E Ink releases latest generation print colour display
E Ink Holdings (Billerica, Massachusetts), a leading innovator of electronic ink technology, has launched its new Kaleido product, the E Ink Kaleido Plus (New Kaleido).
E Ink launched the first generation Kaleido print colour product in Q2 2020. Kaleido displays offer 16 levels of grayscale and are capable of displaying 4096 colours, enabling ultra-low power and high mobility devices with a paper-like experience, ideal for image-rich information applications such as charts, graphs, maps, photos, comics and advertising. And just like E Ink's monochrome ePaper products, Kaleido’s crisp text and detailed colour graphics are fully viewable in direct sunlight.
In E Ink Kaleido Plus, the company has made improvements to the printing pattern, and its closeness to the ink layer, to create brighter colours with better text rendering. Improvements to the front light reduce light scattering to create more saturated images with triple the colour gamut of the previous generation while the front light is turned on. E Ink Kaleido Plus also supports a 7.8”, up from the 6” size of the first generation product, and the possibility to extend to other sizes for different applications.
E Ink Kaleido utilises a new printed Colour Filter Array (CFA) technology in conjunction with its latest generation, faster and brighter ink layer. The new printing process alleviates the need for a glass-based CFA, making the displays thinner and lighter, while simultaneously having overall higher optical quality. This allows eReader companies to design more ergonomic devices that combine the power of traditional black and white displays with colour for a more fully realised eBook shopping and reading experience. In addition, E Ink’s faster ink enables quicker updates for animations and video. With this new colour technology, E Ink’s eNote product lines are now able to introduce writing tablets with colour highlighters, pens and markers, giving new options for education and professional devices.
“E Ink is excited to launch our New Kaleido, E Ink Kaleido Plus, to the market,” said Johnson Lee, CEO. “We took our customer’s feedback from our initial launch, and incorporated it into this upgrade, bringing a new level of colour saturation to our colour devices, and we look forward to Kaleido Plus being adopted in the eTextbook market in the future. We are proud to have the support of our leading customers, PocketBook (InkPad Color) and Onyx (BOOX Nova3 Color), for this launch.”
“We are happy to expand our product line of colour devices, presenting a new 7.8-inch PocketBook InkPad Color e-reader with updated New Kaleido (Kaleido Plus),” said Evgeniy Zaitsev, chief sales and marketing Officer, PocketBook. “The world's market of eContent is growing in terms of volume and diversity. There is more and more eContent with illustrations which require colour, like comics and books for children, non-fiction and periodicals. In colour, they are even more attractive and informative. We see a growing demand for colour E Ink eReaders and we will do our best to satisfy customer’s needs. We’re sure the new 7.8-inch product will be even more successful than the previous 6-inch PocketBook Color e-reader launched in 2020.”
“This is an exciting moment, Onyx has been working with E Ink for over 12 years and all BOOX products are based on E Ink technology,” said Kim Dan, Onyx BOOX CEO. “The brand new BOOX Nova3 Color uses New Kaleido (Kaleido Plus), and we are expecting to open up a whole new potential market for colour eReading and note-taking.”
Caption: E Ink’s Kaleido Plus (photo: E Ink)