The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.
It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.
The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).
Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?
Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.
I think what he means is emissive in general. OLED, LCD, whatever, all are powering through ambient light, so need really high brightness in high lighting scenarios.
E-ink and these rLCD screens use the ambient light to their advantage, so they’re almost always lit at the appropriate level automatically, and you can supplement with much less fatiguing front-lighting in low light scenarios so you don’t have the emission from the display shining in your face.
The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.
It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.
The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).
Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?
Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.
Backlit OLED? You may be thinking of QLER because OLED is self emissive
I think what he means is emissive in general. OLED, LCD, whatever, all are powering through ambient light, so need really high brightness in high lighting scenarios.
E-ink and these rLCD screens use the ambient light to their advantage, so they’re almost always lit at the appropriate level automatically, and you can supplement with much less fatiguing front-lighting in low light scenarios so you don’t have the emission from the display shining in your face.