanted to read comics that only ever had mediocre artwork?

I have one but wish I'd bought a monochrome one. I barely use the colors, but the whites aren't as white as on a monochrome one.

TRMNL made one of these, 31.5” spectra 6. will start selling in a few weeks. fully hackable

I would love this as well. I dream of a clean dashboard for things like a shared calendar in my home.

I feel like amazon tends to wait a couple of years before using whatever the latest e-ink screen is and claim to do a lot of customization and calibration as compared to their competitors.

Once I saw that Kobo was going all in on the color e-readers I decided I'm going to sit this whole trend out and bought another Aura One. Between it and the one I currently own they should carry me for a long, long time.

The Aura One is essentially perfect. The only gripes I have are the USB port and non-removable battery. It is a bit slow with the stock OS but with KOreader it runs amazingly well.

I'm in the exact same situation, still rocking an Aura One with KOReader and can't find anything with that form factor in black/white that satisfies me.

There's something to be said with a device that has a single purpose and supports custom firmware: other than the micro-USB port and the slightly shorter battery charge I don't think I will be changing it soon.

I also have a kobo aura one and was just recently researching potential upgrades and was shocked even looking outside of strictly kobo that I couldn't find anything that was a clear upgrade or equivalent on various features against it. For a product almost ten years old it's so weird.

Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.

I would also try going the other way, and build transreflective color LCDs - those don't have latency or refresh issues, like these weird hybrids.

They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.

You can buy a 13" color e-ink display for ~$250, or a 7" e-ink display for ~$60. These can be placed in a frame for a couple bucks more [2].

Two things that I did not anticipate:

1: Refresh time is a lot longer for color displays (~20s) as compared to black and white displays (~0.5s).

2: Stock images tend to use cartoons. There is a reason for that. These displays require dithering which seems to work a lot better with a limited color palette, flat areas, and bold edges.

[1] https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-e.htm

[2] https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-photopainter.htm

I wonder how white balance is handled across these products.

I recently bought the InkJoy frame which is similar to what's sold at your link and the white balance is _awful_ and grey.

I naively expect these to reflect light like paper photos and be nearly identical in that regard when mounted beside each other on a wall, but I've been disappointed with the results so far.

Colour depth is not _as_ big a deal to me as the image simply looking natural among printed photos.

It’s requiring all my willpower not to take out a second mortgage and build a gallery wall filled with these. That image transition is gross but I guess it takes a lot more steps to move all those pigment layers around.

I agree it's probably an unnecessary expense for 99% of people, but I actually find it very useful reading articles, news and academic work. Also, I really like the washed out newspaper look the colours have even though this makes them ill equipped for graphic novels.

My kids have Clara's and they love them for graphic novels. They had b/w kobo's before but would never go back (unless they stopped reading graphic novels).