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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

Funny that this is what you guys wanted it for.

I swear, I have been wanting this SO BAD for so long for my monitor. LCDs are bright and make my eyes hurt. I want this for my monitor.

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The latency would make it tough for anything other than word processing (and even that would be a bit annoying).

Yep that's true.

But I will put up with that -- the "good" of it being easy on the eyes trumps the "bad" of latency issues.

Though, let's hope the technology matures and this problem is solved to some extent.

I've seen demonstrations of eink displays showing 60fps video without any noticeable latency. I think the latency is purely dependent on the voltages used to drive the display.

Edit: This was with a black and white display. Depending on how the colour displays work, avoiding latency might not be possible as easily.

Can you give links where?

We wanted to make eink displays with touchscreen controls for videoconferencing but the latency isnt great.

Qualcomm's Mirasol displays might have fit the bill, they weren't responding to my company's request for samples and they eventually closed everything down without shipping many (any?) in production. They are working on a MEMS-IGZO product w Sharp that was similar and supposed to come out last year but I haven't heard a peep recently. Liquavista was working on a color epaper solution as well (acquired by Samsung in 2010, then Amazon in 2013, nothing announced.)

Qualcomm shutdown Mirasol in 2012 after buying it back in 2004 and laid off all the engineers. http://gizmodo.com/5928315/say-goodbye-to-qualcomms-magic-mi...

Recently, Apple bought the Taiwan fab plant where the old mirasol displays were made, which had been transferred to AU Optronics. But a fab is a fab is a fab so it doesn't mean they're making mirasol displays there.

Liquavista is another crapshoot, spun off in 2006, made huge pronouncements at shows, told us they would be production ready in 8-12 months back in 2010 and then shuttered in Dec 2010. Then layoffs, then Samsung, now Amazon. No clue what their real status is now.

In other words, doing demos is doing demos. Commercially available production ready product is a different story completely.

Mirasol made it into the Qualcomm Toq smartwatch, but in ‘limited quantities’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Toq

Mirasol also made it to an e-reader, but I believe it was only released in South Korea.

http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/kyobo-mirasol-color-e-reader-deb...

I've heard with 60fps refresh, the power efficiency goes away.

Having tried the Kindle expiremental browser, I can confirm. Granted their tech may be more primitive than this!

That's more than enough for me. I get home from coding and I want to work on my novel, but LCDs are killing my eyes.

Apparently this can be done. Not too surprising.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/259582/how_to_use_a_kindle_dx...

Try a pen and paper. Worked for so many for so long. This pen with broad italic Masuyama nibs, some fine ink. Watch out, fountain pens are like cats. You cannot stop at one.

http://www.franklin-christoph.com/model-20-marietta.html

Not speaking for parent, but I have terrible handwriting :(

Then try calligraphy. All it takes is practice. Like playing the piano, or coding.

Ha, I have a problem with stationery. I'll buy beautiful pens and notebooks, but I never end up writing with them. Or I'll just get carried away with how pretty the ink looks on the page, and copy out poetry or my own signature. For actual writing I need to type.

Starting is hard. Do a diary and see where that takes you. Don't buy expensive stuff first. A simple lined notebook and a cheap fountain pen. I found myself buying things for hobbies, spending money but not time and effort. Nowadays, if anything, I buy books and study. When I have the habits in place, i'll learn how to paint.

If you're afraid of making that first entry in your beautiful new notebook, turn it upside down, flip it around and make a few trivial entries or notes in the back of the notebook. Once it's no longer blank, using the notebook for its intended purpose will be a lot easier.

The Kindle display can do latencies of <100ms if they're set to plain black and white --- the really slow refreshes are due to hacking it to make it do greyscale. I think that's comparable to the old greenscreen monitors, but I can't find any hard figures. Would certainly be worth a try.

What I would really like, however, is a monitor-sized Sharp Memory LCD display, as made famous by the Pebble. The colour displays are things of beauty. The colour gamut's not brilliant, but they refresh instantly, consume practically no power, and look great. With the backlight turned off, you get an interesting metallic sheen that looks like no other display on earth.

Even the monochrome ones are really cool. I have a development kit where the display can show white and silver --- like, metallic, reflective silver, which you can (just about) see your face in.

Alas, they don't make them much bigger than watch sized.

By the way, Dasung Paperlike, the monochrome e-ink display is now on Indiegogo. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e...

Dasung is very cool for a text terminal. But last time I asked they required weird drivers, not available for Linux of course.

to be honest I am awaiting the day I can just cover an entire wall in them so I can be outdoors all the time

Absolutely! I would put up with a fair amount of latency just to have this. I'm picturing late-night work with a lamp in front of my monitor (not kidding). And it would probably do wonders for a laptop's battery, right?

Did you see the video link posted here [1]? "Latency" seems to be in the 5-10s range with a huge amount of jarring flickering. Definitely not bad as an art display but way way way far from being remotely useable as a screen. Considering how long this step took, still easily 3-5yrs or more from a commercially viable monitor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767090

Still wondering why Pixel Qi failed. It's the one piece of tech in the past decade I keep going back to. The founders went off to Google X and the patents were snatched up by the EFF co-founder and openly licensed in the past year.

It was not e-ink but a reflective panel viewable in bright daylight that also had a backlight for indoor/night use. They had a 10" netbook panel commercially available.

It makes me wonder if reading about another exciting screen tech such as this will suffer the same fate. Maybe someone else knows why.

I've wondered that myself. It seemed promising.

Pixel Qi struck me as overhyped. It was just a regular transflective LCD panel that the founder of OLPC, Nick Negroponte wanted to exploit to get massive funding (from big orgs like the UN, the easily confused ministers of education in developing countries) for his pet project that flew him around the world giving talks and hanging out with popstars who all claim they're doing it to save children in the developing world. If you google Nick Negroponte now, he seems to now claim that he invented or was a key factor in the tablet computing revolution, touchscreens, and VR. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329725&print=yes

Interesting. I knew about transflective screens and miss them from my early cellphones. I guess I need to read what the patents pertain to. A list is here: http://www.toad.com/20141209-dpl-patents.pdf

People want this. Anyone who wants the ability to take a small laptop outside on a nice day and be able to read the screen wants this. I don't particularly care about Negroponte's goals with OLPC but it did bring some technology into discussion that isn't typically used on mobile devices (lithium iron phosphate batteries being another thing to use for rugged outdoors devices...)

Digging up a bit more research it seems Toshiba was the last to use transflective in an ultraportable size. Here's one in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ

Have you tried lowering the brightness? Modern monitors can be crazy bright, which is good for watching movies, but not for staring at them for 10 hours a day.

Unfortunately, on many even the lowest brightness is too much for a low light or no light environment.

Also, at low brightnesses, the PWM frequency of the LED backlights drops, and depending on how low it drops to that can cause a bunch of eyestrain as well.

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