
Sony releases the Holy Grail: A flexible e-ink screen - techiemonkey
http://techgeekforever.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/sony-releases-the-holy-grail-a-flexible-e-ink-screen/
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bashcoder
Meanwhile, today I get an email from Sony saying that their Reader store
closed on March 20, and that it has ceded its customers to Kobo, which spawned
from Canada's Chapters Indigo. [0]

While this tech may be notable, Sony continues to have a fatally misaligned
device/content strategy.

[0]
[http://www.kobobooks.com/SonyMigrate](http://www.kobobooks.com/SonyMigrate)

~~~
lignuist
What is wrong with just offering a reader without forcing its users to also
buy the books from the same source?

I own a Sony reader and I actually enjoy that it is not tightly bundled with a
bookstore.

~~~
bashcoder
Sure - and I think Sony e-readers were even among the first to allow side-
loading of non-DRM ebooks.

The problem is the economics. There just haven't been financially successful
examples of standalone readers, and Sony has been no exception.

Amazon can offer cheap Kindles because they can sell ebooks onto the devices
directly and make money from content. Apple can charge more for their books
because people are bought-in to their iPad investment, and because competitors
have to pay Apple 30% to sell directly on to an iOS device.

Sony, meanwhile, continues to fail to bring an integrated value proposition to
the market. Everything with them involves friction, compared to the
competition. Last time I was at CES, I couldn't even find a Sony reader in
their booth.

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mdip
As I've been reading the coverage of this product throughout the day, the
price seems to be the biggest drawback everyone focuses on, and I agree that
$1100 is overpriced for what this product is offering. I got the sense from
several articles that $1100 would be way overpriced for _any_ e-reader.

Because of the huge number of PDF files in larger paper sizes that I have, I'd
happily pay $1500 for this if in addition to it's features it: 1. wasn't made
by Sony, 2. was color (to about early 1990s Newspaper quality), 3. was
unlocked (different OS could be installed, etc)

~~~
anigbrowl
It's a premium price that's partly for early adopters to show off, but when
you can read and write Japanese on it (as shown in the product video) the deal
is basically made. Lawyers will flock to this in droves, not least because it
will be a deductible business expense. The color will be irrelevant to them
and the Sony brand will actually be an asset, because they're less concerned
about Sony's cool factor than the fact they're in no danger of going out of
business.

I know, it's not the most hacker-friendly analysis, but this really is
something innovative and will help teh technology towards becoming ubiquitous.

~~~
dfc
> when you can read and write Japanese on it the deal is basically made

Why is this the deal maker? I do not read/write japanese so maybe I am missing
something obvious.[^1] Is writing/reading japanese with pen/pencil and paper
difficult? Is there something that differentiates Japanese reading/writing
from Korean? Have there been other tablets that worked with western scripts
but not Japanese?

[^1]: I am assuming we are not talking about handwriting recognition.

~~~
dfc
Downvoted for asking a legitimate question. Who does that? I could care less
about the karma but in light of the pending comments change this is very
troublesome.

~~~
anigbrowl
I gave you an extra upvote. I hate it when that happens and thought your
question was entirely legitimate - my original comment was a bit vague.

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devindotcom
Not really, I've played with one an the enclosure is pretty rigid. It flexes
but it's not like you can fold it and half and then smooth it out. I'm still
waiting on that. Also the resolution leaves something to be desired at that
size.

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derefr
Would the best analogy be something like a 5.25" floppy, where it wiggles a
bit but bending it into a U-shape would wreck it?

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devindotcom
This is much thicker than that. No, if I remember correctly it's really more
like a large, thin hardback, like a children's book. Sorry I can't be more
specific, I only held it for a few moments, and they could easily have altered
the design or simply had an old prototype out.

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psc
This technology is really cool, too bad it seems like there wasn't much
thought put into making an appealing product out of it. Just imagine how much
more you could do with a flexible display, rather than just reading PDFs and
writing notes. From the video, the UI looks mediocre, and this is just a
guess, but I wouldn't expect the software to be great. It feels like Sony just
wrapped up a really cool hardware prototype in a shell and decided to sell it,
but the whole thing lacks any sort of polish. I can't wait for someone who
cares about the details of a product to get a hold of flexible e-ink screens.

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scarmig
Attach it to a keyboard. Screen is big enough to code at the beach.

Isn't what I wanted Mirasol to be, but looks like a damn fine refinement of
e-ink.

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guidopallemans
sand in the keyboard though...

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rectangletangle
Hook up one of those new projected keyboards, and I think it'll be ready.

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dwb
I don't understand why a flexible e-ink screen is desirable if its cost
doesn't approach that of paper – and it's safe to say it won't for a very long
time. If it's (relatively) expensive, you want to reuse it, and so it will
need a rigid enclosure. Apart from bending around shallow radiuses for gently
curved displays and the like, am I having a failure of imagination?

~~~
anigbrowl
Imagine you already deal with a great amount of paper by necessity. You can
put it in a binder, bend it out of the way to get at physical documents behind
it, use it as a live index to other things and so on. It would be perfect for
lawyers in court, where you don't necessarily wish to have a laptop on the
table r a device that you hold up, but you do have to deal with massive
amounts of paper and would like an electronic tool that substituted/integrated
as seamlessly as possible into that environment.

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arjn
This is just an initial release/prototype. Pretty sure it will improve with
time. Glad to see Sony breaking new ground and also glad that e-ink technology
is improving.

~~~
scholia
No, it's being offered for sale....

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sukuriant
So is the Rift

~~~
nezza-_-
The Rift _devkit_.

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TrainedMonkey
It does not matter how much it costs now. Simple facts that it is possible and
technology to produce it exists are important. Within a few years economy of
scale and technology optimizations will bring flexible e-ink at affordable
price.

~~~
rectangletangle
This, technology always starts out expensive and impractical. Through mass
production and refinement, it becomes practical and useful. Now that it's
confirmed possible and somewhat practical, more funding and research is likely
to be directed toward it.

~~~
CountingCode
It's funny, almost every argument against this e-reader I've read here today I
also read when sony released it's first e-reader, well in advance of the
kindle. I bought it anyway and had no regrets.

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ben174
Still in major need of a refresh rate boost. Especially with stylus input. It
would be near-impossible to write at a reasonable speed when the screen takes
so long to refresh.

~~~
jamesmiller5
I was pretty upset with it's performance as a writing pad, having 100ms
response times, maybe even higher. Even if I didn't have 3 week battery, I'd
prefer <35ms draw times so it feels 1-to-1 with the input.

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leoc
1200×1600 greyscale and 13.3" is great, but I feel that 'flexible' is a lower
priority than 'not $1100'.

~~~
riffraff
that is only if you haven't broken a few e-ink screens already :)

As soon as I saw this I thought "no way anyone sensible is buying this, it
will break in a week".

Factoring this in, a rigid screen would have probably meant "unsellable".

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TillE
Use a case? Include a free fake leather case with every purchase?

I've had zero problems with my Kindle screens, but I've never dropped them.

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dorkrawk
This looks awesome. I love the ability to write on e-ink. But is flexibility a
feature or a bug of paper? What is the benefit of a non-rigid e-ink display
for these types of use cases?

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lando2319
> But is flexibility a feature or a bug of paper?

This is interesting. I hadn't thought of it from this perspective. If perhaps,
down the line of course, you could roll it up like a taquito then you could
put it in your pocket.

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tenfingers
I actually want/need a digital sketchpad, and while I do read/annotate PDFs,
this is not what I would do the majority of the time.

If this device would be hackable (run linux on it), I would find so many use
cases for it that I could justify the price in a heartbeat.

Somehow, being a device from Sony, I expect this reader to be a piece of junk
software-wise, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised that you need to
convert the PDF into something else and use custom clients just to exchange
files.

I hope I will be wrong.

~~~
joshvm
If you want a cheap digital sketchpad, look at the Boogie Board LCD slates.
They're nowhere near as good as a proper graphics tablet, but you can draw and
save stuff on them. High end model is around $100, other models more like $30.

~~~
tenfingers
I really want an e-ink screen, otherwise paper is still a better option for
me. Price is not really an issue if the screen delivers.

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udev
This might be very useful for reading academic papers, because most of the
time people scribble notes while reading.

It's funny how having solved the battery problem (3 weeks on one charge), they
still can't solve the speed problem (1 sec to refresh the page).

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rectangletangle
Wow, that's cool as hell. Even though it's $1100, it's new technology, and
subsequent iterations will likely be much cheaper (and will probably have
support for color).

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johnduhart
Is there a source for this that isn't blogspam?

~~~
scholia
[http://www.worldox.com/news/sony-digital-paper-
worldox](http://www.worldox.com/news/sony-digital-paper-worldox) and
[http://www.sony.com/digitalpaper](http://www.sony.com/digitalpaper)

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kliao
wait, this device is literally flexible as in bendable like paper? that's what
the article makes it sound like, but it doesn't seem to be true based on the
product page:

[http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-digitalpaper/cat-
digitalpap...](http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-digitalpaper/cat-
digitalpapersub/product-DPTS1/)

~~~
shawn-furyan
I think that it's the display that's flexible, not the device. I suppose that
you could potentially do a Chromecast style computer in a kind of bump
enclosure at the bottom of the back of the display to retain flexibility
(though I don't think that there's enough detail to determine if there are
other issues with such an approach). They however seem to be using a
traditional rigid enclosure for the prototype.

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logfromblammo
At $8.95 apiece, $1100 can buy you 122 mass-market paperbacks. I certainly
hope that someone can bring that retail price down a fair chunk, or this tech
is not going far.

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necubi
This is not meant for reading paperbacks. A kindle paperwhite, at $120, is a
far better choice for that.

This is for reading and annotating documents, and generally replacing paper in
an office or academic setting. Given then number of research papers I've
printed out (thousands and thousands of pages), I can see a huge use for this.
It may still not be cost effective, but is still much more environmentally
friendly and saves the hassle of keeping track of all of that paper.

The paperless office has been an idea for several decades, but without devices
like this that allow easy reading and annotation, we haven't been able to get
there.

~~~
logfromblammo
For research papers... maybe 50 pages including technical graphics? With a
monochrome laser printer, we'll give a very high estimate of $0.10 per page,
or $5 per paper. That's still 220 papers to break even, at least, and only one
person can use it at a time, unlike the printer, which can be shared for the
whole office.

My home printer is over 10 years old, and I still don't think I have spent
more than $800 on it during that time, including consumables.

And I would recommend the Kobo Glo/Aura over the Paperwhite for paperbacks.
The MicroSD card slot alone is worth it.

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dragonwriter
> For research papers... maybe 50 pages including technical graphics? With a
> monochrome laser printer, we'll give a very high estimate of $0.10 per page,
> or $5 per paper. That's still 220 papers to break even

Okay, so, yes, its cheaper to print paper than to carry a letter-sized, write-
on-it, ereader.

OTOH, its a _lot_ more convenient to carry one ereader if you have a lot of
stuff to view than it is to carry a stack of books/research papers/etc.

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caiob
How exactly is this a MVP?

