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Comment by calebkaiser | Hacker News Reader

I wish so badly that color e-ink was further along. I'd love a tablet that could replace my notebooks, but for some reason, needing a second screen to read my textbooks (color is nonnegotiable for diagram-heavy some textbooks, in my experience) makes me reticent. The ReMarkable 2 looks fantastic, and I love the idea of a distraction-free, dedicated writing/reading tablet, but $450 feels just a touch too far for a device that will require me to use a second device to read textbooks.

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> I wish so badly that color e-ink was further along

It is coming: a waveshare 7 color eink screen is $600 on aliexpress, 16 second refresh

If partial refresh comes more supported in open source, pictures could be drawn immediately with the b&w text, then refresh little by little to add color.

16 second refresh is a complete nonstarter for a note taking device. Its only good enough for a desk calendar screen. I'm not sure how much more can be done since these color e paper displays are basically a hack which doesn't scale well and degrades refresh rates as contrast from the ones I have seen.

There are a few "color eink" displays floating around in demos which are actually just an lcd with a matte layer over the top.

This is a genuine color eink, not an lcd mask hack

Real color eink is a hack too. Its multiple colors with the same magnetic polarity but in different sizes and the display is able to pulse the fields to select the color but its super slow and the colors can blend together a bit. All of the ones I have seen are 3 color and I imagine more colors make the issue even worse.

Have you checked this one out? Not associated with them but I do own a Boox Max Lumi (not color) and just saw the announcement about this.

https://onyxboox.com/boox_poke2color

Unfortunately, it's not a genuine eink display but a rebranding of Qi hybrid LCD that was made popular in the OLPC.

Just look at the announced resolution in dpi in b&w vs color, and you'll see they use a LCD mask in front.

If you want both color and eink, it's better to get a dual screen, like a Lenovo C930 book: use the screen clone mode and just turn off the color screen when you don't need it.

This can also gives you a eink laptop if you use a USB keyboard.

This an interesting option I never considered. Somehow, I wasn't aware of the C930 book. It looks like it's been discontinued, but there are still many being sold.

I've also toyed with the idea of purchasing an old Surface Pro 3 because of the price and the ability to run a full Linux distro—though obviously, I lose all the benefits of e-ink with this option.

I just looked at it. I feel like I would have much preferred they put the e-Ink on the back side of the LCD screen instead of replacing the keyboard. It's really hard to use a non-tactile keyboard for any productivity.

Yes, the same product with an eink screen on the back would be nice... but different. Personally, I like taking notes while reading a website, and this requires a dual screen. Lenovo has other laptops with eink on the bank, but I'm not familiar with the lineup.

For the keyboard, consider getting a USB or bluetooth keyboard, like Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II, or ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint (0B47190) - they are very comfortable.

As for linux support, check out https://github.com/aleksb/yogabook-c930-linux-eink-driver

it _is_ an e-paper / e-ink / electrophoretic display. E-ink went back to color filters because their filter-free color displays take tens of seconds to refresh and nobody was buying them.

Boox Note Air is similar price and you can comfortably read PDFs on it. Onyx's PDF reader is very good.

It looks like a nice tablet—unfortunately, it doesn't seem to render color either (at least from what I can tell).

Please do not support Onyx or buy any Boox tablets! I'm reproducing an earlier comment[0] below:

They're a lousy company that does not respect the GPL and ships intentionally insecure software (ancient linux kernel with SELinux disabled for starters) that phones home to Chinese servers. The bootloader is locked, so putting pmOS is out of the question and their update files are intentionally obfuscated.

I explain it all in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543

This received some attention in the re--it community last month--the company still does not care [1]. It's a tragedy because their hardware is good, otherwise and they can compete on that.

In other news, I am now a happy owner of a ReMarkable 2 and the first day I was able to SSH in, set up rsync on my local network and customize the hosts file to disable their cloud services. We should not tolerate the inability to run software on computers that we own, especially for devices that are as trusted as notebooks and personal computers, which this tablet is.

I'm not sure if I should sell my Boox Note or relegate it to use as signage. The only problem is that if the battery dies, it refreshes the display to a "battery depleted" screen, instead of leaving up the last image. But you can't customize that because the bootloader is locked.

Edit: Another note about Onyx. At least my Note does not support proper C2C charging. In other words, you can't charge from a Type-C charger, you have to use a type-A charger. My rM2 works just fine with all of my C2C chargers.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237328

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...

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