Okay so statistically speaking, in agrarian/preindustrial societies more than 9/10 of them would be farmers, which means they would (hopefully) have pitchforks. And if you don’t have a pitchfork, then you shouldn’t be at the front because then you’ll be blocking someone with a pitchfork. You can carry a torch or something maybe.
Also, some farmers might have multiple pitchforks (so the wife/kids can pitch in, I’m pretty sure that’s the literal meaning so not a pun BTW), and would know you probably don’t have a pitchfork so would kindly bring along a spare to the angry mobbing.
Point is, the stereotype is at most off by 10%.
The price has nothing to do with patents, it’s economy of scale - LCDs ship at a rate of billions per quarter, and are included in every device under the sun, whereas e-ink screens basically only ship in niche luxury devices (ereaders/enotes) that can be replaced by your phone and an ipad respectively. As a result, LCDs ship several orders of magnitude more screens, and reap the resulting economies of scale.
Yes, EInk corp has patents, but that doesn’t prove that the price is caused by the patents.
Currently, our best hope of seeing prices come down is 1) if the fast-multidye tech (i.e. the Gallery 3 thing) takes off enough to give e-notes mass market appeal (color drawing and comic book reading could be huge, maybe) and thus some extra economy of scale, or 2) if GoodDisplay’s DES screens get their PPI up to 300 and thus are able to compete in the ereader space against E-Ink’s MED.
DES = Display Electronic Slurry, AKA the cofferdam tech. It’s a different method of creating an e-ink screen that (apparently) doesn’t touch E-Ink’s patents, and it works by creating a grid of ditches to be filled up with the e-ink liquid and ink (where 1 ditch = 1 pixel). In contrast, E-Ink’s MED (=Microencapsulated Electrophoretic Display) produces self-contained microcapsules that have the liquid/ink sealed inside, and then the microcapsules are sprinkled onto the screen’s pixel grid like Hundreds And Thousands, and each microcapsule is substantially smaller than a pixel, and each pixel toggles several microcapsules. The microcapsules sometimes overlap the border of the pixel grid (since they’re a bunch of packed circles basically), which breaks up the straightness of the pixel grid and is what gives E-Ink screen their ‘grainy’ look where DES screens are more noticeably checkerboarding. This could potentially give MED a long-term aesthetic advantage, although that might turn out to be a non-issue for DES with sufficiently high PPI.
The advantage of DES is that because it skips a layer (the slurry is directly on the substrate, rather than in microcapsules on the substrate) it could potentially be higher-resolution(/PPI), and higher contrast. Also possibly cheaper, since it might be able to skip a manufacturing step of making the microcapsules. Maybe.