Electronic Reader Running Doom 2 | Hacker News Reader

Electronic Reader Running Doom 2

blog.jitbit.com

26 pointsjitbit8 comments

Nice to see the refresh rates are steadily increasing on e-ink displays. Anyone got any thoughts on what kind of growth rate function we're seeing here? Does it fit moore's law?

I believe some companies are claiming 20ms refresh rates, which is hitting 50fps if these claims count for continuous changes or just one-offs. Certainly a lot of display manufacturers have been showing off video, but you've got to consider the growth rates here can be biased for one reason: colour.

E-ink and every other company wanting to produce e-paper want colour. If they can hit continuous frames above 24fps in full colour, then they've got a massive game changer. I mean think of the game change in laptops where the display uses 60-70% of the battery life of the device if you're capable of dropping that to 5-10%. Your average piece of shit netbook will run 24-hours. Your laptops that already run through a full business day plus commute, will be able to last you the full week and maybe a saturday on a single charge.

I think the black&white e-ink displays aren't advancing as fast as they could be simply because developers are trying to find their holy-grail of a video-capable colour display.

When we have smartphones with ~30fps full colour e-ink screens then we can officially forget our anxiety over the lack of flying cars.

It'd be exactly like a flying car except that it isn't flying and isn't a car. Great stuff!

I'd settle for nothing less than an immersive virtual world in which we can have flying cars.

My point was that it would be better than flying cars. E-ink screens will liberate us hackers from the confines of our offices and allow us to go and work outside in the sunshine. Can you imagine how much of a difference that will make?

It has just started to get warm here in the UK and I'm actually starting to feel twitches of envy for my friends who haven't managed to find proper jobs since graduating, or who haven't graduated yet. They're all having BBQs today.

Living in a country where sunshine is a scarce resource does odd things to your priorities.

I do like working in the dark, but I live in a place where sunshine is abundant.

It would work in a direct sunlight, something that no laptop is capable of, but with the constant redrawing, I'm not sure if these nice power figures would actually hold, sure, my e-ink reader can last for at least weeks, but that's perhaps one redraw per minute, or even more, and with CPU and whole system almost completely idle in between.

I think latency is also a big issue for these displays

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