How to Add Color to a Kindle: Pixel Qi’s Cheap Screens
by Peter Kafka
Posted on June 23, 2009 at 3:00 AM PT
Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle gets many plaudits, but it also gets one consistent criticism: Why can’t it come with a color screen?
It can, say the folks at Pixel Qi, a start-up based in Silicon Valley and Taiwan: It could use the cheap, lightweight color screens that we’re going to make.
Pixel Qi is the brainchild of Mary Lou Jepsen, who was best known as the CTO at the One Laptop Per Child project that makes supercheap laptops for kids in dirt-poor nations. Her new company has a similar thrust with a different goal: Produce cheap color screens that can be used in supercheap “netbooks” or in Kindle-like devices.
Jepsen says she can pull this off and create screens that cost less than the E-Ink ones used in Kindles and other devices like Sony’s (SNE) Reader because she’s using LCD technology, which has an existing industrial infrastructure to support it.
Meanwhile, she says, E-Ink screens will struggle to incorporate color because the only way to do that is to put a color layer above the existing monochrome screen, which will end up making the screen harder to read.
Almost all of these technology claims are impossible for a knuckle-dragger like me to assess, but I will note that I’ve heard other companies working on E-Ink-based readers make the same argument about the difficulty that color poses.
I’m still not convinced that color makes a Kindle or a Kindle-like device that much more successful. I know that the publishing industry wants it, but that has as least as much to do with the business model that industry types think that color can sustain as with anything else. Perhaps readers, the kinds of readers who spring for a reading device that doesn’t make phone calls, will be fine with black and white.
Recall that audiophiles spent years complaining, accurately, that MP3 players like Apple’s (AAPL) iPod produced severely degraded sound. Turns out no one cared. Or at least not enough to outweigh the iPod’s other benefits.
But assuming that the netbook/tablet trend has legs, there should still be a market for the screen that Jepsen says she can make and get on the market early next year.
Recently I sat down with Pixel Qi chief operating officer John Ryan, who happens to be married to Jepsen and who walked me through the company’s pitch. We tried our best to show off the demo screens, but it’s the kind of thing that you really need to see in person; even if I wasn’t using a Flip camera, I think this would be difficult to capture. But Ryan was a good sport about it, and although you can’t see the screens that well, you can get a good glimpse of Central Park during a rare bit of sun.
Comments
So this article is designed to say that instead of using e-ink the Kindle should use an LCD display instead?
I think, just like about every critic of the Kindle, you’ve missed the point of the e-ink technology.
Quite honestly, I suspect you’re just pimping this new company because nobody with a brain could actually be saying what it is you’re saying. You might want to re-read the whole point of the e-ink display.
Posted by Mhar Johannsen at June 23rd, 2009 at 8:02 amI must agree with Mhar, Peter you’ve completely missed the boat. The whole point of eInk is that it reduces eye strain (like a real book) and provides virtually unlimited power life (only uses power to turn the page). LCD displays don’t offer either.
Posted by William Cherry at June 23rd, 2009 at 9:27 amWilliam, the Pixel Qi 3Q in reflective mode does like the electrophoretic screen of E-Ink reduce eye strain and have a very long power life. It has 200dpi, better than Kindle, and a crisp contrast display. It also is larger at 10.1 inches diagonal than the Kindle Dx. You can see this from the Computex videos on YouTube and from the OLPC XO-1 screen. All it requires is some switch to turn off the backlight, not needed for reflective mode in sunlight. Then the display is mostly black and white with hints of color, and a very long battery life. Turn on the backlight and you get full motion color video. We must wait and see actual production products, but the 3Q appears in every way superior to the Kindle screen. Both E-Ink and Pixel Qi came out of MIT labs, but the Pixel Qi technology is better for open purposes such as cheap smartbooks, while E-Ink is suitable for proprietary uses, for instance locked-up content such as ebooks from big publishers. Both technologies are good, but for different reasons, readability of ebooks not being a major difference.
Posted by Joe Shuren at June 24th, 2009 at 5:32 am