E Ink Working On Color And Capacitive Touch Displays

According to Digitimes, E Ink Holdings, the company behind the popular E-Ink displays, is busy working on color E-Ink displays, and the device vendors are already sampling the fruits of their labor at the moment. Hanvon has already provided some good news by promising to offer color E-ink readers by the end of the year, one with a capacitive display, and other which will use a digitizer for input. The newer display panels also offer better response times and reflectivity, which has us dreaming about color eBook readers from companies such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

E-ink ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook offer, in the opinion of many, the best digital book-reading experience available. The battery life is astounding (the new Kindle gets up to a month of battery life. An entire month!), they can be used outside without glare, and they quite simply look more like printed, physical ink and paper than any other display ever created. You can lose yourself in e-ink, which is about the best compliment I can give to a digital reader.
On the other hand, LCD devices in a similar package, including tablets like Apple's iPad, offer a passable reading experience on top of a whole host of features e-ink will never, ever be able to handle. Ebook readers are better for books; tablets are better for everything else. So tablets and ebook readers exist in an odd sort of stalemate right now: neither can quite replace the other.

New Amazon Kindle DX: Sharper screen, sharper price

Shipping as of July 7th, the price for a new Kindle DX will fall by nearly $100, to $379 from $489. It also now comes in a hep new color (do college kids still say “hep”?), graphite (which looks more like charcoal to me), but for US models only and is touting better screen contrast.

Of course, the recent 2.5 upgrade made file management a little easier, but there seems to be no progress on the features that the DX’s target audience, academia, was most interested in, like annotating and a touch screen.

"With 50 percent better contrast and darker fonts, you'll find it easier than ever to read wherever you happen to be, whether it's outside in bright sunlight or under the low light of your living room", said Steve Kessel, senior vice president, Amazon Kindle.