Quote:
Originally Posted by IV4ES
I am not a big fan of Chinese brands (as I have had some in the past and know what I am talking about).
Are there any brands I can rely on? I mean not Chinese brands.
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Not all Chinese brands are equal. Also lots of other brands are made in China (Apple).
TCL made Alcatel phones back before iPhone, Android etc. When Alcatel got out of phones they licensed the Alcatel brand. Nokia still exists and Microsoft only bought their phone division, and a license for the brand for one year for phones for the 11 Billion! They got zero IP. TCL now has the license for the Nokia brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCL_Technology
They have been involved with European companies for decades and at one stage #2 TV maker in the world.
The big phone service provider "Three" is actually a Hong Kong company and that is now in China.
Amazon Kindle is developed by an
American company Labs126 bought in by Amazon about the time they bought French Mobipocket (2005 and at that time a leader in ebook sales) founded by an executive from Palm. The ereaders are made in China. The Fire Tablet is Android based and the eink is Linux based.
Kobo is a Canadian company now owned by
Japanese Rakuten, who also does the excellent Viber chat system. They also took over the German Tolino and the HW is now the same as Kobo, but OS is Android rather than Linux on the Canadian Kobos. They are made in China.
Pocketbook was founded in Ukraine in 2007 and moved to Switzerland. Their products are made by Chinese and Taiwanese (Foxconn?) companies in China.
They may mostly use Android, but the models might not support the Playstore. Like Boox, they only make eink readers/tablets.
Onyx International / Onyx Boox is niche eink ebook and tablet maker since 2006 and currently in violation of GPL as they have used Linux as well as Android and don't release Source.
It's not clear if Boox or Pocketbook is bigger. They are both niche companies.
Boyue / Likebook seemed to die and resurface as Meebook. Small Chinese company with Android based ereaders.
There are also a lot of Chinese makers with obsolete eink panels and no touch making 4.7" to 6" (167 dpi) ereaders.
Bigme is a crowd-funded niche Chinese startup with very expensive eink products that are not realistically photographed. Maybe releasing products since 2020?
Sony ereaders are long gone. The reMarkable is a one-trick pony Nordic company and their tablet is a PDF/note system, not an ereader. Made in China.
Fujitsu and Sony used the same HW for a Digital Paper Tablet (made in China).
All the current companies making viable eink ereaders or tablets are using
E Ink Corporation panels. All competing bistable technologies are either buried by Qualcomm (Mirasol), or bought and buried by Amazon (who uses E Ink Corporation panels) or by E Ink Corporation.
The low power is only when reading because CPU sleeps and rhe display maintains state while power is off. Page flip/refresh uses high power. It's opaque so uses ambient light (good) or a front illumination by PWM LEDS and a light spreading layer (light pipe). A replacement panel costs as much as an entire LCD tablet! Pixels on eink are cells with multiple balls. Refresh is 55ms (poor shade accuracy) to 200ms (all grey levels) compared to a response time of 0.3ms to 3ms for non-bistable technologies.
The E Ink corp has two completely unrelated technologies for "color".
1) Putting a colour filter on top of a regular mono eink panel. Triton is saturated R G B stripes so is very dark indeed in ambient light as the filter must pass the light twice. Resolution is thus 1/3rd in one direction, Kaleido uses a more expensive 2 x 2 matrix filter using pastel RG and GB squares, so colours are washed out. Because the mono is black, white and approximately 14 grey levels (slower), the total colours (hue), shades and saturations is about 4000 with both schemes compared to 16M+ on modern LCD/OLED/QLED/LED panels.
2) Using cells that have bistable Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and White layers. This allows about 50,000 variations rather than only 4000+, but refresh / update is about 1500ms, so it's only for retail signage.
There are other eink panels for price labels and similar that can have a colour as well as black and white. The biggest growth market for E Ink Corporation is retail price labels and advertising displays.