E Ink Holdings is brazenly making us wait until 2012 before producing a successor to its popular Pearl electronic paper display. One of the company's VPs dropped into
CNET's offices to spill the bad news: developing and testing a next-generation display "takes some time", apparently, and it is sticking to a two year product cycle. Perhaps E Ink has shifted its focus to the LCD screen in
Amazon's rumoured tablet. Or maybe it's still working on the Triton color e-ink display that left us
so underwhelmed at CES. Either way, the monochrome Pearl has been knocking around in the
Kindle and other e-readers for a while now and although it has better contrast than earlier iterations, it is still ripe for a revamp -- especially a faster refresh rate. But the E Ink VP did hint at some brighter news: the next-gen display, when it does finally arrive, could sport full-motion video. So far e-ink video has failed to go beyond
a slightly jittery 10-15fps, so full-motion 24fps or 30fps could definitely be worth the wait.
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