New E Ink Gallery Displays May Finally Make Full-Color E-Books Good

E-readers like Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite have great battery life and are pleasing to the eye, but they still have one big drawback: they’re only capable of outputting black and white images. E Ink Corporation, the company behind the screen technology that powers most e-readers, offers color products, but most suffer from strange color casts, long refresh times, and low pixel densities.

That may change with the introduction of Gallery 3, a new E Ink color display technology that promises better color reproduction and significantly faster page refresh times than its predecessor. The first E Ink Gallery display took two seconds to refresh a page with black and white content, and 10 seconds to refresh a color page – which is acceptable if you’re using it for signage, but takes forever if you’re trying to read a magazine or graphic novel. Gallery 3 promises refresh times of just 0.5 seconds in the fastest low quality color mode, or 1.5 seconds in high quality color mode.

The Gallery 3’s 300ppi pixel density is also comparable to today’s black and white e-reader screens, and text and images will look noticeably crisper than on the previous generation’s 150ppi pixel density screens. Black and white content can update in as little as 0.35 seconds, and the screens also support e-book pen input that lets you mark up PDFs and other documents.

One advantage of Gallery’s Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP) technology over color screen technology like E Ink’s Kaleido is that it doesn’t use a color filter array to display color, which eliminates the weird color cast you might see. on displays based on Kaleido. Instead, each display pixel can use a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow, and white e-ink to display different colors.

Although color e-readers now exist, black-and-white e-books are still extremely popular, especially in the most popular e-book ecosystems (Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and Rakuten’s Kobo). Several existing color e-books, such as the PocketBook Color, tend to be significantly more expensive than even the most expensive black and white books.

In addition to sharpness and higher refresh rates, E Ink’s demo videos also show foldable and curved versions of the Gallery 3 displays. E Ink is selling a 13.3-inch ACeP test kit for $800 to manufacturers, but we’ll have to wait for e-book makers to announce new products before we know if (or when) we’ll see Gallery 3 on consumer devices.