E INK is getting bullish about their latest generation color e-paper, Gallery 3. Two products have officially been announced, the Good e-Reader X Bigme Galy and the Pocketbook Viva, both of them should be released in the next couple of months. The big selling points behind this new e-paper is being able to display over 50,000 colors with 300 PPI. Users can disable color completely and switch to black and white mode, for a standard e-reading experience. This tech is also compatible with ComfortGaze Plus, which refines the front-lit display. E INK has just announced a number of new vendors are working on new devices and that Gallery 3 has entered mass production at all of their factories.
E Ink Gallery 3 is based on the E Ink ACeP Advanced Color ePaper platform. In this platform, a full-color gamut is achieved through a four particle ink system: cyan, magenta, yellow and white, which allows a full color gamut at each pixel. Gallery 3 offers substantial technological improvements in many aspects over its first generation. Black and white update time has been improved to 350 milliseconds (ms), fast color mode is 500 ms, standard color mode is 750-1000 ms and best color is achieved at 1500 ms. Pen input capability supports black and white and an addition of several other colors and an update time of 30 ms. E Ink Gallery 3 will be offered with E Ink’s new ComfortGaze front light. ComfortGaze has been engineered to reduce the amount of blue light reflected off the surface of the display, providing further comfort while reading with reduced Blue Light Ratio (BLR) and Blue Light Toxicity Factor (BLTF) by up to 60 percent and 24 percent respectively compared to the previous generation of front light design.
Bigme Group took the lead in using the latest ink screen technology of E Ink Gallery 3, and released Bigme Galy on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in the international market, which funded $320,000 US dollars in the early stage and is expected to exceed $1 million. “It is an encouraging moment that E Ink Gallery 3 is announced in mass production”, comments Bigme . “In the future, our brands will join hands to promote the upgrading of E Ink screen technology and provide users with a more eye-friendly reading experience!”
“The market entry of our new PocketBook Viva e-reader based on E Ink Gallery 3 will be one of the most significant events of the first half of 2023 for our company,” said Evgeniy Zaitsev, Head of Sales of PocketBook International S.A. “This product is special to us because we have always believed that the future of digital reading is in color ePaper technologies. Ten years ago PocketBook was among the first manufacturers who released an e-reader with a color E Ink screen. Over the following years we used the latest color ePaper technologies to provide an outstanding reading experience to our users. And now we are happy to continue this more than ten-year tradition with PocketBook Viva, which is a long-awaited new stage of e-reading in color development.”
Sophie Pang, CEO of Readmoo, expects the mass production of Gallery 3 could open up a different experience for readers. “As a leading brand in the traditional Chinese market, we are eager to work with E Ink, providing our users with a happy and colorful reading experiences. It’s our shared goal to provide comfortable and environmentally friendly e-reader products to our readers.”
Wrap Up
This is an exciting team for the e-paper industry. Gallery 3 represents a huge advancement in color e-paper. In the past, the only option was E INK Kaleido, which could only display 4,000 colors, so jumping up to 50,000 colors is a huge deal. E INK has officially announced that Onyx Boox, iFlyTek, iReader, Readmoo and AOC expect to launch their products with Gallery 3 with ship dates to customers in 2023 and beyond.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
