How will Amazon make Gallery 3 work for Color Kindles?

E INK invested over 100 million dollars in making Gallery 3 a reality. This colour e-paper technology was based on Advanced Color E-Paper (ACEP) a few years ago. It was initially developed for digital signage with still images, such as sandwich boards, digital menus and advertising. The refresh rate for ACEP is abysmal; each time a new state change is initiated, it flashes over a dozen times and takes around 10 seconds. E INK developed Gallery 3 with e-readers in mind and reduced responsiveness. So far, there haven’t been that many Gallery 3 products; only the Bigme Galy hit the market a few years ago and was recently discontinued. Pocketbook developed the Viva, which hasn’t yet come out, and the Sharp 8, which never made it past the prototype phase. It is rumoured that two Amazon Kindle e-readers will come out in 2025 with Gallery 3. Will Amazon succeed while all others have failed?

What exactly is Gallery 3? It achieves stunning full-colour representation without colour filters. This allows for enhanced saturation and contrast. Further, ACeP employs oxide backplanes, which ensures superior responsiveness. It can display over 50,000 colours with CMYK, whereas the industry standard is Kaleido 3, with a colour filter array that can only display 4000 colours in RGB.

In Gallery 3, the black and white update time has been improved to 350 milliseconds (ms), the fast colour mode is 500 ms, the standard colour mode is 750-1000 ms, and the best colour is achieved at 1500 ms. This is a substantial improvement over the first generation of E Ink Gallery, which had a black-and-white update time of two seconds and colour updates of ten seconds. In addition, Gallery 3 will have an improved resolution of 300 pixels per inch (PPI) versus the earlier 150 and an operating temperature of 0-50 degrees Celsius, on par with black and white eReaders.

E Ink Gallery 3 will also support pen input in black and white, adding several other colours and an update time of 30 ms. E Ink Gallery 3 will feature E Ink’s new ComfortGaze™ front light, offering a blue-light-safe viewing experience.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of Tianfeng International Securities, who has a tremendous track record monitoring the upstream supply chain, stated that Amazon will release two e-readers in 2025 using ACEP, or Gallery 3. He expects one Paperwhite Color and one giant screen device, likely the Scribe Color.

I have been critical of Galley 3 devices and even went so far as to call it a dead technology, which is for Android. The only Gallery 3 devices I have seen and used in person have all used Android, which requires a fast processor, lots of RAM, and a dedicated GPU, which are killer specs. Android employs many background processes, and the OS must be heavily optimized to provide a smooth experience. Gallery 3 on Android has been nothing short of a show. It is almost impossible to tweak the responsiveness of Gallery 3.

Amazon will succeed, while all others have failed, simply because they are using Linux. Linux has always been the operating system of choice for every Kindle e-reader. This is similar to Rakuten Kobo, which has always used Linux, and ditto with Pocketbook and other brands. Theoretically, it should be easier to optimize the responsiveness for Gallery 3 on Linux, which is more lightweight than on Android. Amazon has a legion of internal developers who have always worked on Linux. In conjunction with Lab126, they should be able to work as a team and cut down on latency and refresh issues for Gallery 3.

I believe a colour Kindle and colour Scribe will come out in 2025. All of Amazon’s competition is investing in colour now. Kobo just announced the Clara Color and Libra Color, with Kaleido 3 colour e-paper, which will come out at the end of April. Pocketbook, iFlytek, iReader, Onyx Boox, Hyread, Readmoo and other companies have been doing colour for years. Amazon and Barnes Noble are the only two significant brands that do not use colour

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