Amazon buys Samsung's Liquavista screen tech company, Potentially for color ... - VentureBeat

Updated 10:18 AM PST: Amazon has confirmed the purchase

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is in glorious living color, but its original and still-strong-selling Kindle and cousins, the Kindle Paperwhite family, are still irritatingly stuck in 1950′s-style black and white.

That small change soon.

As The Digital Reader found, Amazon has bought recent Samsung acquisition Liquavista, while attempting to hide the fact that the routing of the acquisition through a limited liability corporation registered in Delaware, Which is in turn linked to a holding company named CSC: “Corporation Service Company. “

Very tricksy, Amazon.

Amazon confirmed the purchase with a short emailed statement, saying:

We are always looking for new technologies in small be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for Invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista that develop these displays.

Liquavista has built a screen technology That approaches the efficiency of traditional e-reader black-and-white e-ink screens, while offering the color of the LCD and other full-color screen technologies. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it too: gorgeous full-color screen plus a long-lasting battery life.

That might be just the technology That Amazon needs to kickstart conversion of its full eReader line to a full-color and quick-response screen, as E-ink is also notoriously slow to refresh.

And that is important, because Amazon is doubling down on digital content, hoping to drive both sales and margin growth by selling digital media like movies and TV shows, apps, in-app purchases, and games. The company just launched its new virtual currency, Amazon Coins, today, attempting to Increase the Rate at Which Amazon customers buy things That do not have to be Expensively stored, packaged, and shipped.

And you can not sell much digital content on a slow black-and-white screen.

While

Liquavista’s screen tech will not be cutting-edge enough to run Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets, Which need the best screens available, it is advanced enough for Amazon’s Kindles, The Digital Reader says, Which are Primarily budget, mass- market devices.

And advanced enough to move Amazon’s low-end devices beyond being ghettoes for books, and towards being able to handle all the full-color and full-motion media That Amazon can sell.

Image credits: Devindra Hardawar / VentureBeat