Los Gatos, California – January 29th, 2023 – We all love our smartphones and tablets. Their versatility and the breadth of the apps ecosystem makes them incredible tools for a flurry of usages. For us sailors, kayak and small boat owners, Navionics did an awesome job putting together an app that is so helpful to prepare our trips from anywhere but let’s face it our LCD screens are less than optimal when we leave the comfort of our day-to-day life and start living our adventures outside.
There is a simple reason for that: in order for an LCD screen to be readable in outdoor environment with a bright ambient light, the LCD screen’s brightness needs to exceed the intensity of light that is reflected from the display surface. To be comfortably viewed by human eyes, the LCD’s screen brightness needs to exceed its reflected light by a factor of 2.5 at minimum. If we want to use LCDs outside in direct sunlight, that leaves us with 2 options: accept a lower contrast (which you can see in the photos above) or push the brightness to the maximum if the screen accepts that. Most LCDs in our smartphones and tablets cannot achieve that and for those that can, the power consumption becomes outrageous, which causes other issues on our small boats and kayaks.
The E-Ink screens we adopted at MAPTATTOO rely on reflected, not emitted, light. Just like we enjoy using the natural environment to our advantage in our adventures, the E-Ink screen take advantage of the ambient light!
In an E-Ink display, a clear fluid suspends millions of tiny capsules filled with black and white pigment. The black pigment is negatively charged, while the white pigment is positively charged, and the fluid layer is sandwiched between two electrode layers divided into regions. Each region is one “pixel” in the display.
This whole process is called electrophoresis. Depending on how the electrode layers are charged, the ratio of pigment in each region changes, and that ratio is what produces varying degrees of grayscale on the screen.
The other advantage of the E-Ink screens is that the “image” stays on the screen even when you stop applying a voltage on the electrodes, power is only needed when you want to update a section of the screen. At MAPTATTOO, we adopted a proprietary algorithm in order to intelligently refresh the screen in order to even further limit our power consumption.
In one of our next updates, we will likely talk about power consumption on small boats as this is also a key constraint in our adventures.
– Erwan Kerebel