E Ink, the company responsible for the display technology used by Amazon's Kindle and other e-readers, announced new color technology on Monday. "
E Ink's Triton technology will display "thousands" of colors, in addition to 16 levels of grayscale, the company said.
It positioned the technology as ideal for applications showing charts, graphs, maps, photos, comics and advertising. Since E Ink technology refreshes relatively slowly, the color version will likely still not be ideal for displaying video.
Triton does speed up the time it takes to refresh a page, E Ink said. That improved performance will let customers view "simple animations" and "more dynamic content for signage or advertising," E Ink said in its press release.
Triton is available now and Hanvon, a Chinese company, will be the first to use it, E Ink said. The New York Times on Sunday reported that Hanvon would be the first to use new color technology from E Ink.
Manufacturers that use E Ink, like Amazon, promote it for being easy on the eyes and readable in bright sunlight. Some e-readers, like the newest Nook from Barnes & Noble, instead use the same kind of LCD screens that computers use. Those devices are capable of doing more then offering book reading because the screens can display video and websites look just the same as they do on a computer.
Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com