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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

I live in places where the sun always shines; it's almost impossible to work normally outside (which is my preferred office) without eInk. I wish there were more laptops because it works fine for coding (I have Boox devices which I use sometimes to write code). Phone same thing. Of course with the great extra of having very long battery life.

My wife writes/reads books on eInk devices and I do reading, browsing and shell/coding. It works really well.

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Living the e-ink dream. I keep waiting for some sort of ARM powered e-ink laptop to materialize out of the ether, but it hasn't happened yet.

Yeah, same, so I 'wing it' by having a Linux machine in my bag and ssh.

I have a Boox Note Air that runs Android. I imagine the processor is ARM-based. I can hook up a BT keyboard + mouse and use it like I would a regular tablet.

Plus, it has 3 screen refresh settings (low, med, high), and the middle one makes typing a very nice experience

I'll have to check that out. Especially if it can be tinkered with via a custom rom like lineage.

Check out the pinenote project. It is intended to be more than just a hackable eink reader slab.

Pinephone and Pinebook Pro owner. Eventually it will be added to the collection.

One Laptop Per Child had a transflective display, and I wish they'd managed to license that tech to someone else to help fund the project.

IIRC, with the backlight on you got full color. With the backlight off you got greyscale.

Together with the Pixel Qi you make reference to, there are a number of display technologies available or partially developed for outdoors use. And some are relatively old: has nobody here ever worked with, eg., a Palm Tungsten with transflective display?

N900 had a transreflective screen, officially as a selling point.

I think my Surface Go first gen also has it, even when not advertised as such, because I can switch to white themes and almost work with back-light off in the direct sun.

I always wondered why we couldn’t have either a lens at the top edge of a laptop display, or a translucent case to let the sun shine in behind the screen. Maybe the colors wouldn’t be perfect but you’d get more light behind the screen no?

Find yourself a half-silvered mirror, stick it in bright light, and put another mirror with some kind of diffuser behind it.

What happens is that the light in front of the mirror overwhelms the light coming from behind it. I think you'd pretty much have this problem with any kind of transmissive display, whether it's internally illuminated or relies on transmitted light. Unless you can also shade the front of the display, you'll see little.

Early box cameras, the type that had a drape over the eyepiece or viewplate for the photographer to compose the image, also had this problem.

All of these rely on obscuring some portion of the transmitted light to create a visible pattern. That's always going to be muted by ambient light from the front of the display. It's why we watch films in darkened cinemas but read books (reflective medium) in brightly-lit libraries (or at least with a strong reading lamp nearby). Note that with any LCD-based display, the polarising layer itself blocks ~50% of the transmitted light.

This is why high-ambient-light displays strongly favour reflective media. Ink on paper, paint on canvas, billboards. E-ink happens to be a rapidly-updatable version of this, though not quite as rapid as the electronicly-modulated pixels of an emissive display.

What would be a game-changer would be a material (or suite of materials) which change colour under some rapidly-switchable field (probably electric or magnetic), preferably either on the RBG or CMYK colour space, probably from a white baseline. A response in the 16--120Hz range would be sufficient for video. These would produce the effect of a printed or painted display that could present high-response video and which you'd illuminate from the front rather than back.

Though I think I'm already shuddering to consider the possible applications....

It's monochrome though right?

I can't imagine using a monochrome computer screen nowadays.

There are color touchscreens (Boox has one, there are phones that have those), but yeah I work in monochrome when there is sun or when I run out of battery; it works very well for me. But obviously YMMV! It beats sitting inside or squinting into my Macbook screen by a large stretch.

What about the refresh/redraw speed? I suppose e-ink has evolved past Kindle Paperwhite standards, because otherwise I can't see how you can use it for coding. Turning a page has a terrible redraw speed, it would drive me mad -- it looks like it was with LCD screens when they were first introduced: terrible.

It doesn't matter for reading books, of course.

I'm sure you don't have to wait for each letter to appear before typing the next, I would expect some slowdown but I don't think it would be as bad as you seem to imagine

Depends on how sensitive you are. For Kindle/book reading the image is static for long periods of time. For "interactive" screens (like when coding) it would drive me mad.

I was one of those people who could notice poor refresh rates in CRT (clicking teeth made it worse) and it drove me crazy.

This tech is not for me then.

A whole-screen refresh is slow, but typing does not require refreshing the entire screen. You can update small regions of the screen very quickly (which is what devices like e.g. the Remarkable do for writing).

Yes, this is not as fast, but I got used to it quite quickly. I think you need ten finger typing or you might get very frustrated.

Ghosting drove me crazy with CRTs and older LCDs, so I guess this is not for me.

I do not think so no; I am from a CRT generation and I never noticed even with burnt in amber or monochromes(green). If you cannot stand that, eInk won't work for you I guess.

> Ghosting ... I guess

You should try. E-Ink displays refresh their areas using algorithms involving "waveforms", normally at a layer which hides the details, but giving the vendor and user options about how the display will work. The amount of ghosting depends on the "waveform".

I have no issues with ghosting using an Onyx Boox Max2 as a tablet for word processing - which is quite an achievement.

In addition to using older technology, it's also possible that the Kindle makes different tradeoffs in terms of speed/contrast/ghosting/resolution. Personally, when reading, refresh speed is the property that I care least about among those four. I'd be surprised if engineers couldn't improve refresh speed when designing a panel for a laptop instead of an ebook reader.

Check out review videos of Boox tablets (speed/X mode) or Dasung E-ink monitors. The refresh rate is pretty good.

There are different refresh settings. Its a trade-off between refresh and quality. At the fastest its artifacty but a YouTube video is watchable in real time. Probably 10-15fps. Speed mode is a decent compromise between quality and well speed for typing.

On an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi with four refresh rates, "Normal" (highest quality, lowest refresh), "Speed", "A2", "X-Mode", I find "Speed Mode" entirely suitable for terminal-based work (Termux or SSH sessions).

Of course, colour-based syntax highlighting is unavailable, though a colour-eink device should be able to deliver a workable interpretation.

The "Normal Mode" is best suited to paginated books without any animation, and is virtually indistinguishable from printed paper (B&W/greyscale). Animation of any sort results in very annoying screen flash.

The "Speed Mode" effectively halftones images. I find that this often gives better results on photographs or shaded images, which otherwise appear slightly posterised in "Normal" mode. Most website animations are only grossly annoying (as per usual) rather than disrupting the display. (I really wish there were a toggle to disable animations entirely across web browsers.)

"A2" is mostly indistinguishable from "Speed" in my experience, though the refresh is slightly faster / ghosting slightly higher. Use when scrolling rapidly through materials. (Paginated navigation is much preferred for e-ink generally.)

"X Mode" is really only suitable for video. I actually watch many of those in "A-2", though in truth, this is more an "it's amazing it can be done" than "it works well". Yes, you can get a general impression of a video, but it's not a high-fidelity experience. That said, I don't watch much video in general.

Oh, do books print the text in color now?

I think they were more talking about how modern code editors use color for syntax highlighting.

Most E-ink devices are B&W, usually multi-shade greyscale, with higher-end devices being 16-shade. Dithering or halftoning gives quite good results on images.

There are some colour devices, though more usually ebook readers. Colour is muted -- more pastel than saturated, but gives some distinction for manga or color-differentiated graphics.

Video review of the Onyx BOOX Nova3 Colour: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=aSUcnkQCa-s

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