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Comment by robgibbons | Hacker News Reader

That's why I think a system aimed solely at text editing would be perfect, basically like a Kindle but in the form factor of a full-size laptop.

I'm imagining literally just a CLI or rudimentary text editor with an e-paper interface... no video or images, just text. Very spartan. Response time is more than good enough for something like that.

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Wouldn't it take 250ms between typing a character and it showing up on the screen? That seems kindof annoying.

I could also imagine that searching through a textfile to find the place you want to edit would be pretty frustrating if you had to do it at Kindle speed.

Not necessarily. On the Kindle it takes about that long because it uses greyscale mode, which is slow, and also flashes the screen first to reduce ghosting, which doubles the time.

In 1-bit mono mode you can flip a pixel in ~100ms, which is plenty fast enough for text entry, although scrolling might not be good.

Early LCDs had terrible ghosting (anyone remember trying to play Doom on an early mono LCD and the image instantly turning into incomprehensible hash?), but I can't find any references for actual numbers for the pixel flip time. I'd be interested to know how they compare to eink. Does anyone know?

No idea about the actual numbers, but people have gotten ps1 games working on e-ink displays. I'd think that'd indicate it's probably perfectly doable for text editing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbD753xE-U

That's really nice (although it is just playing back a video, is not an emulator).

If only the Nook had a powered USB port...

Yea emulation would take more than the cpu on the nook can do, but it really does show that the screen is capable at least. Might never play Crysis but it should be adequate for a lot of thigns.

100ms is about 6.25 frames of a normal 60fps display.

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