E Ink 发布 Kaleido 4 彩色电子纸屏幕，色域翻倍、刷新率升至 18fps
E Ink upgraded the screen found in most color e-readers
E Ink 发布下一代 Kaleido 4 彩色电子纸屏幕技术，色域体积是 Kaleido 3 的两倍，白色反射率提升 15%、对比度提升 50%。新屏采用 oxide TFT 背板，刷新率最高达 18fps，可播放视频，但仍只支持 4096 种颜色。汉王科技将率先在仅面向中国市场的 M10C II 平板上采用该屏幕。
Andrew Liszewski
is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
E Ink announced the next generation of its Kaleido color e-paper screen technology today, delivering several welcome improvements. The company’s existing Kaleido 3 displays can be found in e-readers and tablets from companies like Kobo, PocketBook, and Boox, while Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft uses a customized version to improve performance. The new Kaleido 4 technology addresses some of Kaleido 3’s shortcomings with improved color reproduction, better contrast, and faster screen refreshes.
Other E Ink technologies, like its Gallery 3 display found in the Remarkable Paper Pro, use colored pigments that move around to form full-color images, but Kaleido 3 employs a color filter over an e-paper panel with just black and white pigments. That approach results in color e-paper screens with fast refresh rates, but it generates color images at a lower resolution with a limited palette that tends to make them look desaturated. The extra color filter also leaves plain text looking darker than it does on e-readers with only a black-and-white E Ink screen.
E Ink claims its new Kaleido 4 display tech doubles the “color gamut volume” of its predecessor, which should improve how color images look. However, the technology is still limited to producing just 4,096 colors (modern LCD and OLED displays can produce millions) and, as with Kaleido 3, at a lower resolution than black-and-white text is displayed. But Kaleido 4 does increase white reflectance by 15 percent and boosts contrast by 50 percent, so plain text will potentially look less muddy than it often does with Kaleido 3.
The reason that E Ink’s seemingly superior Gallery 3 technology hasn’t been used in more devices is because those displays have a slow refresh rate that can often feel frustrating to use. Kaleido 3 refreshes much faster, and thanks to a new oxide TFT backplane (that sounds similar to what the Kindle Colorsoft uses), Kaleido 4’s performance is even faster with refresh rates up to 18fps, making the screens capable of playing back video.
Image: E Ink
Companies like Amazon and Kobo haven’t yet announced any new devices that will feature Kaleido 4 screens, but Hanvon Technology will be the first to adopt the new technology in its upcoming M10C II tablet. It will only be available in China, but the M10C II will feature a Kaleido 4 display with a micro-etched tempered-glass surface designed to reduce glare while providing a more authentic paper-like feel when taking notes using its battery-free pen.
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- Andrew Liszewski
来源：The Verge：订阅版科技 · theverge.com