New 10.3″ Waveshare E Ink Monitor
blog.the-ebook-reader.com
blog.the-ebook-reader.com
Unfortunately vendors are somehow constitutionally incapable of providing useful technical information for eInk displays. It's so frustrating that there's a huge graphic extolling it's FPGA based refresh technology but actual technical information is almost completely absent. Why can't I just get a datasheet?
I'll summarize here so other people don't have to grep through this mess.
HDMI input
1872×1404
5V/3A
~5Hz refresh in mode A2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw
Eink could have changed the world, yet the only eink display I and many people have it our kindle.
They were the first to build the technology to bring refresh times for writing near the 50ms mark, and hold the patent about it (AFAIK they license this patent to other builders who use Canvas).
[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264751...
Economy of scale makes weird pricing happen.
Right now on digikey you can buy a "SWI25-12-E-P5" 25 watt PSU for $11.95, or a "KTPS12-12010WA-VI-P1" 12 watt PSU for $12.21. Both are wall mount class 2 supplies, level 2 efficiency standards, even the same connector. The cheaper one has a longer cord, LOL, as yet another weird example of economies of scale.
If your application requires 10 watts, a 25 watt supply will quite happily provide 10 watts and run extremely cool for a long time compared to a 12 watt supply being asked to provide 10 watts.
I will admit that one mfgr chased safety approvals for euro countries and the other chased safety approvals for USA/Asian countries, but for hobbyist one off purposes, something that passes TUV/CE is approximately as good as something that passed UL, and if you want to sell commercially in the US its usually a paperwork transaction to cross approve something. A bigger problem is X% where X is pretty large, of chinese mgfr equipment has fake safety marks. So for hobbyist purposes you're far safer using a genuine TUV approved supply in the US than graymarket gear with a fake UL mark. So there are minor differences. It would be non-trivial to design something that could pass TUV but fail UL, although someone out there has probably succeeded in the past.
The real world market is not magically 100% efficient, so you can absolutely pay 26 cents more for a supply with a shorter cable and lower power output.
Seems like with no backlight, you could make a 1080p matte version of those that could push 60 somewhat streaky frames per second for like 0.5 Watts or less.
I mean there was a HN post about a full RGB-E-Ink display last week or something. Any spec or pricing is behind a NDA, though.
EDIT: Nevermind, they explicitly state it's 16 level grayscale.
That's in black and white mode, not grayscale too, which I'm sure is going to be even slower.
So you could type as fast as you can, the computer would update its front buffer without delay, and all keyboard commands to move around in the editor would be executed instantly just like normal but the screen would only get full updates five times a second.
I could work with that.
https://onyxboox.com/boox_max3
Edit: but maybe the Waveshare experience is better than this https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2019/09/30/onyx-boox-max3-...
Edit2: that Onyx video doesn't look so bad...
From my experience using an Kindle it is way less eye strain, and reducing the amount of strain, in this case hours every day, would have to have a positive effect over time.
Maybe in the future it will be normal to have dedicated E Ink programming displays.
Greyscale works as syntax highlighting, you do can get used to it after time. But what greyscale does to you is that isn't that interesting to you anymore to look at the screen, so you do start get "bored" from it and the eye starts to wander around looking for something else perhaps pretty to look at. Nice if you want to look often enough out of the window, but annoying if you have work to do.
For at dark at night coding it isn't that bad. But having an AMOLED with the right colourscheme and low lightness setting is more pleasing I found.
An e-ink is enough to program on emacs all day, but color highlights is a missing feature.
Maybe when patents expire, the tech will improve faster allowing for acessible color ones.
For indoor use it has to achieve a lot more. But I would use one as a primary display to rest my eyes more.
In my room I’ve blocked out just about everything except that darn monitor - these stickers helped a ton https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009WSJNCW
I've also found this:
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-rise-and...
In any case, it's a shame.