E-ink, the company responsible for making grey-scale screens for Amazon Kindle. has introduced a new type of display, but this time with an emphasis on writing called JustWrite. The great achievement here is that it offers near-zero-latency when writing with the stylus.
In order to do this, E-ink had to discard the traditional TFT backplates and use the new stylus to power the display. So now, the stylus drives the display essentially cutting battery requirements dramatically. A battery is still required for screen refreshes.
E-ink is known for making displays that are low cost but more importantly have the paper like feel. E-ink displays like the ones used in Kindle are able to produce great battery as they don’t need to power up a back-light. They also have great outdoor visibility in direct sunlight and readers love how they are able to produce the paper-like feel.
These aren’t the first E-ink displays that have stylus support. Sony’s Digital Paper and reMarkable tablet have been doing it for some time. The problem there is that they don’t really offer a zero-latency experience and they are really expensive. E-ink’s JustWrite fixes these issues. You can check how smooth the experience is here. JustWrite allows for a paper-like experience for writing which many people have been longing for. Other devices like Apple iPad, which offer stylus support, also fail to emulate the feeling of writing on paper, and they are also really expensive. E-ink has different plans for JustWrite. They plan on using it in more unconventional places, like class-boards.
E-ink has been trying to tap into new markets. Some time ago, E-ink started making color E-ink display for various pebble smartwatches, but since the demise of pebble, color E-ink displays have disappeared. But in August, E-ink said that it had shipping color-display capable of displaying thousands of color. But it’ll be sometime before we get our hands on them.
