E Ink’s new Triton line give the company’s displays the long-desired brand-new underline: tone. Most of a E Ink team is in Japan this week, demonstrating their brand-new screens in Hanvon’s brand-new e-reader. I spoke by phone with E Ink’s Lawrence Schwartz, who pennyless down the technology at the back of a brand-new screens, Triton’s importance for his association, as well as where their displays fit into a broader ecosystem of readable screens.

“All of our screens have been building towards this,” Schwartz said. “The contrariety as well as brightness you were means to supplement to a Pearl’s black-and-white screens, paired with a tone filter — that’s what lets us bring color to a display.”

Schwartz emphasized which a company’s primary concentration is still developing low-power, high-contrast surfaces for understanding. “What’s singular about tone in understanding,” he added, “is that whilst many textual content is still in monochrome, you can deliver color into cover art, children’s books, newspapers, as well as textbooks — places still in a reading margin where color is during a premium.”

E Ink grown a Triton shade in and with a group of partners, including Epson, Texas Instruments, Marvell, and the semiconductor companies Maxim as well as Freescale, all of whom worked upon a electronic components of the Pearl shade. In particular, Epson played the key role, providing the tone filters’ controller chip.

Underneath, it’s still a same white, black as well as grayscale electrophoretic pigments; it’s only when filtered by a RGB overlay that a picture appears in color. To stretch for an chronological result, it’s not totally separate from film’s Technicolor routine, that shot in black-and-white movie strips through tone filters, then reverse-processed.

Because the underlying record is identical, Triton’s contrariety, energy use, viewing point of view have been all radically a same as a Pearl. The image refurbish or refresh rate for monochrome is the same (240 ms), though tone animation can take up to about one full second.

Unlike the LCD display, yet, cinema upon a Triton don’t need to refurbish the complete shade: the relocating figure in a foreground might be rested while the credentials stays matching — only like normal cel animation.

E-readers have been a high-profile example of E Ink in movement, but the company’s screens are additionally used in watches, battery indicators, printers, calculators, signage, end-cap displays in stores as well as a far-reaching range of industrial displays. All of these displays, Schwartz pronounced, could benefit from a key of tone. And in a immeasurable infancy of these make use of cases, LCD or alternative full-video displays simply aren’t possibly, possibly for reasons of energy charge or a inherently singular inlet of what’s being shown.

While Hanvon is the first company bringing a Triton screen to market, Schwartz pronounced E Ink had alternative customers operative with Triton shade technology who haven’t yet made announcements about their forthcoming products. Otherwise, he couldn’t criticism upon destiny devices or accessibility.

The many sparkling innovations, Schwartz pronounced, were a experimentations with user interface in conjunction with E Ink screens, either regulating multitouch, stylus, or other NUI. E Ink, he pronounced, functions to optimize any of the displays for each one of these interfaces, that has compulsory a company to be increasingly stretchable in how it thinks about its products.

In a meantime, E Ink’s goal is to goon to urge their existing product line: get aloft contrariety, brighter colors, faster shade refreshes, as well as continue to find better ways to optimize their screens for every interface, make use of box as well as use surroundings.

E Ink Triton Imaging Film [E Ink]