E Ink Holdings - Page 4

E Ink Holdings says that it is seeing high demand for ePaper displays and expects to see a growth in revenue in 2021. The company is worried though that the shortage in components may hurt its full potential.

EIH says that 2021 will be better than 2020, and it sees its performance in Q2 to be similar to its performance in Q1. The demand for E Ink's display is higher than what it can supply, and the company is building four new production lines to increase capacity.

During SID Displayweek 2021, Tianma showed an interesting display that places a transparent microLED display in front of an ePaper display. The microLED is a 7.65" 480x720 panel while the ePaper is a 5.84" 648x480 (138 PPI) E Ink panel.

Tianma says that the E Ink display was developed in collaboration with WeiFeng. E Ink invested in Wuxi Wei Feng back in 2016.

Last month at Touch Taiwan 2021, E Ink demonstrated its latest foldable and rollable ePaper displays, and the company now published this nice video that shows these flexible displays:

We're not sure how close to commercialization these displays and such devices are, but it will very nice to see a foldable or even a rollable e-Reader on the market soon!

E Ink Holdings announced a new partnership with healthcare security solutions developed IntelliCentrics to create Eco-friendly ePD smart badges for medical credentialing.

The new smart badges integrate IntelliCentrics' technology platform and E Ink's ePaper display technology. The smart badge can be reused after disinfection and will replace the traditional paper badge to reduce the consumption of single-use paper, and to provide real-time badge updates as needed.

E Ink Holdings launched a new display called E Ink Spectra 3100, which is a next-generation four-color ePaper display aimed to support Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL) and retail signage.

Thew new Spectra 3100 features four-particle electronic ink, in black, white, red and yellow. It features an improved update time, and an expanded temperature range for red and yellow states. Spectra 3100 displays will be offered in panels with an updated all-in-one driver IC that supports premium ESLs with higher resolution across various sizes.

E Ink Holdings says it plans to double its capital expenditure this year (to $56.5 million) in order to expand its capacity and meet its customer demand. EIH is now building four new production lines in Taiwan.

EIH says its capacity is now fully booked for the year, and it is quite sure it will be able to find customers for its new capacity as demand is strong. The company's revenues in the first two months of the year rose by 77% compared to last year. The main growth driver seems to electronic shelf label displays, but EIH also sees higher sales for e-readers and e-notebooks.

E Ink Holdings officially launched its new color ePaper display, the E Ink Kaleido Plus. The new display technology enables 16-levels of grayscale and 4,096 colors. The new display offers sizes up to 7.8-inch in size (larger than E Ink's first generation Kaleido displays).

E Ink explains that with the new Kaleido display, it has implemented an improved printed color filter array (CFA) technology, with an improved, faster and brighter ink player. These two improvements enable brighter colors with better text rendering.

E Ink Holdings announced new Digital Paper solutions, developed in collaboration with pen tablet solution provider Wacom and Linfiny, E Ink's own JV with Sony Semiconductor Solutions.

These new solutions feature Wacom's EMR technology and are based on E Ink's 10.3" and 13.3" E Ink Carta 1250 panels. EIH says that the new platform offers faster pen speed and faster page turns compared to its previous platforms. The new devices will be commercialized in the summer of 2021, and EIH and Linfiny are looking for OEM partners.

Low-power IoT Bluetooth technology developer Atmosic announced that it has developed a reference design for eBadge applications in collaboration with E Ink Holdings.

Atmosic will offer the power-optimized eBadge reference design, featuring one of E Ink’s 2.9” or 3.7” black and white displays, or 4.1” Gallery Palette color displays. The kit utilizes Atmosic’s M series extreme low-power Bluetooth LE platform, enabling long, multiyear battery life which can be extended by using optional on-chip energy harvesting.

E Ink Holdings announced that it has signed a joint-development agreement with Shenzhen-based MICROVIEW Electronics, for the development of ePaper modules for retail shelf labels, healthcare, wearables and various IoT applications.

E Ink will provide the ePaper films to MICROVIEW which will be authorized to manufacture and sell ePaper display modules. MICROVIEW expects to reach an annual production capacity of five to eight million ePaper display modules in 2021 and an annual production capacity of 10 million ePaper modules in 2022.