New images of the Pixel Qi display
By LuYu
Mary Lou Jepsen has a new entry on her blog over at PixelQi. In her latest post, she links to an image of the new display connected to an Aspire One with the backlight turned off next to a Kindle. As usual, it looks pretty impressive.
So, who wants an e-book reader / computer that can do this and color and video?
UPDATE: Blech!! It is running Windows. New technology should not use an outdated OS.
Note: Thanks to LuYu! I’ve moved this post up because of its importance to many TeleRead community members. Also, see a Time Magazine/CNN item on the new display. Is this right: “The screens are cheap to produce, too—well under $200, she said”? A prototype cost? Or a typo? – D.R.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:24 am
Outdated or not, Windows still has readers for more e-book formats than any other OS.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:15 am
Every computer I have has Windoze because I need it to work; I wouldn’t purchase another OS.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
As for the Windows OS, let me recount a story from the Security Now Podcast.
There was a hospital that hooked up some kind of life support monitoring system to a Windows XP system. It was configured for automatic updates and it rebooted during the middle of an operation. The hospital SysAdmin then disabled automatic updates for all Windows systems in his network. And then came the malware from an unpatched system with a connection to the internet.
Now, an ereader is not as critical as a system monitoring life support, but wouldn’t you really rather have critical (or even non-critical) systems running a more reliable OS like Unix or Linux.
BTW, I’m on a Mac.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:54 pm
It shows, Greg, it shows…
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
That Time piece is a weird one, since it tells us that disaffected members of OLPC went on to invent Eink. Oh really? That said, it seems more likely the ‘under $200′ is accurate.
Kind of puts into perspective Negroponte’s boast that XO2 will have 2 of these screens, with touch on both, plus power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, storage … for $75.
We have to hope that with scale the 3Qi screens will come down a lot farther, fast. Don’t know what the production cost of a typical netbook LCD screen is. But I’d imagine that some people would pay extra for the advertised ‘up to 40 hours battery life!’ that they might claim if you had the screen on epaper mode, and never turned the page!
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Pond,
The old Rocket eBook of mine got about 22 hours of reading at 40% backlight, with a Ni-MH battery. Ten years later it gets 18-20. So 40 hours does not seem unreasonable in eInk mode (relective mode). If the battery was the same size as the rather big battery in my Rocket I might expect 40 hours using the backlight. But of course the battery will not be anywhere near that size.
I wish I knew what these display panels will cost to manufacture once full scale production starts. You can buy a 19-21 inch LED monitor for $200 or less so that gives us some sort of upper limit. Still I think $75 is something to shoot for without knowing much about production costs.
The cool thing here is eReaders are suddenly blossoming with many units out or soon to be available. That is good. The pricing is still bad. But with the competition ramping up there should be pressure to drive the price down in the next few years.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:13 am
@Greg M:
Not if I want to be able to read encrypted MobiPocket e-books without illegally breaking the encryption. (Not that I particularly do, since I don’t buy in that format, but there will be others who bought those books in the past when they had something that read them and for whom being able to read them will factor heavily into their considerations as to what platform to buy in the future.) There’s no MobiPocket client for “Unix or Linux,” and there probably will never be.
Of course, since you’re on a Mac (for which there is no Mobi client either), you can’t read encrypted MobiPocket e-books without illegally breaking the encryption, so I guess you wouldn’t miss what you’ve never had.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:09 am
Up until February of this year I was still on Windows and had the ability to encrypted Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, Adobe, and eReader; funny thing, however, I never did so. Out of a hundred plus ebooks I’ve read over the years, not one has been done on a desktop or laptop. The fact that a Mac can’t read most encrypted ebooks is completely moot; even if available, it would be a feature never used.
How many people actually read whole, full length ebooks sitting at their desktop? My guess is not many.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:32 am
@Greg M:
But we’re not not talking about desktops here. In the context of the original post, we are talking about netbooks optimized for e-book reading, which is the entire purpose of the Pixel Qi display.