E INK intends on announcing E INK Gallery 3 sometime in the next few weeks. This e-paper tech has traditionally been reserved for digital signage, the new E INK Gallery Plus blends signage with Advanced Color E-Paper Display on ACEP, that can display over 50,000 colors, but the refresh rate is horrible and only good with static images. Gallery 3 has E INK Carta HD compatibility and likely E INK Regal Waveform controllers to make seamless image transitions and no ghosting. It remains to be seen exactly how many colors can be displayed and what the black and white and color PPI are. Well, we won’t have to wait long, E INK will likely make the official announcement on April 27th at Touch Taiwan. They have a 15 minute block of time reserved for the presentation.
We do know a little bit about Gallery 3, courtesy of an E INK Taiwanese entry. It states “Significantly improves the page turning speed of color images to 1 second, which is equivalent to the page turning speed of black and white e-paper used in e-book readers. The operating temperature of the E Ink Gallery 3 meets the application specifications of e-book readers and is suitable for displaying colorful digital content such as picture books, textbooks and magazines. In addition, this technology combines digital handwriting and touch functions to create a full-color electronic paper notebook, which can realize color digital note-taking and drawing functions.”
How does this technology compare against E INK Kaleido 3? K3 color e-paper uses RGBW to display 4,000 color combinations. Gallery 3 uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black, in addition to different shades of grey. It remains to be seen exactly how many different color combinations will be possible and if RGBW will provide a better experience than CMYB. E INK did tell me that their new Comfort Gaze front-lit technology is not exclusive to Kaleido 3, so it should be possible to integrate this tech into Gallery 3 e-readers and e-notes.
There are tons of questions that I have. It seems as though Kaleido 3 and Gallery 3 compete against the same target demographic, e-readers and e-notes. What are the other factors that come into play? Without full details, I would speculate that Gallery 3 will be more affordable and chiefly target 4 to 6 inch screens, whereas Kaleido 3 is optimized for larger screens, such as 7.8, 10.3 and 13.3
Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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