E Ink, the company that produces e-ink displays, has just surprised everyone: after announcing a new generation of Kaleido 3 color displays, they're working on a brand new color technology with Gallery 3.
Gallery 3 is the trade name for the Advanced Color E-Paper (ACEP) color display technology.
It will therefore be possible to display 50,000 different colors on screens with resolutions starting at 8 inches. This new technology should nevertheless be suitable for smaller diagonal readers (we're thinking of 6" to 7" machines, of course).
Unlike Kaleido's e-ink color screen technology, Gallery 3 offers brighter colors and better resolution. Unfortunately, this screen is slower to refresh.
In practice, it takes 350 ms to refresh a screen with black and white. For color, the situation is much worse, and there are 3 options here:
- A "fast" mode that refreshes a screen with color in 0.5 seconds
- A "standard" mode that refreshes in 0.75 seconds
- A "best colors" mode that refreshes in 1.5 seconds
In practical terms, this means that the Gallery 3 screen will take more than a second to refresh a page with the best color setting.
If you settle for a fast half-second refresh, you'll get blander, less vibrant colors.
It remains to be seen whether future e-readers featuring this screen will be able to integrate software enabling us to choose the screen refresh mode, or whether the manufacturer will take care of this (and therefore the user won't be able to change it).
In addition to this technical information, E Ink has announced that these new Gallery 3 color screens will be compatible with Wacom's touch technologies (to have a touch screen) and with its own ComfortGaze lighting system, which reduces the effects of blue light during reading.
From the few visuals we have, it seems clear that this type of color screen is a clear plus over Kaleido screens.
However, it's clear that the display of these screens will be very slow for the time being (so count on a good second to fully refresh the screen while displaying colors).
This is a major limitation, and it's easy to see why the company is continuing to develop Kaleido color displays: they refresh much faster.
While we'll have to wait and see before drawing any conclusions, it also seems that the Gallery 3 screen offers twice the color resolution of the Kaleido 3 screens (300 PPP for Gallery 3 vs. 150 PPP for Kaleido 3.
If this is indeed the case, Gallery 3 screens could finally make it possible to read comics comfortably on a e-reader, provided the diagonal is at least 10 inches.
Even if the screen takes a second to refresh a page, if the reading experience is as close to paper as E Ink claims, this could be a real revolution for digital reading.
If all goes well, we should soon have new images and videos to tell us more.
