Don't worry about the price - when the e-ink patent overlords learn that they are not being used for blessed purposes (digital signage or ebook readers) but as general purpose display sold to end users (gasp!) they'll probably become mysteriously unavailable.
(Source: our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult...)
Any evidence of this? Everytime someone mentions this, I ask, and I get no evidence. If this kind of allegation was true, I'd expect tonnes of publications to jump on this.
> our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult
I perceive this as equivalent to my company trying to buy 100 displays straight from Samsung and then alleging that it is hard to do. It is all about volume. Even a 1000 and they won't talk to you. It has to be in the 100k volumes before the actual device vendors talk to you. Otherwise you go through distributors just like everyone else.
Well we regularly buy LCD panels in large and small quantities from big manufacturers, and distributors, in order to integrate them into our industrial PCs. While we are not a household name, we're big in our niche and I'd say we have industry experience.
I was not on the project and I'm not in purchasing, so I don't know the details, but from what I heard it was quite odd. The vendor (not e-ink, but a downstream integrator) was first willing to sell thousands of units, we got a devkit from them and started developing. But suddenly they were like "What is your business plan sir?" and "I'm afraid we cannot sell at the moment". The quantity was not the problem, they sounded like they were not happy with the use case.
The reason you never see hard evidence is that there is no evidence to be found - it's just that the vendors behave "odd" and are picky with whom they sell to.
> I was not on the project and I'm not in purchasing, so I don't know the details, but from what I heard it was quite odd.
Ok.
> The vendor (not e-ink, but a downstream integrator) was first willing to sell thousands of units, we got a devkit from them and started developing. But suddenly they were like "What is your business plan sir?" and "I'm afraid we cannot sell at the moment". The quantity was not the problem, they sounded like they were not happy with the use case.
If my purchasing team gave an explanation like that, I'd be suspicious of the purchasing team. I've seen scenarios where the "distributor" didn't actually have the quantity in the timeframe they promised as they weren't a top tier distributor. So the purchasing guy who had some kind of relationship with that distributor was coming up with lots of crazy reasons to keep delaying until we finally found out. As always, the simplest explanation is not "vendors behaving odd and being picky about who they sell to", I've never seen a vendor being unwilling to sell as long as you are offering market price for that quantity.
My crazy conspiracy theory is that there is some ownership overlap with traditional display manufacturers. If it gets used widely as a general-purpose display this can cannibalize sales of LCDs as the technology gets better and cheaper. [1]
That's one reason you can get good and cheap e-ink if you are building an ebook reader [2], or if you are building these little price displays for the shelves in supermarkets. But if you want a monitor, you have to either pay a lot of money or buy something for tinkerers, there is no inbetween.
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[1] The rational reason would be that they have only limited production or support capacity, and sell to the easiest, most lucrative customers first.
[2] Of course, for e-book readers you also have the benefit of scale if you are Amazon or Sony. But there are also smaller vendors, and in the case of the digital price tags the companies that make them are mostly smallish businesses.
(Source: our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult...)