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Comment by ds | Hacker News Reader

Havent looked into this much- What is the maximum 'refresh' rate you can get out of something like this?

For single or double-color displays, you can do pretty decently. This Applied Sciences video on YT goes over what's possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

The page says 15s.

That is what the page says, but can that possibly be right? I know e-ink tends to have very low refresh rates but taking a full 15 seconds to redraw seems excessive. I have found sites like this often have pretty obvious errors on them, is it likely this is correct or a typo?

E-ink is commonly used in signage where it won't need to change again for a week or more. 15 seconds is fine when your required average refresh time is measure in days.

I am really looking forward to the day when high refresh rate e-ink displays are common. The B&N Nook from about 8 years ago could be modified to successfully play flappy bird at about 10hz, but it was pretty ugly to use, requiring a black/white full clear of the screen to zero out the image every 30 frames or so.

That's actually not too bad for a multi-color e-ink display. The last color e-ink display I looked at had an even longer refresh interval.

My understanding is that the refresh time tends to increase significantly with the number of colors displayed.

Some months ago I saw a larger one that took half a minute of cycling through different states to fully display the final image. So 15s seems reasonable.

15 seconds doesn’t make sense for a handheld reader. Are there other scenarios where it does make sense?

Event specific signage such as 'Donner Party' in Conference Room C could be useful for many hotels and convention centers.

Information displays in retail.

I think colored ones typically change the colors in sequence, so it seems like that could be correct.

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