> so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see?
What licensing cost? Who is licensing what from E Ink? What patent? Please be specific. I work in the display industry. See my comment history for how many times I've asked this question and also have a look at the replies people give. So far, I've never found a satisfying answer. I'm starting to think people who say this stuff don't actually have a clue about the display industry, or are unwilling to acknowledge things like how volume is the main determinant of price in the industry today.
Goes over it in more depth. If such NDA's exist it would be hard to tell, but certainly we can see various things that suggest that those NDAs are real.
Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays? Technology wise they're very similar, and enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale.
It does not. You can see in that thread, I had asked there as well and the throwaway account never responded to me. I'm pretty sure it is fake as that narrative describes things like "strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays" which would cause uproar in the display industry and all of us would have heard of it.
> Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays?
Volume. Volume. Volume. The typical MOQ for an LCD order would be in the tens of millions of units per quarter. Even the highest volume E Ink panel presumably the one in Kindle, would be at best several million a year.
> Technology wise they're very similar
No, they are not. Electrophoretic displays are very different than LCDs which are again very different than OLED.
> enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale.
In order to reach lower prices, you have to reach higher volumes so that you get closer to the bare materials cost. If you're only selling a few million displays per year, you'll never achieve sufficient volume to justify building a fully custom production line in order to reach the asymptote of materials cost.
What licensing cost? Who is licensing what from E Ink? What patent? Please be specific. I work in the display industry. See my comment history for how many times I've asked this question and also have a look at the replies people give. So far, I've never found a satisfying answer. I'm starting to think people who say this stuff don't actually have a clue about the display industry, or are unwilling to acknowledge things like how volume is the main determinant of price in the industry today.