So, Ive recently gotten back into writing and been thinking about how much more fun it would be to write Outside. Problem is, the sun hates screens. I have an Alphawrite Neo, of course, but I’ve always been insecure about lugging a weird educational device around with me in public. So I started looking into Eink tablets that could be used with a keyboard and
Jesus H. Christ, that price tag!
I just want something to type on something. Apparently thats strange, so maybe there will be something cheaper as just a word processor. It seems that the only reasonable offering here is the Freewrite Traveler, though, so I look it up and
WHY‽ It’s the same price!
Okay, maybe I could just get a Raspberry Pi 400 and attach an eInk monitor to it. Apparently, this is not the usual use-case for E-ink, but there are in fact e-ink monitors out there! Most were around a thousand dollars for some reason, but here is the cheapest one I could find:
That’s around the price point of a Boox Go, for reference, which has a really slow screen refresh rate.
Why is there no affordable e-paper products that arent a pain to use? I am aware of cheaper ones, but the ones ive seen reviews if aren’t able to keep up with typing in a way that seems responsive. And I’m aware that you can find eink displays (as in the component) for as low as $30, so they should be able to be cheaper than this!
The devices you’re looking for are hyper niche devices that very few people actually want. Most people don’t want more than a basic ereader with an eink display.
Yeah, this is the issue. Niche devices don’t sell many units, but the same amount of product development has to go into creating them. The result is they need to sell it at a higher price point.
This issue is funnier (or more tragic?) with huge government projects, things like fighter jets. They need to do the R&D either way, so there’s a base pricetag of perhaps $200 billion. Now If we build 200 units they end up costing like $1.2 B a piece with most of that cost just being the initial R&D. But let’s say we manage to sell 40 to England, 22 to France, 34 to Australia, etc… we could potentially get their “per unit cost” down to 500M a piece just by making and selling more units.
I bet if OP went looking for retail e-ink and reverse engineered it into an e-reader they’d find a better price point and a wonderful hobby.
Koreader FTW!