E Ink confident its technology can compete

One thing stood out over the crowds, flashing TVs and blaring speakers of this year's International Consumer Electronics Show.

That would be the wild optimism on display.

My guess is the burst of holiday sales put the retailers and manufacturers in a good mood. Or maybe the crazy gambling mentality of Las Vegas was rubbing off on the suits.

Show host Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, set the tone. On stage and in a new book he was pitching, Shapiro said innovation at electronics companies will revive the economy and boost the industry to $186 billion in sales this year.

Things also look rosy through the active-shutter glasses in the booths of Sony, Panasonic and other TV companies. They see consumers being ready to start buying $2,000 3-D sets that require the battery-powered goggles.

But the biggest optimist I talked to was Sriram Peruvemba, vice president of marketing for E Ink.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company produces the paperlike electronic displays used in Amazon.com's Kindle, Sony's Reader and most e-reading devices.

You'd think Peruvemba would be in a funk, with all the froth around Apple's iPad and new tablet computers based on Google's Android software and Microsoft's Windows. The tablets were a highlight of the show, and are expected to sell like crazy this year. They work as electronic readers, and they all use a different display technology — the good old LCD.

Yet Peruvemba insists that the iPad's arrival isn't hurting E Ink.

"Just the opposite has happened," he said. "My personal belief is tablet devices educated the market. People who want to read, particularly for long-form reading, they prefer our technology."

Sales of E Ink displays have more than tripled every year since 2006, when the company shipped about 100,000 units. Last year, it shopped more than 10 million E Ink displays and it's on track to ship perhaps 30 million this year, he said.

"Our ramp has actually gone up much more steeply after the iPad arrived," he said.

To keep growing beyond 2011, E Ink and device makers need to expand into new markets, such as textbooks and perhaps newspapers with bigger displays.

They also need color devices, and E Ink is finally coming through. Peruvemba was toting a demo color unit with a 9.7-inch diagonal screen — the size of a Kindle DX — that displayed 4,096 colors.

It's not as vivid as a photo in a newspaper and nowhere near the crispness of an LCD display. It also refreshes too slowly for decent browsing or video playback.

But it's still color on the special display material that, unlike LCD, looks better in direct sunlight and uses no energy to hold an image. It draws battery only when pages are turned and a new image displayed, which helps the Kindle run for weeks on a single charge.

The color display debuted in November and is being used in a Hanvon reader that's for sale in China.

U.S. consumers will see color e-readers later this year, Peruvemba said. "Large players" are designing units with the color display but he wouldn't be more specific.

"There are a lot more people working on it," he said.

Eventually, color may replace monochrome E Ink displays, especially when costs even out. The first generation of color displays will result in devices that cost about 30 percent more, Peruvemba said.

But is the color technology good enough to convince device makers they can use it to compete with the iPad?

Peruvemba responds with more of that optimism.

"We've convinced them they don't have to be worried about that," he said.

MIT spinoff

If you believe e-readers and Web tablets will converge into a single device in the future, "this is never going to be able to give the same performance as the LCD," he said. He noted that E Ink is now part of a company that also produces LCD panels; it spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 and was sold in 2009 to Taiwan's Prime View International.

Peruvemba said the company sees the display technologies coexisting, with people buying both computerlike LCD devices and e-readers with lower-power, paperlike displays.

Amazon has been key to this division, with its Kindle proving the market for monochrome E Ink readers, but the retailing giant is also putting its e-reading software on other companies' color devices. Spokesperson Kinley Campbell wouldn't say if the color E Ink is coming to Kindle, saying "we don't speculate on future plans."

Room for both

Barnes & Noble is also going both ways. Its Nook presents books in monochrome, but the display shares space with a 3.5-inch color touch screen.

In November, Barnes & Noble added a second device, the $249, LCD-based Nookcolor.

"We think the reading audience is large enough and diverse enough that there's room for both," said Jonathan Shar, general manager of Barnes & Noble's digital newsstand business.

To play up the color advantage, Barnes & Noble emphasizes how well the display works with magazines and illustrated children's books.

Pictures on a Nookcolor the company loaned me look great — far better than the new color E Ink display, but I still prefer reading actual magazines.

Nookcolor's LCD screen did not bother my eyes at all after reading for long periods of time, and the lighted display was a nice addition for reading in bed.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the inevitable color Kindle will compare.

Peruvemba wouldn't say much about the Nookcolor, only that it's "a very beautiful product."

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com