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Comment by dragonmum | Hacker News Reader

Slashgear posted a video of the actual color e-ink panels in operation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2V9iuTW3sA

The flashing bit looks annoying, but I think that electronic picture frames that don't suck are finally here! A poster that changes during the night(so you don't see the flicker) and you wake up to see something new every day. I am really excited for this tech!

It's unfortunate that it seems like the eInk flashing problem seems so much worse than on monochrome displays.

Once the image fully appears it looks great.

I wonder if it's fast enough that they could do it line by line. It would be slower, but it might look better having the picture cut over fully, instead of flashing the entire screen over and over.

Or just have a layer over it that goes opaque for a moment until the pic below develops. Would be weird, but way less annoying.

Interesting pattern of flashing as the picture changes. That probably provides big hints on how it operates internally.

The pixels have a bit of "memory" to them, and if they don't do a full on-off cycle they tend to get muddied over time. It's a bit more psychedelic on a color panel, but the same thing happens with Kindle e-readers every handful of page turns.

I had to optimize our product's driver for a monochrome display; you can optimize quite a bit if you know the application and test how muddied it gets and how fast. I think that driver optimizing will be able to make the flashing on the color screen less annoying too.

Hell, the earliest models did a full inversion for every single page turn.

You got used to it after a day or two anyway.

I love that I couldn't even tell the far left panel was e-ink until it changed later in the video.

They were showing some kind of multi window demo. The 3 panels would show independent images and then synchronize and show a single large image split across the 3 panels. Cool stuff but I couldn't find video of that online.

...I actually think it was done on purpose, as an aesthetic choice.

God, I hope I'm right. If that's how it really looks, it's terrible.

It just seems like the full image ARRIVES very early in the flashing process, and there are only minor details still arriving during all of the flashing.

The refreshing seems way worse...

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