Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!
I've been thinking of color e-ink for a while and I'm not sure if it's been posted or not or if it qualifies.

It's really interesting, but I also I guess it's sort of a niche product that is sort of becoming irrelevant with the price of tablets dropping and the battery life and screen clarity becoming better and better. You could spend the same amount of money on one of the color e-ink devices as you could on a full-fledged premium tablet with greater features and function.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


JediTalentAgent posted:

I've been thinking of color e-ink for a while and I'm not sure if it's been posted or not or if it qualifies.

It's really interesting, but I also I guess it's sort of a niche product that is sort of becoming irrelevant with the price of tablets dropping and the battery life and screen clarity becoming better and better. You could spend the same amount of money on one of the color e-ink devices as you could on a full-fledged premium tablet with greater features and function.

Oh man I would really love for colour e-ink to be on this device when it launches:



http://www.meetearl.com/

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.

JediTalentAgent posted:

I've been thinking of color e-ink for a while and I'm not sure if it's been posted or not or if it qualifies.

It's really interesting, but I also I guess it's sort of a niche product that is sort of becoming irrelevant with the price of tablets dropping and the battery life and screen clarity becoming better and better. You could spend the same amount of money on one of the color e-ink devices as you could on a full-fledged premium tablet with greater features and function.

Can you actually buy a colour e‐paper device today?

I’ve heard “it’s right around the corner” for years.

I love e‐paper, but for my R&D money, I’d rather have improved pixel density.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!
There's one I think called the Jetbook that sells for about $400-500 dollars.

A quick glance at the website and it seems like they're aiming it at an academic setting. I'm sure in some ways it's maybe an easier sell to some school districts as compared to a tablet.

edit: Where I can sort of see where it might be a bit viable. Lighter, less power requirements, probably a dedicated interface streamlined for kids of various ages and academic settings and restricted a bit more from distracting apps in a school setting.

I guess very large color e-ink panels could be even viable in an advertising way if the prices dropped enough for static print promotions in place of the flat panel monitors I see popping up everywhere. It seems that one company is making something like it already.

JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 07:25 on Mar 11, 2014

Lowen SoDium
Jun 5, 2003

Highen Fiber
Clapping Larry

Mister Kingdom posted:

This was my first VCR, the Panasonic PV-1220. Top-load with a wired remote that only controlled fast forward, rewind, and pause functions only after you pressed play on the VCR itself.



We had a couple of these. They were incredibly good VCRs as far as reliability went. Must have had them for 10+ years.

stealie72
Jan 10, 2007

Their eyes locked and suddenly there was the sound of breaking glass.
\

Lowen SoDium posted:

We had a couple of these. They were incredibly good VCRs as far as reliability went. Must have had them for 10+ years.

I would say the reliability of GE consumer products, later turning into the mere existence of GE consumer products are obsolete and failed technologies.

Which is too bad, because I have a couple of excellent pre-1980 GE radios, one of which (original Super Radio) has served me well for AM DXing (which is probably an obsolete technology by now) and the other has been in pretty much daily use since the late 60s/early 70s.

stealie72 has a new favorite as of 13:50 on Mar 11, 2014

jadebullet
Mar 25, 2011


MY LIFE FOR YOU!

Fair Hallion posted:

I mailed away smarties tokens to get this.. I think mine was orange or brown though.

The sounds can be heard here
http://www.classaxe.com/smarties/uk/tubes/1/index.shtml#Zapper_Pouch

I had a pair of shoes growing up that had rocket ships on them that, if you started running, would play the sound of a rocket taking off which included these sounds. Needless to say my school banned those shoes after about a week of me "accidentally" pressing it during class.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

JediTalentAgent posted:

I've been thinking of color e-ink for a while and I'm not sure if it's been posted or not or if it qualifies.

It's really interesting, but I also I guess it's sort of a niche product that is sort of becoming irrelevant with the price of tablets dropping and the battery life and screen clarity becoming better and better. You could spend the same amount of money on one of the color e-ink devices as you could on a full-fledged premium tablet with greater features and function.

E-ink is an odd technology in that it really doesn't get utilized anywhere near as much as it should. Kohl's department stores recently went to digital price tags on their display racks and used terrible looking washed out LCD screens, when for that purpose, E-ink would have been perfect and probably cost less.

Lucy Heartfilia
May 31, 2012


Maybe it's insane licensing costs? E-ink should be cheap as dirt.

Slanderer
May 6, 2007

Krispy Kareem posted:

E-ink is an odd technology in that it really doesn't get utilized anywhere near as much as it should. Kohl's department stores recently went to digital price tags on their display racks and used terrible looking washed out LCD screens, when for that purpose, E-ink would have been perfect and probably cost less.

E-ink displays are still more way expensive than cheap monochrome LCD displays. In bulk, those things are dirt cheap.

DicktheCat
Feb 15, 2011

Krispy Kareem posted:

E-ink is an odd technology in that it really doesn't get utilized anywhere near as much as it should. Kohl's department stores recently went to digital price tags on their display racks and used terrible looking washed out LCD screens, when for that purpose, E-ink would have been perfect and probably cost less.

I got my Kindle because of the whole E-ink thing. It looks really crisp, and it doesn't loving glow without a backlight so when I'm reading for long periods of time it doesn't kill my eyes like the Kindle Fire does. (I have one of those, too, but mainly use it for internet browsing rather than real reading. That and the cute little games on it. Plants vs. Zombies is really fun to play on a tablet, maybe even more fun than playing on a computer.)

The whole thing seems super futuristic to me, and I wish it was more ubiquitous.

GWBBQ
Jan 2, 2005


JediTalentAgent posted:

There's one I think called the Jetbook that sells for about $400-500 dollars.

A quick glance at the website and it seems like they're aiming it at an academic setting. I'm sure in some ways it's maybe an easier sell to some school districts as compared to a tablet.

edit: Where I can sort of see where it might be a bit viable. Lighter, less power requirements, probably a dedicated interface streamlined for kids of various ages and academic settings and restricted a bit more from distracting apps in a school setting.

I guess very large color e-ink panels could be even viable in an advertising way if the prices dropped enough for static print promotions in place of the flat panel monitors I see popping up everywhere. It seems that one company is making something like it already.
Color e-ink would save schools a fortune on printing and shipping textbooks, not to mention the environmental impact of not throwing out several pounds of paper per student per class per 1-2 years.

AFewBricksShy
Jun 19, 2003

of a full load.



GWBBQ posted:

Color e-ink would save schools a fortune on printing and shipping textbooks, not to mention the environmental impact of not throwing out several pounds of paper per student per class per 1-2 years.

Not to go all :tinfoil:, but wouldn't the absurd amount of money made by textbook publishers be a hell of an incentive to try keep this out of schools? It would be awesome for everyone with the exception of the people in the textbook publishing industry, but I'm pretty sure they have some serious clout.

edit: Never mind, they are already trying to roll out ebooks:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/23/us-usa-education-textbook-idUSBRE96M04520130723

AFewBricksShy has a new favorite as of 19:17 on Mar 11, 2014

Cat Hatter
Oct 24, 2006

Hatters gonna hat.
Most of the price of a textbook is for the information inside the book (which they would still charge for the eBook license) and not the physical printing of the book. That's why phone books/stacks of magazines are so much cheaper to buy.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!
I think a lot of schools are starting to move towards iPads/Android tablets, though. Then you get articles like this where the tablets are sort of launched badly with too many expectations:

http://news.yahoo.com/school-declares-switching-books-hp-tablets-unmitigated-disaster-203813551.html

edit: It seems that a simple color eReader is a good baby step for the technology, though, in schools. Don't try to push it as an end-all, be-all device. Just an eReader to hold all the relevant textbooks and needed materials.

JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 19:07 on Mar 11, 2014

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

AFewBricksShy posted:


Not to go all , but wouldn't the absurd amount of money made by textbook publishers be a hell of an incentive to try keep this out of schools? It would be awesome for everyone with the exception of the people in the textbook publishing industry, but I'm pretty sure they have some serious clout.

edit: Never mind, they are already trying to roll out ebooks:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/23/us-usa-education-textbook-idUSBRE96M04520130723

Yeah, textbooks are an obsolete technology. My kids rarely bring books home. Typically there is a class copy and digital versions if you need to read something at home. When I used to substitute we almost never used textbooks, instead relying on handouts or using the overhead to read along in class. Compare that to my childhood when every kid had 20 pounds of literature to haul to and from school.

Here is an interesting article about textbook publishing. Essentially they priced themselves out of the market and now that market is rapidly contracting.

http://www.project-disco.org/competition/112113-the-changing-textbook-industry/

Digital subscriptions make money too. But it's a piece of an ever smaller pie.

Zonekeeper
Oct 27, 2007



JediTalentAgent posted:

edit: It seems that a simple color eReader is a good baby step for the technology, though, in schools. Don't try to push it as an end-all, be-all device. Just an eReader to hold all the relevant textbooks and needed materials.

Honestly, anything with e-ink should be a simple device - it isn't a tablet, so it shouldn't try to be one. Make it a device that does one thing really well, and let Tablets be the swiss army knife option.

My dream e-reader is a durable clamshell design that displays 2 pages at once in color and can display any e-book or PDF format you throw at it. If anyone sold that at an affordable price I'd buy it day one.

Call me old-fashioned, but for something intended to replace a printed book you need to be able to present some types of books as intended. Textbooks/technical manuals (especially those with a lot of tables and charts) and comics (which tend to have 2-page spreads) are created with the assumption you can view 2 pages at once, and can be almost unreadable if you can't. I consider that essential for something intended to replace a book. Plus, I want something I can close up and toss in my bag without worrying about damaging the screen. Basically, something as durable as a hardcover book, in a book form-factor, but lighter and able to carry an entire library in its memory.

KozmoNaut
Apr 23, 2008

Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle


DicktheCat posted:

I got my Kindle because of the whole E-ink thing. It looks really crisp, and it doesn't loving glow without a backlight so when I'm reading for long periods of time it doesn't kill my eyes like the Kindle Fire does.

I've just ordered a Kobo eReader Glo (it has the same frontlight tech as the Kindle Paperwhite), since e-ink devices have reached an acceptable price level to me. I tried reading ebooks on my tablet and on my phone, but it just doesn't work all that well. E-ink really is something you have to see in real life to appreciate the benefits, it's hard to show it off otherwise.

Zonekeeper posted:

I want something I can close up and toss in my bag without worrying about damaging the screen. Basically, something as durable as a hardcover book, in a book form-factor, but lighter and able to carry an entire library in its memory.

This is exactly why I ordered a cover along with my Kobo. I want to be able to close it up and put it in my bag, exactly like a real book. It even looks kind of like a hardcover book.

Manky
Mar 20, 2007


Fun Shoe

Zonekeeper posted:

My dream e-reader is a durable clamshell design that displays 2 pages at once in color and can display any e-book or PDF format you throw at it. If anyone sold that at an affordable price I'd buy it day one.

My million-dollar-idea is a two page ereader with screens on both sides of each page and a 360 hinge so you can "flip" infinitely. Preloads pages as you flip so you never see load times, maybe an option to keep an outward facing page displaying the book cover.

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

Lowen SoDium posted:

We had a couple of these. They were incredibly good VCRs as far as reliability went. Must have had them for 10+ years.

Mine lasted about eight years on the first set of heads. I replaced them and used it for another two before selling it.

jojoinnit
Dec 13, 2010

Strength and speed, that's why you're a special agent.

Manky posted:

My million-dollar-idea is a two page ereader with screens on both sides of each page and a 360 hinge so you can "flip" infinitely. Preloads pages as you flip so you never see load times, maybe an option to keep an outward facing page displaying the book cover.

It hasn't worked out that great for tablets so far:



The Sony Tablet P is as good as obsolete. A dual screened Android tablet that probably made way more sense in production. It even came with a few full PlayStation ports but there wasn't much more on the PlayStation store at the time. I almost bought it twice, but its the sort of thing that has too many obvious downsides for each good bit, such as the huge bezel between the screens breaking up some apps and the corners not being rounded off made it small but sharp.

smackfu
Jun 7, 2004

As a Paperwhite user, I don't think making page turning more like a real book would be a win. The swipe or tap to change pages is better.

I do agree that having it turn on when you open the cover is great.

Zonekeeper
Oct 27, 2007



smackfu posted:

As a Paperwhite user, I don't think making page turning more like a real book would be a win. The swipe or tap to change pages is better.

I do agree that having it turn on when you open the cover is great.

Yeah, the idea I have in my head still turns with a button press, it just has two screens so you could view 2-page spreads as intended. Plus the whole purpose of the clamshell design is that it protects the screens and buttons when it's not in use, especially if you enclose it in a thick impact-resistant cover. If there's always a screen on the outside like in Manky's version it kind of defeats the purpose.

champagne posting
Apr 5, 2006

YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

KozmoNaut posted:

I've just ordered a Kobo eReader Glo (it has the same frontlight tech as the Kindle Paperwhite), since e-ink devices have reached an acceptable price level to me. I tried reading ebooks on my tablet and on my phone, but it just doesn't work all that well. E-ink really is something you have to see in real life to appreciate the benefits, it's hard to show it off otherwise.

The only convincing image I can think of would be a comparison between a tablet and a kindle in bright sunlight.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

Boiled Water posted:

The only convincing image I can think of would be a comparison between a tablet and a kindle in bright sunlight.
It seems like every other YouTube video now has a Kindle ad showing just that.

GWBBQ
Jan 2, 2005


Zonekeeper posted:

Yeah, the idea I have in my head still turns with a button press, it just has two screens so you could view 2-page spreads as intended. Plus the whole purpose of the clamshell design is that it protects the screens and buttons when it's not in use, especially if you enclose it in a thick impact-resistant cover. If there's always a screen on the outside like in Manky's version it kind of defeats the purpose.
Being able to choose two pages to view side by side would be pretty awesome. For textbooks you could lock one to a problem set and flip through references on the other, for books with footnotes you could keep your place and reference the notes, for technical documentation you could keep a diagram or set of instructions on one and flip pages on the other. It might not be all that useful for average book reading, but for any specialized application it's a great idea. Patent that poo poo.

Old James
Nov 20, 2003

Wait a sec. I don't know an Old James!

Mister Kingdom posted:

This was my first VCR, the Panasonic PV-1220. Top-load with a wired remote that only controlled fast forward, rewind, and pause functions only after you pressed play on the VCR itself.



The bold part reminded me of the old cable box remotes that had 12 radio buttons, a dial to adjust the frequency, and a lever to go above channel 13.



Always tripped over this thing.

robodex
Jun 6, 2007

They're what's for dinner
I like my Kobo because it's basically as close as you're going to get to reading a real book on "real" paper without actually having to lug around a book. Books are heavy and take up a lot of room.

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Old James posted:

The bold part reminded me of the old cable box remotes that had 12 radio buttons, a dial to adjust the frequency, and a lever to go above channel 13.



Always tripped over this thing.

I remember that switch on the left, to switch among the three tiers of channels. I got very good at running through all the channels at high speed, enough to make my Mom shout at me once because the constant "SNAP SNAP SNAP" was making her crazy.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


More phone stuff:

WAP - "I can get the internet on my phone now?"

I personally hopped on the bandwagon and even coded a WAP site full of glorious monophonic ringtones many years ago.

MMS - when this came out it in Australia I distinctly remember Telstra having a promotion on New Years Eve stating that all MMSs throughout the night were free (a big deal at the time). Unfortunately no one I knew had a mobile that could receive MMS. That and we were too drunk.

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
Oh man, WAP browsing was the best. You mean I can look up product reviews straight from the store? Outrageous!

Of course it was slow and expensive, but wow, what a convenience!

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free

Old James posted:

The bold part reminded me of the old cable box remotes that had 12 radio buttons, a dial to adjust the frequency, and a lever to go above channel 13.



Always tripped over this thing.

Hahaha holy poo poo I've never seen anything like that before.

The oldest cable box I can remember is my brother's back in the early/mid 90s, one of those set top boxes with the two red numbers on the front to show the current channel.



Knowing him, it likely had one of those oft-advertised descramblers hooked up to it. Is that how those things worked, you hooked them up to your box or something? Or were they boxes themselves? I was always fascinated by the ads for descramblers but I was a poor as gently caress country kid who didn't get cable till I moved away for college in 2000.

cowtown
Jul 4, 2007

the cow's a friend to me

Old James posted:

The bold part reminded me of the old cable box remotes that had 12 radio buttons, a dial to adjust the frequency, and a lever to go above channel 13.



Always tripped over this thing.

Ours was one of these, with a single slider for all the channels. It was really easy to get to channel 2 quickly!

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


cowtown posted:

Ours was one of these, with a single slider for all the channels. It was really easy to get to channel 2 quickly!


I had 2 TV channels as a kid. I could never have imagined having soo many channels as a kid. My brain would have exploded.

KozmoNaut
Apr 23, 2008

Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle


Zonekeeper posted:

Yeah, the idea I have in my head still turns with a button press, it just has two screens so you could view 2-page spreads as intended. Plus the whole purpose of the clamshell design is that it protects the screens and buttons when it's not in use, especially if you enclose it in a thick impact-resistant cover. If there's always a screen on the outside like in Manky's version it kind of defeats the purpose.

That would be pretty cool, but you'd be looking at roughly double the cost of a normal single-screen reader, and thus a much smaller market for such an expensive, single-purpose device. It would be pretty nifty though, especially with larger color e-ink screens for comic books and textbooks with diagrams and illustrations.

I talked to one of my colleagues yesterday and had a look at his Sony eReader, and I think the standard 6" screen size is just a bit small. I compared to some of my paperbacks, and the text seemed to take up roughly 7" or so in diagonal for most of them. So I changed my order to an Aura HD instead of the Glo, to get the 6.8" screen, 1440x1080 pixels and 264ppi :awesome:

I'm still getting a nice case for it for screen protection, but a clamshell-type reader with dual screens? I would be so in, especially if it had Nintendo-like build quality.

Ensign Expendable posted:

Oh man, WAP browsing was the best. You mean I can look up product reviews straight from the store? Outrageous!

Of course it was slow and expensive, but wow, what a convenience!

We had a guy come do a talk for us on WAP while I was at trade school taking electronics and programming. This was in 2003 or 2004, so WAP was pretty much already dead, or at least the writing was on the wall.

But this guy was absolutely adamant that WAP was the future, and that within a couple of years, the personal computer would be no more, since we would do everything on a mobile phone. He believed in it so hard that he had put all of his life savings into a WAP-focused company. While it's true that the original iPhone came out in 2007, nobody saw it coming, and it was still severely limited in what you could do with it.

A bunch of us got so tired of listening to his bullshit that we got up and started to walk out. He pretty much went "So! I guess only the smart and visionary people are left now, huh?"

To which one of my friends shot back "Nah, we were just leaving :smug:".

Part of me wonders what happened to that guy, if he actually bombed and failed, or if he managed to get in early on the current wave of apps and mobile solutions. WAP died, but the idea of doing everything from a phone certainly hasn't.

Collateral Damage
Jun 13, 2009

lovely failed technology:



gently caress Blackberry forever.

MyFaceBeHi
Apr 9, 2008

I was popular, once.
It's not really failed if it is used by [nearly] all businesses the world over. It certainly is lovely though, and becoming far more obsolete what with BBM being on iOS and Android now and more businesses moving from RIM to more user friendly devices. Even my brother has gone back to Android after having a Blackberry 9300 for a year!

Guy Axlerod
Dec 29, 2008

MyFaceBeHi posted:

It's not really failed if it is used by [nearly] all businesses the world over. It certainly is lovely though, and becoming far more obsolete what with BBM being on iOS and Android now and more businesses moving from RIM to more user friendly devices. Even my brother has gone back to Android after having a Blackberry 9300 for a year!

Businesses love to use obsolete technology. See: Dot Matrix Printers, Windows XP, Fax, etc.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
Despite Blackberry tanking in profits from being slow to adapt to a changing market they still have something like 70 million people actively using their devices.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


Collateral Damage posted:

lovely failed technology:



gently caress Blackberry forever.

I never got the Blackberry hype. People said it was great for business and what not, but I just don't know why any other established manufacturers weren't good enough. Was it just BBM?

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply