Hacker News Reader

Comment by sireat | Hacker News Reader

While the price of $275 seems pretty high, it is still much lower than what you could get e-ink display as a developer.

The big question is, can this screen serve its stated dual purpose as an excellent e-reader screen and a general purpose netbook screen.

As for the resolution, my wild guess is standard 1024x600 which the Lenovo S10-2 they are marketing as a replacement screen has. Frankly $275 is a bit high for 1024x600.

Interesting though is this note: "The e-paper mode has 3 times the resolution of the fully saturated color mode"

So this e-paper mode is something like 1536x1200 or more like 3072x1800 (unlikely as it seems)?

View on HN

It's 3072x600 [1]. This is actually exactly the same as any 1024x600 LCD it's just that in e-paper mode that extra horizontal resolution is more usable as the rgb sub-pixels are in b/w.

But the OS probably never sees it as 3072x600 (or it would have to be changing the resolution and aspect ratio on the fly). Also it's not necessary as AFAIK the sub-pixel font rendering would amount to the same thing.

[1] http://netbooked.net/blog/lenovo-s10-2-w-pixel-qi-display-ce...

I've got an Asus 1005P, which cost me £240 when I bought it. It's also got a 1024x600 screen, but adding one of these would mean I could work outside and, if I believe what the blog post says, possibly add a couple of hours of battery life to boot. Is that worth almost the same price again?

Hell yes.

No, other way around. The monochrome mode uses a 1-1 pixel mapping, so it's true 1024x600, but the color mode uses a novel pixel layout that does not have each color component in every pixel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Display_resolution

So, while the resolution always remains 1024x600 as far as software's concerned, the effective resolution is a third when using color.

(Note that the new screen is, I'm sure, not identical to the XO-1 screen, so you can't assume that the Wikipedia description will be accurate for it.)

So the ACTUAL color resolution is what, about 340x200 or something? Or is it just a vertical/horizontal thing, or?

Without having seen it, or even good pictures of it, I would assume the color mode would still have full resolution, but that colors would appear "wrong" but not neccessarily less detailed.

You guys do know that there is no full color pixel? At least when i look at the recent display comparisons, it's always a matrix of different red, green, blue pixels:

http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/06/25/retinal-scientist-p...

I'm guessing this screen uses something like this: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-n...

A matrix of color pixels is less noticable when you have 200-350PPI, vs something like 80PPI on a netbook.

Of course, but the point is that there are usually (e.g.) 1024 red pixels, 1024 green pixels, and 1024 blue pixels, per-row. This screen has 1024 color pixels per-row total, in a novel layout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com