Dasung just released a 25 inch eInk monitor
reddit.com
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One company developed a small, expensive, newspaper-quality electrophoretic display with a refresh rate so terrible it was only suitable for books, decided that that was good enough, and 15 years later every comment in this thread is looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in this space "once the patents expire."
That is some first class bullshit. We could have had large form, glossy brochure quality displays with video refresh rates by now, but nobody outside of China wanted to get anywhere near this patent minefield.
If the patent is protecting some business's hockey-stick growth, it's worth the fee, so it fulfills the original purpose of patents, that is, avoiding trade secrets while protecting cash-cow inventions for a limited time.
But sitting on a patent becomes prohibitively expensive soon enough even for a large company.
That said, I think patents could be given out less often when the operation of the device is clear or can easily be discovered by the public without a patent.
E-Ink screens released without a patent kept under 'trade secret' wouldn't have mattered, the idea would have been implemented elsewhere.
I suppose you could argue that without exclusive rights the original inventor wouldn't have bothered to create it at all - in that case there's probably a better middle ground of something less than 20yrs. 5yrs? 2yrs? First $1million in profit?
Is there any evidence that the introduction of patents actually encouraged innovation?
If trade secrets cause knowledge to be held from the public and then ultimately lost that would be worse.
Whether that’s still relevant today I don’t know. In cases with massive research R&D like drug discovery they still seem really important.
In that case a trade secret wouldn’t be enough to justify up front investment if the drug can be copied and sold as a generic for cheap along side it.
Even with a patent system, if your innovation is not easily reverse-engineered then you have no reason to patent it. If you invention is easily reverse-engineered, then the knowledge becomes public effectively as soon as you release your innovation, and that is when a patent is most useful.
You make it sounds like trade secrets don't exist anymore.
If someone else figures out how to build or reverse engineer your invention they can do so. If an employee leaks the secret you can go after them, but can’t stop others from using it.
And don't companies keep various details about how to produce something secret.
It seems to me, that many companies in effect have it both ways.
Most patents don't describe in full how the sausage is done. That's been well known for decades now, in various disciplines.
That's why with the current system we are left with the worst of both worlds.
To improve the predictive capability of the USPTO, they could host a bidding process in which other companies can participate.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/the-thousands-of-secret...
Rather than trying to estimate the value of the idea we could drastically reduce the time for patent protection. Shortening protection period to 2-5 years should still encourage inventions, but would discourage early carpet-bombing filings (which scare many inventors away) as well as move successful inventions into public domain while they are still relevant. My 2c.
Estimating the value seems pretty much impossible, but estimating a length seems more reasonable. Clever software trick, quick to invent, easy to capitalise -> 2 years. Ground breaking new drug/material with slow market deployment -> 20 years.
There's still some subjectivity involved (but that's already the case with the current patent system), but you could try to base it on some objective metrics.
It would be easy to discriminate between 20 years for drugs vs. 5 for anything software, but I guess it's tricky to decide whether something like e-paper should count as fast-moving consumer-facing tech or hard-won physics/chemistry knowledge.
No method is perfect, but I think that in most cases a 5-year protection is enough to encourage invention.
In general, it is a business decision on whether to patent a technology that it is not ready for the production: the risk of not making a product in 5 years vs the risk of competitor getting there first. It is not perfect, but I would prefer that inventions that the owner wants to own (and suppress competition for) but cannot commercialize in 5 years enter public domain. My 2c.
perhaps a fair value assessment might include some % of revenue or profit, to self adjust?
In order to turn a patent in to a literal recipe for a competing product all you have to do is step out of a registered jurisdiction.
So people who actually come up with something meaningful have the financial burden of registering in numerous major jurisdictions at a minimum.
However, each comes with its own quirks, costs, and processes, some of which can be slower (eg. Japan) or qualitatively different (actual novelty checks performed vs. only cursory inspection) and thus vary from verging on legally dubious (more like "option to expend lawyers on creating problems for competitors in the future" than actual patent) to total lockdown.
It's a mess. Mostly it only keeps patent lawyers in business. We need to get rid of it.
then you talk about each jurisdiction having very unique flavors & characters to them.
the favt that the uspto governs such a vast share of products-sold carries a lot of weight. I tend to think increasing the cost of patents is a silly idea, because right now they cost nearly nothing if you file & do the reject/re-apply dance yourself (and know how to). unless we the people are going to start charging billions for good ideas being monopolized, I tend towards a fair reasonable & non-discriminatory access model for all ideas, with a depreciating over time scale. i'd rather open the closed system than try to find the right price for it. but either way, I think the uspto & Congress has a lot of power to fix this practically free hand out that ongoingly locks down this world & obstructs progress time & time again.
When you have a registered patent in the USA and the EU, there is no real alternative market for competition except India and China - because both the US and EU will reject any import of a patent-violating product.
H. L. Mencken
Would not be very effective for companies like Amazon or Apple which have billions to play with. Rather a 5 years maximum duration would be more effective across the board instead of the ridiculous 20 years we have to live with.
On the contrary, such companies tend to have tons of patents. Apple for example has over 70,000 patents for the 2009-18 period alone. Exponential fees would quickly add up to a substantial amount of money on such a massive portfolio.
Wasn't the original purpose of patents not to protect big business's hockey-stick grown, but to allow small inventors to capitalize on their inventions (and not have them shamelessly ripped off by some big business). I think the other original purpose was to make sure inventions would eventually become publicized and exploitable by all.
That exponential patents idea seems like it would render patent protection prohibitively expensive for all except maybe the rich or inventors unusually well-position to quickly capitalize on their invention. The little guy who takes ten years to get his business off the ground is out of luck.
However, I think the balance generally works in the other direction. 20 years feels excessive, but it’s arguably fast enough that taking something from a lab to mass production often eats up 1/2 the time. Further, many patents that are obvious like asteroid mining are going to expire long before their practical. On the other hand simply waiting out the clock to manufacture something means being really behind, thus pushing licensing.
That's only true for the public.
A company may not with to license patent use under truly fair conditions, because it would compete with their products using a different technology, they may not with to license to potential competitors, and/or small businesses (fairly).
Alternatively, holder may be using the patent, but choose that their current cash-cow is good-enough so why support competition and innovation, when they can just bump it up slightly every 10 years or so.
Defensive and overly broad patents are definitely a thing, but the intent is to give a monopoly for a limited time. Locking down alternatives not currently in production that are obvious workarounds is kind of a requirement for most patents to be meaningful. The issue is when a company in effect owns an industry and then keeps submitting obvious patents. But, here the problem is with obvious patents being granted.
A ton of patented stuff is regularly reinvented by people. In many fields, key ideas are so well-understood by practitioners that who patents them first is mostly a game of chance.
There's no point to allow someone (usually a company that does nothing but sits on patents) to do nothing while blocking everyone else from independently reinventing and implementing it. It is especially spearheaded against companies which buy and then bury an idea to preserve their incumbent status for 25 years more.
A monopoly is a bad thing. Sometimes it's a lesser evil, but most often it's not.
For example, imagine you get 100% rebate of auction proceeds untill year 5, then it drops 1% per year:
- at year 5 it's nearly impossible to do a hostile accquisition because you have a 100x advantage and only lose 1% of highest or second highest if it's a blind auctio.
- by year 25 you have to pony up up to 20% FMV per year just to retain monopoly. And only have a 5x advantage vs a competing bidder.
- the remaining fraction if paid back to consumers as basic income, can be thought of as a
- losing an auction doesn't hurt your buisness operation if you wrote yourself a perpetual contract
- auction loser is compensated less every year the contract ages and therefore has strong incentive to sublicense
- government and trade groups can buy out key patents at fair prices
- defensive patent pools still work, trolling is riskier
In the case where the profit (from owning the patent) is less than the cost of the patent it will be equivalent to the absence of patents. In the case where the profit is higher than the patent cost it’s still a company bribing the government for monopoly rights.
Unless the profits made by the government from patents is used to put a discount on the retail price of the product for which the patent is held. But even this is probably worse than free competition.
I don't see how this is an obvious fact. I don't even see how this is a valid example.
> every comment in this thread is looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in this space "once the patents expire
It is telling, very telling that when asked, none of those comments are even able to describe which patent it is that is blocking "innovation in this space".
Here's the facts.
The physics of bistable displays is complex. Many have tried with very different technologies. Electrowetting. Interferometric. Other types of electrophoretic. Electrochemical.
The investors in all of these realized it was too expensive to get it to the finish line. Even Amazon decided to trash Liquavista.
The truth is that investors would rather invest in some new consumer internet service, or AI/ML, which is a simpler problem that will give a quicker return on their money rather than try to create a bistable display solution.
If you go to SID, you'll see that there's tonnes of startups that try to solve the "fast" or "color" bistable display chalenge, and they all fail due to fundamental physics problems and burn out their funding. That's also probably why E Ink isn't able to get past their limitations.
I genuinely hope this helps people understand that this is not "patent system stifles innovation".
In very large and complicated fields, you'll often have a minefield of conflicting patent claims, much of which are minor improvement patents. These often coalesce into patent pools, assuming all participants in the pool are interested in playing ball. (Looking at you, H.265.) You don't see certain players looking to invalidate patents on the basis of not having been paid for the right to improve their invention, because such a right doesn't really exist.
It's generally not good for your business plan to include the ability for your direct competitors to shut you down if you become too competitive.
I don't follow your thesis. Are you claiming there's someone out there who is being blocked by the eink manufacturer with a threat of a patent?
The comparison earlier to FDM 3D printing is spot on. The entire industry stagnated for over a decade under Stratiasys, who had no interest in pursuing the consumer market. It was only after the patents expired that the explosion of affordable printers and innovation in filaments happened.
That's because there are over 700 of them:
https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation
None of what you said about the physics of low power displays is wrong, but you're giving E Ink Corporation a pass when they really don't deserve one. They've been unreasonably hostile to basically everybody that has wanted to work with them over the years. No volume price breaks, no prototype-quantity orders (at any price), no partnering with other manufacturers, no shared development projects, absolutely no sharing of the proprietary driving waveforms to groups that want to use a different controller, etc.
Many, many embedded, tablet, even IoT projects that started out wanting to use an eInk display for power reasons had to settle for other technologies because the company just wasn't interested in exploring new leads that weren't one of their existing eBook partners. I can understand having priorities, but you're not supposed to be able to sit on a patent hoard this large while behaving this badly (FRAND requirements, etc.).
I could buy the part on the grey market from China, but the documentation was literally non-existent (as in, there was zero, none. At least from the seller I wanted it from).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX
Does anyone have any suggestions for a screen that would fit this sort of use-case? The UI/UX I planned on being a straight Linux TTY1 to begin with.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694
It's a "memory LCD", which has very low no power drain when idle, but has an LCD's refresh speed (i.e., fast enough to display video).
You can also get some decently-documented eInk boards from Waveshare in 1" to 13" sizes, though the costs are definitely too high for anything but one-off Maker projects:
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm
You may also find the PaperTTY project interesting for your TUI:
And... what's wrong with that specifically please? Tonnes of companies have hundreds and even thousands of patents. The original claim that innovation is being blocked needs a clear example to support it.
> No volume price breaks, no prototype-quantity orders (at any price), no partnering with other manufacturers, no shared development projects
None of this sounds like blocking innovation. Sounds more like a difference in perception about costs. It would be like me expecting to get preferential treatment from one of the LCD vendors to develop something.
> but you're not supposed to be able to sit on a patent hoard this large while behaving this badly
I see a lot of superlatives but googling doesn't give me any hint of what you're referring to as their bad behaviour.
The problem is patents have come closer to patenting the overarching concept rather than an implementation.
A patent application should be required to come with [an] implementation[s] to show that every claim being made exists and has actually been developed.
That said, I wonder why there hasn't been a competing tech e.g. like LED vs LCD; Are the fundamental physics behind E-Ink so perfect for the low-power display that no other alternative is possible (or) is it just the absurd patent which stifles even exploring this direction.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter... (Disclaimer: It's a problem validation platform, I created).
This fusion reactor could be affordable. It just needs to be invented first:
It has never been properly funded.
That is quite the leap.
Some inventions we know and love would have never seen the light of day if the patent protection window was lesser.
Patents protect inventors and encourage innovation. There's no better way to encourage invention than to protect those who came up with the idea.
I don't like it when they're applied to software but that's another story.
- If I invent something and patent it, I can assure that I am the only one that can benefit from it for a period of time; to recoup the costs involved.
- If I invent something based on someone else's patent, they can deny me the right to use their patent if they think it would negatively impact them (for example, if my version is better and nobody would buy their version once mine was available). In many cases, it's just not worth bothering to even try innovating in an area because of this (and similar reasons).
Patents have both good and bad points. Presenting just the good or just the bad, and pretending it's the only valid view, is disingenuous at best.
The thing is, for a lot of industries, that's a dated pipedream. It's not 1804 and you're not Richard Trevithick. You're not going to challenge TSMC with a semiconductor fab built in the backyard shed. Even if you had huge amounts of startup capital and a laser-focused market vision, there's also a lot of innovation that's time-sensitive: for example, if you're building a better petrol engine or coal-burning generator, will you be able to scale before the product is obsolete?
Beyond that, I suspect there are also a fair number of patent holders who just take potshots at the market-- wildly mis-guessing their target market or (attempting to get orders or raise funds) based on promising undeliverables, because they don't have the full knowledge of getting a product to market. After their business fails, they'll just spend the rest of the patent term as legal unexploded ordnance-- useless by themselves but waiting to blow the leg off of some poor sod who happened to step in the wrong place.
Reducing the term from 20 years to 10 or even 5 would tend to prioritize partnership development rather than the "one man in a garage" mentality: with the clock ticking that fast, your best chance is to license broadly, hoping that someone will get product to market before the patent expires.
Practically, patents only protect large-scale holders with time and finance to enforce them.
"For a claim that could be worth less than a $1 million, median legal costs are $650,000. "
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-much-is-that-patent-lawsuit-go...
I've seen this first hand, a friend obtained a patent on an invention and offered it to various companies. They feigned disinterest and then simply developed their own versions of it. He couldn't afford to sue, so did nothing.
They still do protect individual inventors. And, this isn't justification that patents discourage innovation, as a parent comment alleged.
Patents protect individuals who may be acquired and compensated by larger entities. There's nothing dubious about this.
This is not broad-strokes true. Within the realm of tech? Maybe. Within the realm of XYZ? Maybe.
Innovation requires investment and time. The classic example for the positive merits of the patent system is the pharmaceutical industry. No pharma company is going to spend 5 - 20 years and millions or billions developing new medicine if someone can immediately copy it and make a generic brand pricing it cheaper (they don't need to make back those costs). The issue of drugs costing an arm and a leg here is not really relevant either as that's moreso an American phenomenon, here in Australia or the UK they are reasonably priced.
Anyway the point here is that the patent system's happy-path design is to give the inventor of X time to make their money back and some profit before competition drives the price down. Is that abused? Absolutely whole-heartedly yes. Is the solution to the abuse the absolute removal of the patent system? Absolutely not.
It absolutely is, though. Innovation is inherently hampered when someone owns the right to the use of a technology.
Patents do little to nothing in this regard.
When I'm looking to spend money to solve a problem, I search for a product or service to buy.
I never, ever, ever search for a patent to license, because that's stepping into a legal minefield.
Show me a field where people looking to spend money to solve a problem search the patent database for solutions, and I'll believe there's a field where patents are a good thing.
...or more than 16 levels (4-bit) of grayscale, something that a hobbyist has already shown is possible:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284
We could also have mass-produced electrophoretic sheet (basically the display without the electrodes), that you can "draw" on with any suitable voltage source; you can see someone playing with one in this video and showing how the technology works (and is fundamentally quite simple):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXxSOR1PHpE
...and someone else, coincidentally also Russian, making his own eink display(!):
Based on what principle? It strikes me as most of the comments here lack a basic understanding of the physics behind electrophoresis. It is an inherently slow process.
> ...or more than 16 levels (4-bit) of grayscale, something that a hobbyist has already shown is possible:
a simple google search showed me that you're quite badly mistaken. 5-bit grayscale or 32 levels is widely used. Just google nxp 6sololite 5-bit eink and you'll find "Up to 5-bit pixel grayscale representation" and has been for 5 or 6 years.
Also, the fact they ported basically every software feature from the Note3 which came out weeks after I got my Note2 made me amazingly happy, their after sales support has been surprisingly good, the new firmware has removed literally all latency when using the Wacom stylus for note taking, and I recently bought the Staedtler “pencil” Wacom compatible stylus and now I’ve literally ditched pen and paper for good.
It’s that excellent, for me.
An A4 or slightly larger eReader should have existed (and not cost ridiculous money) years ago.
An iPad pro that is the same size is only £100 more for me, but then thats not what I am after.
As ePaper and eInk has been around for a while now, I would expect that much like TVs the price per inch drops over time but it seems fixed at that 7" mark then the price rockets.
I get that a larger format eReader is a smaller market than the standard book, but I don't get how I can get 10 kindles (or similar) for the same price as that Sony one just because of size. If someone can enlighten me why I'd be grateful, if after a certain point the screens get harder to manufacture maybe?
Even if you don’t like that pure theory point, litigation is expensive and takes a long time. If some small little patent holder is really being stubborn and you’ve got something valuable, it’s not that hard to grind them into dust while you get big. Litigation financing makes this a little harder than it used to be but still.
In practice, they are not.
Like many others here, I wish the technology could have advanced faster and been made more accessible for everyone. Without the obstacles it still faces, I'm sure we would already have color screens with a good refresh rate. C'est la vie.
That's kind of my "oww, server is too far away" point with SSH...
FWIW, that's what the default keybindings configure.
You can create your own input.conf to override this - ^F for `audio-delay`: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mpv-player/mpv/master/etc/...
You can also specify --audio-delay (^F in https://mpv.io/manual/master/) which accepts fractions of seconds, but that makes for much slower iteration.
Is this actually a common problem? I've never had this with even 12 hours a day in front of a screen, or is this just luck?
Are you sure?
https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/safeguarding-your-...
"Myth: Reading in dim light will worsen your vision.
Fact: Although dim lighting will not adversely affect your eyesight, it will tire your eyes out more quickly."
"Myth: Staring at a computer screen all day is bad for the eyes.
Fact: Although using a computer will not harm your eyes, staring at a computer screen all day will contribute to eyestrain or tired eyes. Adjust lighting so that it does not create a glare or harsh reflection on the screen."
> So the myth is true, unless for some reason you don't consider eyestrain and tired eyes "bad for the eyes".
> So the myth is true, unless for some reason you don't consider eyestrain and tired eyes "bad for the eyes".
I was replying to "monitors eventually kill eyes and brains". I would equate "kill" to "permanently damage" and not "temporarily tired" so maybe we're just disagreeing on definitions?
And how bad is it really? Do you have anything to back what you mean and its severity? Most activities cause temporary fatigue after several hours so what makes this special?
You're right, but the similarity between your comment and the one from 11 days ago is uncanny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25417481
We're clearly using different interpretations of the word "killed".
I have no memory of my eyes being "killed for the day" so I was asking for evidence that maybe I am accumulating eye damage that will eventually catch up on me.
No matter what it is, in COVID times when everyone uses the screen 8h+ / day we should have some better screen tech, which is at least as good as a book. It can't be that this occupational hazard should be accpeted like it is right now.
Other professions like medical radiology imaging are more forward thinking in this: http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5449879
There is a whole community dedicated to LED Strain: https://ledstrain.org/
While I don’t expect this to also be a breakthrough in terms of pricing, hopefully it starts driving the volume that will eventually make this type of display more accessible.
Sadly, AMOLED hasn't progressed as quickly as we expected and big screens are both rare and expensive. Besides, eInk has some advantages like lower energy consumption.
> We know having to press this sucks, but unless we see a decentralized Web 3.0, some elements on our site are cookies baked by others that could track you. You have to put up with this, otherwise, might as well shut yourself out of the world.
edit: tyler109 - given that you've linked that site 11 times so far in this thread, I'm guessing you're affiliated with or run that site? If so, might I ask that you edit the cookie text to not be so... bad? Or much better, add a button to it to let readers opt out of the pointless tracking? Also, if you are affiliated with it, could you maybe disclose it in some of the comments where you link to it?
Samsung yet again made a breakthrough in LEDs, now, inorganic.
Then they go dark for 9 years
And almost 10 years later, bang: https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-quantum-dot-successor...
It takes a company like Samsung to singlehandedly pursue a pie in the sky science institute level project for 10 years before even a mere prospect of commercial returns emerges.
I personally use a curved 32" 4K VA screen. The resolution, text size and contrast make this great for text heavy work.
I am curious about the new 1000R displays though, at first it seemed like a gimmick - but it totally makes sense curving the screen so much in order to diminish or even radicate the need to refocus your eyes as they look across the panel.
But I haven't had a chance to try it out in person yet due to the current times. Anyone here on ultra wide 1000R?
eInk is notoriously proprietary and patent-encumbered, which is largely what makes for the astronomical price. Once the patents start expiring, we should start seeing the prices of displays become closer to LCDs.
Some of the earliest ones are starting to expire.
And now people are excited many years later for a new kind of grayscale monitor :P
* Hitachi 21" CRT which seemed enormous at the time
The Amiga interlace flicker was bothersome to me. When I got an Amiga 3000 with the built in deinterlacer / flicker fixer, it was like night and day...
I look forward to having a red light setup for night coding like my father had for his photography dark room.
Can you expand a bit more on this solution? Is this something you made or COTS?
It used to be automatic but it's not stable because there's only one point of measure. If I stood up and cast a shadow on the screen it decided that the whole room has gone dark and dimmed the screen to be invisible.
The only reason why I prefer that over doing it manually is the white point balance. It beats sitting around with a piece of white paper eyeballing it to match white on the screen.
I have tried every option with smartphone screens,: low brightness, night light filters, dark themes and nothing short of paper is remotely as free of strain as e-ink hardware.
Now OLED _might_ be able to fix things, but manufacturers don't provide low brightness settings for most screens at the moment (even though anything with a LED backlight could have almost arbitrarily low brightness), so I'm not particularly optimistic.
The example from that one guy that made a fake painting by matching light levels to a white wall was pretty convincing though, so I think it can be done it just isn't for some reason.
I have this setting tied to triple-clicking the sleep button, so I can activate it easily in the morning or late at night.
I had to fiddle with the settings quite a bit to get a 1x zoom w/ the filter, though.
Do you happen to have a link to this? I remember reading the original post years ago, but I didn't save it and could never find it again.
It's been referenced on HN a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Another solution you can use instead of or in addition to this is installing backlights and more area lighting. Provide more even lighting coverage throughout the room, and don't compute or watch TV in completely dark rooms. Anecdotally this works for me at least.
Is there any body of evidence that working with displays with refresh rates in the 60hz range with improper contrast ratio days after days do NOT damage one's vision?
(Old 27" 1440p DELL where I have to use old HDMI-port as DP or Dual-Link DVI isn't option for main pc anymore, so trickery is needed)
It seems to me that if the emissive technology is up to par and properly calibrated it shouldn't be worse.
When VGA itself improved enough to buy my first color VGA monitor, it was a bit of a let down in that the sharpness was a definite step down from that monitor.
As a kid, I remember how excited I was when we upgraded from CGA to EGA, let alone VGA or SVGA, and now I'm practically drooling over how amazing my eyes would feel from staring at a monochrome e-ink display all day!
I'm sounding like an old man now, but as an 80's kid I couldn't dream of the tech we have available today. We were all imagining flying cars and the like, but in many ways what we have, and so available, is much more incredible.
Back on topic though - if the resolution and refresh rate really are as good as shown in the videos, then as a developer, this would genuinely make a huge difference to my working day. My eyes are practically begging for it!
Unless there are markets I'm not seeing, this is undoubtedly a niche product, and I'm very pleasantly surprised that a company has invested to bring it to fruition. I haven't been this existed since NVMe, and I hope this thing ships soon so I can find out how much it costs and read reviews!
Monochrome CRTs can use any color for the phosphor, and cheap displays usually used some variant of green or orange.
Like this
Now, they actually cost more than 20 years ago.
I will never be an early adopter for that precise reason. I _do_ think the monitors look quite lovely but I am not interested in a product with such a hefty price tag while being made in China. (Full disclosure, I will go out of my way to avoid Chinese products even if the price tag is more reasonable.) That being said, I would pay $1k for a 13" monitor made in Germany, Europe, Japan or USA.
Also an irony of you mentioning Germany is that many German companies have actually been bought up by Chinese capital in the recent years.
Rampant human rights abuses. As long as the CCP is in power in China, I do not feel comfortable buying Chinese products.
> Also an irony of you mentioning Germany is that many German companies have actually been bought up by Chinese capital in the recent years.
That affects none of the companies I value, though.
Kindles have only gotten cheaper over time, so I don't see why e-ink monitors can't do the same.
And you don't have to drop all highlighting altogether: you still gave greyscale, underlining, font weight, italics etc... You'll just have to be a little more creative.
(From a thread a month or so ago, where someone did this as a maker, now it's much more commercially viable)
It's essentially plug-and-play - no major technical skill required to use it
Doesn't seem to be in the same league if we factor in refresh rates. Doesn't seem to be usable as a monitor.
But it would perfectly work for refreshing a newspaper every hour. :)
The Dasung had several 'modes' you could choose, but none worked well. Worse, their software is closed source, is fairly buggy, and requires root for zero reason. I felt very uncomfortable about installing it, and didn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Paperlike/comments/au0yuc/dasung_on...
Without the software installed, you have to manually hit the 'refresh' button. This is done to clear up errant pixels aka a screen flash. Yet the refresh process was slow, so to test, rather than let their questionable software do it, I hit the manual button on the monitor.
The flash on/off was highly annoying, and I couldn't imagine reading text, coding, working this way once the software was installed.
Customer service from dasung was non-existent. I had to return it.
I so much want an e-ink display.
Doesn’t it require a cloud service subscription to drive, or failing that, locally hosting their cloud service to drive?
I am just reminded of various sci fi type shows and movies where the outside world was simply a colorful screen that changed periodically if at all. this type of use could make even the most boxed in apartments much more livable
As well as one of the USB dasung paperlike screens. Unfortunately accessing the software and use on modern windows and mac os seems impossible.
I want a second generation screen :).
To get back on topic, a 25.3" 3200 * 1800 eInk panel is mentioned at https://www.beck-elektronik.de/en/products/displays/e-paper-... and I doubt there is more than one but all details are "tbd".
Though I think there is an old Thinkpad model that had a light on the lid that lit the keyboard. Maybe something like that would work nicely.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/waveshares-e-paper-displays-work-...
So relaxing. For many things, e-ink is amazing tech.
Had given up on it generally. This is good news.
They seem to be trying to hide it too, given how they cut away so quickly from moving content on the screen...
That said, E-Ink displays are cool, and this still appears to be a huge advancement.
Pixel qi allows passive lighting in grey scale while also allowing colour with active lighting. And higher frame rate than e ink while still having low power consumption thanks to passive lighting ability.
Edit: Found an interesting article on the fate of pixel qi and some other alternatives to e-ink: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-rise-and...
Debating on whether I should go for the A7 (https://goodereader.com/blog/product/hisense-a7-5g-e-ink-sma...) or the Light Phone II (https://www.thelightphone.com/products) - both having e-ink displays, as far as I know - as an upgrade from my SE (2016). Although, both phones do have different use-cases of course.
https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/the-best-e-ink-smartpho...
> No exact pricing yet, but a teaser in form of "1xxx9", so it could be anything from 10009¥ to 19999¥, so about 1500$ and 3000$ or 1250€ to 2500€ respectively.
Which isn't a monitor. It's a barebones devkit that doesn't accept video input and takes a couple dozen seconds to refresh.
Seems like a trans reflective display? I always thought this type of screen had issues over 10” because of the inner membrane.
[0] https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%CB%9D-color-epaper-di...
Really have to hand it to Jeff Atwood, Sam Saffron, and the team. How many of us (incl myself) thought that the world wasn't looking for a refresh of forum software? Now I realize I haven't even seen phpbb used on a forum made since 2010—everyone just uses Discourse.
The alternate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY
But to be more precise: both "emit" light depending on the ambient light. Of course it's comparable.
The only thing really throwing off the LCD would be the white balance, but with the right sensor that too could be fixed (e.g. a camera with fixed wight balance behind milk-glass).
(E-)Paper reflects blue light, LCD backlight emits it. The only difference is that the color balance and brightness don't change with the sunset on your screen unless you install a tool like flux.
Light is light. Looks the same = probably is the same. Bands are just a bit narrower with LEDs, but I wonder if that makes any difference biologically if it looks the same.
eink/epaper is reflecting ambient light just like every other object in the environment so your vision won't need to adjust when glancing back and forth
If you set your monitor to the same brightness that paper or a non-backlit screen would have in your room, then your vision doesn't have to adjust to the different brightness levels.
Same for TV. Don't watch TV in a dark room!
When I had a modest home theater with a projection TV (the old bulky kind, not a separate projector and screen), one of the best things I did was to light the white wall behind it with a soft neutral gray light.
The technique at the time was to use a small fluorescent desk lamp on a small table behind the TV, with the fluorescent tube wrapped in a specific color of lighting "gel" to make it a neutral gray. The lamp was aimed up at the wall behind the TV. This made everything much easier on the eyes.
The main trouble I think is that very few (any?) manufacturers are making front-lit LCD panels at typical monitor sizes and resolutions. I guess there's not really a market for it? But if such a thing exists I'd compare the heck out of it and eInk.
Viewing angle would be another pain point with them, but that also came a long way and you could chose one with good angles if needed.
This is relevant for pretty much any knowledge worker job as well.
All LCD's essentially use a similar liquid crystal pixel that serves as a variable light shutter for polarized light. It's the back- and front-planes (e.g. addition or omission of RGB color filters, different types of backlights, fully or partially reflective layers, etc.) that differentiate different types of LCDs. If you have an old LCD laying around, with many of them you can actually take the different layers apart to access the active or passive matrix LCD panel (you'll end up with a transparent LCD). I did it once with a tiny LCD, it's pretty cool. Then you can play around with adding your own layers/lighting effects.
1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal...
2.) https://www.winstar.com.tw/products/tft-lcd/transflective-tf...
Frankly, I could use either tech for similar reasons.
E-ink would be superior for overall viewing and eye strain, however both have merit. The LCD would likely be faster, with a much narrower sweet spot for viewing.
And I wonder about these Vanta Black type pigmemts too. E-ink I have seen is really good, but could potentially be crazy good. Maybe that cannot be used, or is too expensive. But yeah, I wonder.
Put a different way: when light falls on an eInk "pixel" it gets absorbed and then re-emitted, modulo intensity. That's how we see the vast majority of surfaces in the world: they absorb light and then re-emit it, possibly changing its intensity and color (frequency). Technologies like OLED directly emit light; not reacting significantly to the ambient light that falls on them. But if one we able to measure the light falling on each individual pixel of an OLED, one could adjust each pixel to mimic the behavior of a physical object. It could "simulate" eInk, so to speak. If the mimicry is close enough, then there's no fundamental difference between the two. They'd both be emitting the same frequency and intensity of light.
In fact I recall a post, mostly likely here on HN: Someone took a high quality Apple display and rigged it with an array of ambient light sensors, put it in a decorative art frame and hung it on the wall. With some software and calibration they were able to get it to look convincingly like a real piece of art, fooling many of their guests.
eInk has been around for decades now and has remained an obscure niche. It's possible we'll see a renaissance for it, with the patents hopefully expiring? But there's no reason we shouldn't also be pursuing better ambient light calibration for our existing displays.
P.S. It's not accurate to say that eInk is a "reflective" display, as it does not primarily reflect light. Otherwise it would look like a mirror. But saying "emissive" versus "reflective" is common parlance for differentiating technologies like eInk from technologies like LCDs and OLEDs. Nitpicking the terminology is not particularly helpful though.
Too bad nobody actually makes one. There's no way to buy a hypothetical, so e-ink it is.
The relevant question is whether you can buy an LCD that calibrates well enough, and the answer is not "obviously no".
There is one specific difference between the light from LED screens vs e-ink : polarization. LED displays work by adjusting the polarity of the backlighting and then passing it through a polarizing filter. An e-ink display image is unpolarized light. It's not clear whether the polarity of LED has the potential to cause eye strain or other negative effects, but it is certainly a quantifiable difference.
Are e-readers really obscure? Seems like a pretty big market.
I also saw something but couldn't find it again :)
Is "reflective" always orderly? I mean, can there be a 100% matte reflection?
I also use an e-ink reader sometimes because it looks so much better under direct sunlight, and because it's a single purpose physical device. But I'd love to see some more substantial work backing the eye and neurological disorders claims, from actual researchers in the field, with n greater than 1. Otherwise, that's how you get a snake oil market for geeks.
https://teddit.net/r/eink/comments/kjvsoj/dasung_just_releas...
-E-mail -Coding -Research -Writing
Benefits: Zero distraction Zero eyestrain No Bluelight
Why should there be difference? 'Distraction' is a question of applications, not monitor type.
Eyestrain is a result of long-term near focus and insufficient blinking leading to dryness, no reason why eink monitor help with this.
Bluelight - regular LCD has LED backlight that passes through LCD, with eink there is an external LED light, reflected by eink back. The source of light is the same (well, depends on specific type of dides in LED backlight vs LED light).
Distraction is a question of colors and rate of change.
While it's a copout way to address black and white displays, most people who turn their backlit monitors black and white report a noticeable difference in focus. At least for the first week or so.
> Bluelight - regular LCD has LED backlight that passes through LCD, with eink there is an external LED light, reflected by eink back. The source of light is the same (well, depends on specific type of dides in LED backlight vs LED light).
By external LED light you mean the lightbulbs in your home? This is not backlit or frontlit or any kind of lit if you put it in a dark room.
Yes
If this is not you, good (how old are you?), but the numbers clearly show that I’m not the only one with this problem. I’ll likely buy an e-ink monitor as soon as as prices go under £500 for 15’’ or so. I am already tempted by the reMarkable, if it had a “dumb monitor mode” I would have bought it already.
Link with timestamp: https://youtu.be/A9qrURPAtnY?t=109
Meanwhile my kindle oasis has like 1fps.
The eyestrain thing apparently doesn't affect everyone, but for those it does it makes staring at a screen for hours a non-issue.
Also, although it probably isn't such a useful function with a monitor (except in warm climates), this sort of screen will be fine to read outside compared to - say - a laptop screen.