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Comment by grumblestumble | Hacker News Reader

E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.

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100% agree. imagine my shock when as a young technology analyst I discovered that E-Ink was a smallcap tech company in Taiwan and basically produced kindle displays, store price tags and that cool double sided phone that one time. I thought it was a huge deal when they managed to do color E-Ink. but no one cared.

Around 2010 I assumed it would a matter of a couple of years until we were reading comic books on our Kindle Color ink tablets.

Still waiting on that E-Ink phone that lasts a month between charges.

I bought a Motorola F3 phone like 10 years ago for relatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

E-ink display, good for elder people, you can drop it from 100 feets height, or run a tank over it, drop it in a pool. It will survive.

The Motorola F3 is that phone, if all you care about are phone calls (it can’t really do SMS). You are probably better getting a similar era Nokia though, as the battery life was about the same and they were a lot more functional.

You can buy 3-color (white, black, and read all over) ones for ... I want to say about 20 yuan which is like $3?

I haven't looked into driving them yet; that's step 3 and I'm still on step 1 (monochrome OLEDs) but I think you might have to do some funky temperature adjustment stuff to get good results out of them...maybe that hasn't quite been integrated into the display controller chips yet?

> "(white, black, and read all over)"

Isn't that supposed to be "red all over"? Or are you making a pun?

8069.TW. It has more than doubled YTD.

I love E-Ink display. Fell in love with it when I bought my first Kindle. I could read all day and my eyes won't be tired at all.

Since then I had been waiting for E-Ink based laptop for work. It doesn't need to play videos or even display color. As a backend developer, I can live with grey scale display. It doesn't need high refresh rates either.

But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen.

I arrive a bit late to the party. I have the same wish and though about startup it. So I digged around last year

> But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen

Some Chinese are trying to do that already : Dasung-Ink-Paperlike-13-3-Monitor

There are reviews around the web about it and you can buy one on Amazon. I have not do it yet for the price is still high at 1200$

I also met with a great manager from the Taiwan Eink company. Eink technologies (for they have several similar ones) are mechanical based which implies many constraints.

For the stories the MIT guys who develop it spend around 20 years on it before passing the baby on to the Tawain based company.

Except Amazon, most big companies are not pushing it, I guess because pictures and videos are so prevalent nowadays.

Will an android tablet do? https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-13-3-e-re...

Tablet might be fun to play with, but really want full replacement for work laptop. But e-ink monitors could be useful, I'll have to look more closely into that.

I thought recently they made e ink monitor. But not laptop though.. More like a giant tablet http://www.dasung.com/english/

Dasung is on their second version of the display. If you look up youtube reviews of the second version, I think you'll be disappointed with what you find. The refresh rate continues to be a major hurdle.

The Kindle and it's e-reader kin are pretty successful?

I think the problem is that a device with an e-ink display is necessarily single purpose. General purpose devices can't use e-ink, they need to support video playback and browsers with full colour.

I'd love an e-ink dashboard in my car so it's not so glary, e-ink tablet that does a bit more than a Kindle but isn't a full media player (super thin super light with basic browser for wiki, news, rss, and email), ~20" e-ink screen on the inside of my apartment door with calendar and notifications and todolist, there's so many cool things we could do with the tech if we could produce it cheaper and bigger. Not everything needs to be able to play video.

Have you seen reMarkable? Doesn't seem to have a browser from what I can see but more capable than a kindle.

https://remarkable.com/

I got mine a few weeks ago. It's true there's no browser but the note-taking capabilities are great. It's running Linux so I can only assuming it's a matter of time before someone starts releasing some custom updates.

I was looking into this a while back. Would love to hear more reviews on it. The ability to write notes with a pen is the one feature I wish my Kindle had. The Kindle is a great device for reading, bookmarking & highlighting but you can't write in the margins... When I first seen this I was hoping the next version of Kindle would try to accomplish this for the holiday season but unfortunately they did not.

How does it compare with Sony's e ink tablet with stylus? Seems too similar except it is made by startup

I'd really love that too! And if it was for color, I would really appreaciate a photoframe as I just think a backlight is not needed for these things and is just annoying at night. I really do not care about video, most relevant content is pretty static and does not even require the already possible 4-5 changes per second.

That's the GP's point. Of course the update rate sucks because enough research hasn't been put into it.

There are already E-Ink displays with much a faster update rate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsY3T1uzjAI

Who knows how much faster this could get with enough investment? Unless there's some fundamental physical limitation to the update rate that I'm not aware of.

Ha that video is not a fast update rate. It's just only updating a small bit of the screen at a time so you can't really see the slowness. Modern kindles are pretty fast but not video speed, and they still have to blank the screen after a few updates.

Yes, obviously I'm not going to be linking to a video showing a technology that doesn't exist yet.

The video serves to demonstrate that given some technological development the entire screen could be like that, and aside from that there are E-Ink screens in common use that can't refresh even such a small area that fast.

A technical video about eink, reprogramming the firmware etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

It's unfortunate that so much of this specific content is locked up as video. The part is $35 shipped on AliExpress, a great way to begin experimenting.

Unedited video is the fastest kind of content to produce, and the slowest to consume.

Edited video is the slowest kind of content to produce.

Unfortunately for me even edited video is still tougher to consume than the written word, when it comes to technical content.

I have a much easier time digesting information at my own pace.

I prefer this video, showing someone playing Wipeout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0wAmMbFgI#t=1m37s

Imagine a table with an e-ink display that can show you whatever you want them to show you.

Imagine reading news above your sink while doing the dishes.

Imagine the entire walls constructed with e-ink displays in your home and being able to change the wallpapers in your living room depending on what's currently in your mind.

All of those could have a "read-only" mode until you push a button, they would use pretty much no electricity, and would ideally be water-proof.

Instead, what I have right now, is an e-book reader. Which is nice and all. I'm often sending articles to my Kindle (kudos https://p2k.co/) and all sorts of things, but I had much higher hopes from e-ink technology (and still kind of do). The hope of having my home filled with e-ink displays is much greater than having a home filled with sensors.

E-ink isn't good enough for any of those yet.

I don't know how much research is ongoing into it, and I do think it's underutilized (I can't understand why smart watches use LCDs), but there are many breakthroughs before we can get those things you mention.

I still expect it to get all over the world, eventually.

> I can't understand why smart watches use LCDs

Refresh rate. If all a smart watch did was be a watch, it would be sufficient, but there would be no reason for it to exist. Once you want it to do non-watch things, you need a better refresh rate.

Ok, I don't know all that a watch is expected to do because I don't own one. But AFAIK, messages, fitness tracking, and remote controls do not need anything above what some e-paper can get you.

Now (after some time to think) I do think it's mostly a design restriction. Nobody was able to make an e-paper watch look futuristic and expensive.

Many years ago, I heard a politician give a speech, and he used a phrase there (I am translating from German, so it might sound a little clumsy): The worst enemy of Good is Better.

Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".

A comparable English expression is “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, which I think every software engineer should have engraved on to their monitors as a reminder.

A slightly different twist, but also a popular idiom, is that "excellence is good enough".

[I'm frantically resisting the urge to redraft that sentence]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

The common English idiom I’ve heard that is similar to the 2nd one is “‘Good Enough’ never is”, which is grammatically a bit strange but a fun one.

I'm out of date. Does E-ink still have ~500ms latency of refreshing the screen? If so, that's the #1 reason I believed it wouldn't be successful when I used them 6 years ago.

There is a Norwegian startup that has decreased the latency dramatically. https://remarkable.com/ https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo

I have one. Really is remarkable.

No meaningful latency while writing unless you draw fast large figures while watching for lag.

Upsides: Feels like pencil on paper. With iPad Pro I keep going back to paper. With this... it’s paper.

Downsides: Mobile software clunky, doesn’t connect to all WiFi, hardware paging buttons should not have been on bottom.

I have one too. I love it.

I was blown away when I was able to write some technical specifications in emacs, render them to PDF and share them to the device, then go for a coffee and review my work. I can markup my documents, sync them back to my machine, etc.

I do wish the resolutions of the documents on my desktop were better. I've drafted presentations on the device while thinking. I vastly prefer paper for thinking. This device is perfect for that.

I just wish I could do more with it. I want to be able to hook up a cloud service to interpret my math hand-writing, run it on my theorem prover or checker, and return the results, etc.... much like what people were doing in Xerox Parc ages ago.

There's so much potential here.

Do you think it would work well for someone who sketches for a living? My wife is a fashion designer and her minimum setup of a MacBook Pro + Wacom is pretty unminimum.

[edit: Reviews I read said that the drawings are scalable vectors, but two posts below talk about poor resolution, so maybe not the right device for her]

I'd consider the latest iPad Pro better for sketching, thanks to high frame rate and no lag, pressure sensitivity control, pencil "angle" control, and iPad-native software options have BnL surpassed desktop.

// Digital ink junkie since the Newton, currently own and use latest models of Wacom Cintiq, Surface, iPad, and Remarkable.

I have a few artist friends who are pleased with the Microsoft Surface. You get a pressure-sensitive stylus like on the Wacom and can run full versions of Photoshop or whatever.

It's not for everyone, but it might be an option for your wife to consider.

I have one too. The drawing/writing is pretty great, though once it's transferred back to a PC, the resolution seems kind of poor. Not too bad, but I'd like it to be smoother.

The only other major issue is software stability especially when reading. I've had it hardlock while reading something, then have to wait for the battery to drain because it won't respond to any input, then once I have it back up it forgot where I left off so I lost progress. So for the time being it sits, though once a software update or 2 come out I'll try again.

They got the latency down by only updating a small area of the screen. If the next version has a backlight, I'm getting one.

Looks great. But I've been itching for a eInk normal monitor. I just want to be able to do text editing (SublimeText) and terminal on it. That's it.

Seems like in this day and age, that's not too much to ask for.

But they're still amazing for status displays, e-readers and stuff that don't need low latencies.

What's keeping them from being more popular is the price, anything over a 1" e-ink display costs a literal arm and a leg.

I would argue that e-readers actually do need reasonably low latencies. The reason I still read books is because I can flip through pages quickly and glance over 20 pages a second as I look for the page with a certain pattern of text or an image.

IMO eInk readers are only good for "linear fiction", books that are read from start to finish.

Anything that needs to be browsed or flipped through, nope. Very few electronic versions are usable in this case, be they normal LCD screens or eInk.

but you don’t need that for signage, calendar on your door, paper decorations on your bedroom walls, meeting room reservation sheets...

Are those use cases significant enough to make e-ink "take the world by storm"?

Not sure how specific you're trying to be - here's a specific example of 4.2" at $35. I actually would be interested to see a graph of cost-per-square-inch to see where the arms and legs actually do come into play.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400x300-4-2inch-E-Ink-displa...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721766

They're a lot faster than they used to be. Maybe 200ms? Still not as fast as video.

And I don't know why everyone seems to think they aren't successful. Amazon sells a ton of Kindles. They're very successful.

E-Ink is a technology that couldn't be developed well enough, it just never got there. I mean, I love my Kindle paperwhite, but without color and rapid (60hz+) refresh, it won't ever be quite good enough. It's a fascinating case of a technology path that fizzles out.

E-Ink never took off because once it reached a profitable niche, it stopped being developed. And it's patent encumbered. I expect E-Ink development will resume around 2030 or so if it first appeared in 2010.

For me it was transflective LCD. Very low power compared to IPS panels, high contrast in direct light. Not quite as low power as e-ink, but it looked like e-ink and had a high refresh rate.

I wish I could get a programmable e-ink display at a reasonable price, that I could mount on the wall or desk. To show quotes, photos, weather, calendar, anything that is nice to have passively updated in the environment, using low power, and not emitting its own light.

This is something I would love to have. The possibilities are endless. Status screens, quotes, project progress, server health, etc. I really wish something like this existed that I could use to show some basic info that would be nice to have a screen at home, but not so nice a monitor is even a remote possibility.

I think it was one of the technologies that are actually hard. So they got where we are with low/medium effort and expenses but unwilling to go further because they can't or don't have money. I suspect color eink tanked because of this.

Have you ever played gameboy as a kid?

Transflective LCDs are another tech that didn't go anywhere. It lets you use LCDs outdoors by reflecting the natural light, which solves the problems of color and video. There were even models with solar cells embedded, so not only you get longer battery life but recharge in the sun.

I think that's what the Pebble Time watches used, a transflective Sharp Memory LCD (that Pebble calls "e-paper"). In direct sunlight, the screens are actually easier to read, and the colors are really vibrant. Indoors, it's a bit dim without using a backlight, though still better than a blank screen. It seems to be the key to the Pebble's 7 - 10 day battery life even with an always-on display.

Yes, where's my 6" Palmtop device with e-ink, keyboard and Linux?

https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-6-8

Still strong and evolving with smart watches and eReaders isnt it?

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