E Ink Gallery 3 color display tech coming to eReaders (more colors, higher contrast)

E Ink has been getting serious about color display technology over the last few years. In just the past month or so, the company introduced its Gallery Plus electronic paper display technology with support for up to 60,000 colors for digital signage and Kaleido 3 technology for eBook readers with just 4,096 colors, but more color saturation than the previous-gen.

Now the company is introducing E Ink Gallery 3 Full Color E-Paper for eReaders.

E Ink hasn’t provided many details about its latest color display technology yet, Good eReader notes that we’ll likely find out more next week when the company is presenting at the Touch Taiwan show.

What we know so far is that this is described as a “full color” screen, suggesting it’ll likely support tens of thousands of colors or more. But unlike the Gallery Plus screens, which only come in 13.3 inch and larger sizes, Gallery 3 displays will be available for smaller devices designed for reading digital content including textbooks, magazines, and picture books.

The company says there’s also support for touchscreen input and handwriting, allowing you to use devices with the new screens for drawing, note-taking, or other applications.

But since the screen refresh rate for color imagery is one second, devices with this display might be better suited for reading than for use as general-purpose tablets. E Ink does say the 1-second refresh rate is comparable to what you get from black and white ePaper screens though, suggesting that this is the rate for a full screen refresh, while partial screen refreshes might be faster.