
The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI - kozmonaut
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-rise-and-fall-of-pixel-qi-how-it-shaped-the-e-reader-revolution
======
peatmoss
Damnit.

This was one technology that just kills me never acheived any market success.
I had bought an OLPC through the buy/give program and sent the OLPC to my
neice (after I poked around at the device—I was VERY curious about the
device).

The part that was truly flooring to me was the screen. It was much faster than
e-ink and, for the time, quite high resolution in its grayscale mode.

As I read through this article, it’s like a graveyard of dreams past. Mirasol
is another I’d forgotten about that I remember thinking would be ubiquitous.

~~~
raphinou
I also hoped it would bring screens readable in solar light to the market. I
still miss it regularly and am always surprised not more people want this!

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
It looks like it is already solved with just very high brightness on regular
screens. Using a flagman phone, I can't remember a single time using it in the
past when the sunlight was a problem.

~~~
askvictor
Even in the highest brightness on a recent AMOLED phone, if the sun is shining
on it directly (i.e. sun is over your shoulder), you can't see the contents of
the screen, in large part due to the reflection on the very shiny screen
(which needs to be shiny for maximum brightness). In these circumstances you
need to position your phone into your shadow (maybe you do this instinctively
and don't notice)

And that says nothing of the battery consumption (pixel qi tech switches off
the backlight in 'outdoor' mode so power draw is even less)

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
I guess it sure seems like there are different usage patterns and some people
are really experiencing this still being an issue? I can see how some people
might need to be using it really in direct sunlight where reflection can't be
tweaked away by rotating the phone just a couple of degrees (which I think I
do without even thinking about it).

So you're right, the current screen tech has not completely solved sunlight
problem.

~~~
ianai
I’m more concerned about always having to have a backlight. I guess people
just don’t care enough.

------
com2kid
The problem is that Amazon has a virtual monopoly on the e-reader market.

If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in
the US.

With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy whatever
good enough technology Amazon sells.

There might very well be a high end screen tech that people would pay for,
much as how Apple discovered people are willing to pay for higher resolution
LCDs on their laptops and smartphones

But without hardware diversity in the e-reader market, that higher price point
may never be found, and as such many promising technologies will never have a
chance to be further developed and come down in price.

~~~
lsc
>If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable
in the US.

For the people who don't buy their e-books from amazon, I think the market is
quite competitive. I mean, if you are reading PDFs, unless you like really
small type or spending a lot of effort converting, you are going to buy one of
the myriad A4 sized e-readers from various vendors. Most of the gutenberg
readers I know use an off-brand e-reader if they buy new.

>With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy
whatever good enough technology Amazon sells.

I own a handful of high-end e-readers, many of which run android. How come
none of those android devices, for instance, my A4 sized Sony e-reader, run
the amazon app available in the play store?

I suspect that it's mostly that the Sony, in spite of being a much better
reader for PDFs than my oasis, is simply not a better device for reading books
that are formatted for the kindle.

(I'm not saying that there isn't a problem... I'm just saying that the
monopoly is almost entirely in the convenience of the kindle book store.
Agreements with publishers. And I _am_ claiming that there is much competition
for the (much smaller) market for e-readers for content outside the amazon
kindle e-book ecosystem)

~~~
com2kid
> For the people who don't buy their e-books from amazon, I think the market
> is quite competitive.

And tiny. Amazon has by far the largest in the US market, from numbers I just
googled and haven't verified, Amazon is 83% of ebook sales in the US, and
probably and even larger % if your consider "ebooks read on a digital paper
device".

Hardware technologies cost hundreds of millions to develop, and years of
active sales to refine and bring prices down. Amazon has a "good enough" tech
in their Kindles, so the market is stagnating, outside of some cool stuff like
Remarkable, which isn't a new display tech stack, nor are their sales numbers
going to support development of new techs.

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anonu
Curious what people's views are on e-readers here at HN? Personally, I've
tried to adopt an e-reader over many years. The convenience of having 100s of
books without the weight is great. Being able to read in a dark room as well.
However, the feel of a real book I think still wins out over any advantages of
an e-reader.

Also my informal and anecdotal survey of how people use technology - mainly on
the NYC subway - doesn't really bring to mind many people reading on
e-readers. It usually a real book.

~~~
trocadero
I think it's the price for eBooks. A good example is Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas:

Kindle - $15

Paperback (new) - $10

Paperback (used) - $6

Paperback (library) - Free

The Kindle version is a significant premium and I don't think there is a
matching convenience factor. It's unfortunate that is the case because I'm
sure it'd be a lot more eco-friendly and efficient to distribute ebooks.

~~~
dguo
I don't know how common this is, but some libraries[1] allow people to check
out ebooks (including Kindle ones). I do most of my reading on my Kindle, and
it has almost all been free because of it.

[1]: [https://nypl.overdrive.com/](https://nypl.overdrive.com/)

------
robotbikes
So this is the first I heard of DPL as a GPL equivalent for hardware but it
doesn't appear any commercial manufacturers want to get behind it. How
feasible is the usage of this technology from a non-commercial/ hobbyist
perspective ? It would seem that manufacturing the displays would obviously
require an advanced factory so it is probably not realistically something that
people without capital and advanced knowledge could iterate on or improve. On
a semi-related note does anyone know how one could retrofit a laptop or even
raspberry pi to work with one of the still available pixel qi screens. I
figure they are missing the interface to HDMI etc and so I've always been
curious how one goes about building that sort of interface. I assume it
involves a fair amount of electronics engineering and thus not something that
could be easily learned by someone with a background mainly in software but
perhaps I just don't know or haven't spent enough time researching this.

~~~
Nursie
This reminds me of the questions "back in the day" (2005 and earlier?) before
LCD screens becames affordable. Lots of people wanted to know how to repurpose
laptop screens as generic monitors when the laptop died.

Unfortunately I think the answer was always "it's complicated, non-standard
and not worth it"

Things may have changed since then, I just wanted to share...

~~~
nitrogen
These days you can buy the adapters on eBay:
[https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=hdmi+lcd+controller+boa...](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=hdmi+lcd+controller+board&_sacat=0)

~~~
Nursie
Oh wow, well that's a bit of a change :)

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freekh
My biggest dream is a big epaper or pixel qi screen to do development on. The
bazillion nits is killing my eyes...

~~~
ptx
Your dreams might have come true, then, with the Dasung Paperlike[1], a
13-inch e-ink monitor. The first generation connected to the PC via USB and
special display drivers, but the current generation uses HDMI like a normal
monitor.

My girlfriend is quite happy with her second-generation Paperlike Pro. There
is apparently now a third generation[2] with higher resolution.

There are some disadvantages (of e-ink in general). It's not fast – the mouse
cursor feels laggy, but typing is OK. You might have to tweak various
appearance settings to make things look better in black and white – they have
software to help with this for Windows, but not for Mac. Lastly, it's not
particularly cheap.

[1] [http://www.dasungtech.com/](http://www.dasungtech.com/)

[2]
[http://dasungtech.com/english/detail/id/223](http://dasungtech.com/english/detail/id/223)

~~~
crocal
Thanks for the link! Based on your experience, would it be a good fit for
hacking? How does a Emacs/Vi session comes across?

~~~
ptx
She uses it at work, so I can't check now, but I think it should be OK. It's
mainly smooth-scrolling web pages and the mouse cursor that look laggy –
things that move continuously pixel by pixel.

Dasung do mention programming as one use case and demonstrate it here:
[http://www.dasungtech.com/sta/en/type.gif](http://www.dasungtech.com/sta/en/type.gif)

They say it's "nearly as fast as LCD". It has different modes to choose from,
with different trade-offs between speed and image quality. And the new
generation might be faster that the one I used.

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IshKebab
I think it was a mistake for them to market it as e-paper because it's clearly
not as good as e-ink for the purpose "e-paper" evokes - reading books.

As a daylight-readable LCD it looks like it was great, but I guess not that
many people need that.

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arendtio
I bought a Notion Ink Adam back when it came out and while other complained
about the faint colors, I was pretty happy when I had no problem reading at
the beach :-D

I wish they would have developed a Pixel Qi version with a AMOLED (not sure if
that is possible), as that way we could have nice colors combined with a
readable screen in bright sunlight. I still want to have a Pixel Qi screen for
my smartphone every single time the sun is so bright that I have trouble
reading anything on it.

Until now, I was wondering what happen to the technology. It is just sad, that
they weren't able to make the whole thing an economical success.

------
amiga-workbench
I would kill for a Pixel QI panel for my ThinkPad, I could program outdoors
and escape the open plan office for a bit.

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bcraven
>If you look at your average paratrooper or ranger they are constantly
receiving revised mission parameters and in harsh conditions like a dessert

Delicious!

