Display maker spends $215m on E Ink
Or $1.4m per electronic ink patent
E Ink has been bought by the company that makes most of the displays based on its technology.
Taiwan-based Prime View will buy E Ink for $215m.
E Ink will use the funding to further its R&D efforts. It'll be demo'ing a prototype colour display this week at the Society for Information Display conference in San Antonio, Texas, but it needs more cash to turn the screen into a product that can be used in real devices.
E Ink has 150 US electronic ink patents to its name, so Prime's paying round $1.4m per patent.
E Ink's technology - as realised by Prime View - is to be found in all of current e-book readers, including Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader.
News of the deal comes as screen technology company Pixel Qi has begun demo'ing colour e-paper that it's pitching at laptop makers who want to offer outdoor-readable displays on their machines. Pixel Qi reckons it'll have commercial product out by the end of the year. ®
Group Test: e-book readers
COMMENTS
slow?
I thought the problem with eink was the relatively slow response, which makes it fine for reading static text (ebook readers etc), but makes it less useful for things like laptop displays?
another problem being that if you get caught with paris on the screen, quickly hitting the power button won't help!
