New Kobo coming? Which?

[LDB]

I've got the Scribe (too big) and the Sage (too small). In the magic land of unicorns I'd have a 9" reader with buttons, Scribe battery life, Sage UI and Amazon bookverse access. In reality, both are very nice units, very, and a pleasure to read on. I don't ever want to go back smaller than the Sage though. My PW Plus or whatever it is called with 6.8" screen is TINY and definitely too small for convenient reading.

[twowheels]

9" is too big, I'd really rather have an 8.9638462" screen.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by errenay

So, we will have Libra Colour, and two Claras: Colour and B&W. Can we expect also new Libra B&W with Carta 1300?

I feel like the Clara B/W is like a control device. How many black and white Claras sell as compared to the Color one? Is it worth it to sell both black and white and color on their pricier readers?

[Aleron Ives]

I'm not sure that's a great control test. If small readers are mostly used for novels, where colour doesn't matter, then you might expect the Clara Colour to sell worse than an Elipsa colour would, when people would prefer the Elipsa Colour for comics and PDFs over the Clara, since it's too small.

[twowheels]

Skewing it the other way in the short term is that many who might really like to upgrade to the new BW reader cannot justify it when their old one still works. The people who want color are the ones who are going to be rushing to buy right now.

[chrisridd]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Very doubtful if Amazon ever releases another Oasis. It's been 5 years since the previous one.

Badereader is pushing/repeating a rumour that Amazon will release an ACeP-based reader. I don't know if that's them doubling down on their losing bet on Gallery 3 with BigMe, or if they really think Amazon+E-Ink are going to one-up everyone.

I hope they don't, because the Amazon+E-Ink relationship seems to hold back the rest of the industry by making them literally unable to compete on specs.

[chrisridd]

Originally Posted by Haesslich

Yes. Kobo doesn't tend to reduce prices at all, and their preorder prices are their retail prices. The Libra 2 spent several years at the same price, until last year when the price went up $10 with inflation. So the Clara Colour is definitely the cheapest retail Kaleido 3 reader to date.

I was thinking more that the prices would increase after the pre-orders finished, but that's good to know.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by chrisridd

Badereader is pushing/repeating a rumour that Amazon will release an ACeP-based reader. I don't know if that's them doubling down on their losing bet on Gallery 3 with BigMe, or if they really think Amazon+E-Ink are going to one-up everyone.

I can't imagine Amazon is as stupid as that. ACeP (Gallery 3) is a shop poster technology, it's x10 slower than regular eink, which is only just fast enough for an ereader. It's maybe 5000x slower than the best LCD/OLED and equivalent to 1980s / 1990s basic High Colour VGA (only about 32,000 shades/hues). Certainly excellent compared to Triton or Kaleido filters on mono eink for electronic posters, which are too dark, or too pastel and too limited in colour gamut. Maybe mono ink A5 posters and Black + Red price labels is now E Ink Corp biggest market, not ereaders.

[chrisridd]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I can't imagine Amazon is as stupid as that. ACeP (Gallery 3) is a shop poster technology, it's x10 slower than regular eink, which is only just fast enough for an ereader. It's maybe 5000x slower than the best LCD/OLED and equivalent to 1980s / 1990s basic High Colour VGA (only about 32,000 shades/hues). Certainly excellent compared to Triton or Kaleido filters on mono eink for electronic posters, which are too dark, or too pastel and too limited in colour gamut. Maybe mono ink A5 posters and Black + Red price labels is now E Ink Corp biggest market, not ereaders.

Perhaps the question is, with the amount of money Amazon may be willing to throw at E-Ink, will they be able to get ACeP on par with monochrome ereader speeds and display quality. That seems like a big ask, and do Amazon really care that much?

It seems way more likely that badereader are just making it all up.

[Squirsier]

I'm very tempted by the Libra Colour, especially to upgrade for its note taking abilities but also, and this is my question, did anyone here used the Kobo Stylus before to have authors autograph their own ebooks inside of those (like let's say, on the 2nd page after cover) ?

Is this something that could work? My birthday is coming up so....

[Frogm4n]

Originally Posted by chrisridd

It seems way more likely that badereader are just making it all up.

Their source is a Taiwanese article about analyst and known leaker of Apple product specs, Ming-Chi Kuo. The leaks aren't always, or even often, completely correct so this may just be one that never actually materializes. I wouldn't be surprised if the truth is that some Amazon engineers really were looking at Gallery panels and testing them and that got blown up into Amazon "will release a full product with Gallery" somewhere along the grapevine.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by chrisridd

Perhaps the question is, with the amount of money Amazon may be willing to throw at E-Ink, will they be able to get ACeP on par with monochrome ereader speeds and display quality. That seems like a big ask, and do Amazon really care that much?

The original eink is only a little younger than commercial LCD (LCD effect discovered in Victorian era). Dates from 1970s Xerox.
Qualcomm abandoned Mirasol colour over 15 years ago.
The first eInk based ereader was in 2004. There were earlier decicated ereaders, not just PDAs and phones, in the 1990s. The first Kindle was 2007.

Regular eink and ACeP seem to be unrelated mechanical bistable technologies. DLP is mechanical too but at tiny scale of moving mirrors that need a projection system, so it can go really fast. There is no adequate explanation as to how ACeP works the Magenta, Yellow and Cyan particles in a cell, but E Ink Corp don't need Amazon's money to make it go faster. The explinations of regular mono eink are poor, but it's currently many black and white balls in a liquid cell for each pixel. Both are inherently slow. Obviously the subtractive colour system is x10 or more slower. The speed of regular eink has been increased to nearly x3 on some products by using massive drive power. This results in poor battery life, poorer accuracy of the 14 greys with the black and white (by mixed number of balls) and no-one says what it does to panel life.

Amazon bought one e-paper company and buried it. E ink Corp has bought and buried all the others except Qualcomm's Mirsol (which isn't eink, but more like how the scales on a butterfly's wing does colour).

Inherently any bistable display is slow. The mono eink is ideally suited to novels as the CPU can sleep and power down the display and controller while you read a page. The mono and bicolour (red, white and black) price labels are even slower to change, but might not be changed more than once at day. The ACeP (Gallery 3) is even slower but it doesn't matter for posters. The biggest market for E Ink Corp is retail and public displays (like timetables), not gadgets for ebooks.

The first eink to use a filter on the regular panel was in 2012. Triton (the approach like used on LCDs) was too dark. So colour saturation was swapped for more brightness and the RGB stripes (1/3 resolution in on axis) replaced by pastel shades in a 2 x 2 pattern (Kaleido), because eink can't do the smaller rectangular pixels used in high resolution LCD and OLED. LCD makers don't quote the mono panel resolution, only the colour. So Kaleido displays are half the resolution of the mono ones. The 300 dpi (ppi) eink came out in 2014, ten years ago. Despite marginal improvements in speed and contrast (partly by building in capacitive touch to save a layer) the resolution hasn't increased. Till the Scribe came out in September 2022 the 8″ was largest 300 dpi and larger panels were progressivly poorer resolution.

A decent colour panel using Kaleido would need to be about 450 dpi mono. No sign of it. The large 13.3″ panels are only 206 dpi (ppi), which would give 103 dpi colour.
The DX and DXG were 150 dpi
The 6" cheaper panels in early Kindles and Basic for years are 167 dpi.

I'd seriously consider a Kobo Kaleido ereader if it had at least 13″ 4:3 and 220 dpi (i.e. a 440 mono panel) and it was under €300. No way would I touch ACeP/Gallery 3.

Originally Posted by chrisridd

It seems way more likely that badereader are just making it all up.

Maybe.

[JSWolf]

Amazon abandoned Mirasol as they bought it from Qualcomm.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Amazon abandoned Mirasol as they bought it from Qualcomm.

Citation? I thought it was an actual eink they bought, or have they also bought Mirasol? Also Qualcomm likes income from patent royalties, especially double dip, so while they might sell exclusive rights to develop and make it, they'd keep the IP.

Qualcomm themselves "buried" Miralsol. One erearder made for two Chinese bookshops was sold. While it's much faster than eink and inherently coloured, it's allegedly not very good.
I never figured if the issue was quality not living up to Qualcomm hype, or real cost (can't be cheap and maybe high defect rate), or people baulked at Qualcomm royalties (a per device charge and also a percentage of the maker's sale price for entire product). It's maybe 16 years since first demo.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Amazon abandoned Mirasol as they bought it from Qualcomm.

I seem to remember some chatter about Amazon buying some technology called LiquaVista or some such. What ever happened with that?

Not that it will happen, but how shocking would it be if Amazon announced a new Oasis with a LiquaVista screen? (At least maybe I'll generate a GoodeReader story for them.)