Enlarge / E Ink’s Gallery 3 screen technology could make color e-readers less compromised than they have been to date. (credit: E Ink)
E-readers like Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite have great battery life and are easy on the eyes, but they still have one big shortcoming: They’re only capable of black-and-white output. The E Ink Corporation, the company behind the screen tech that powers most e-readers, offers color products, yet most of them have suffered from odd color casts, long refresh times, and low pixel density.
That could change with the particular introduction of Gallery 3 , a new color E Ink display technology that promises better color reproduction and dramatically faster page refresh times than its predecessor. The first E Ink Gallery display took two seconds to refresh a page of black-and-white content plus 10 seconds to refresh a color page—that’s acceptable if you’re using it for signage, but it’s an eternity if you’re trying to read a magazine or graphic novel. Gallery 3 promises refresh occasions of just 0. 5 mere seconds in its fastest low-quality colour mode or 1. 5 secs in its high-quality color mode.
Gallery 3’s 300 PPI pixel density is also comparable to current black-and-white e-reader screens, and both text and images will appear visibly sharper than they did on previous-generation 150 PPI screens. Black-and-white content can refresh in just 0. 35 seconds, and the screens also support pen input for e-readers that will let you mark up PDFs in addition to other documents.
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