Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor | Hacker News Reader

Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

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437 pointslnyan260 comments

I couldn't find a video of the display in use, so here it goes (for the 13.3" version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBfWkxOfUfQ

seems a little slow and the screen refreshes sometimes excessive, but much better than I expected

I still don't understand how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?

- Longer battery life

- easy on the eyes for long sessions reading/writing

- Allows me to actually work outside!!!

There is a huge market of people out there (Thinking about the typical ThinkPad users) that don't give 2 craps about color accuracy. We literally just want to read and write.

Anyone envolved in Product Management that can give some insights?

Is it too expensive?

Are there not enough users?

Are vendors scared of the lackluster of the device when compared with shinny reflective displays?

No one is going to sell a device that costs significantly more than any other for the same power to provide what 99% of users would consider a sub par/ unusable display.

Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.

This stuff isn't ready to be a 'main' display yet.

> imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to - watch any kind of media - looks 'laggy'

Imagine thinking that the consumer market is only for media consumers. There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support.

I wouldn't argue that someone buying this machine would only use only this machine. But I know I am not alone in saying that this would be my daily driver when focus is required.

> There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support.

You think in 2021, when I'd argue the majority of folks that own a laptop are working remote, there's huge demand for a laptop that can't display a video feed from a zoom or WebEx meeting? That sounds extremely unlikely to me. I'd wager the demand for such a device would measure in the thousands and would never be cheap enough to sell more than a couple hundred.

You'd be far, far better off just making a Bluetooth keyboard case (like the old clamcase or brydge cases) for a boox and calling it good. You'd have an ssh terminal and basic office apps as supported by Android.

> a laptop that can't display a video feed

Actually, those displays do. They may work fairly well for the purpose. When I tested those capabilities years ago, the chief issue was with ghosting; the second with choosing either high definition with strong artefacts or fast, cleaner low definition; the third was with having algorithms that minimize dot switching (which is energy costly). But there is a possibility that newer refresh algorithms fixed most of that.

Even at the state of a few years ago, to just see talking heads and presentations the video capabilities of EPD were already more than adequate. It makes little sense energy wise (wrong instrument), but it is doable. Those who want the EPD properties for production may see little loss in the lower video quality - provided the issues I listed above have been mitigated, foremostly the ghosting.

Edit:

I checked on YT and, look, it seems to me that video quality on EPD has boosted to incredible levels. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29430696

or directly the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KqASRsIWVw

Surely such laptop would be able to «display a video feed». Suboptimally. (Yet, in a way, amazingly.)

The ghosting on that even as good as it is would drive me crazy.

I'm as much of a fan of the potentials of this technology as anyone, but it really look like it's terrible to use as a main display even for non-multimedia applications.

I.e. try setting your mouse or keyboard to have even 50-100ms of lag, a lot of people would find that very distracting to use even for just using a terminal Emacs/Vim & for writing plain-text.

There's a reason these things are being marketed as "secondary displays", which makes perfect sense.

In terms of cost I really don't see why anyone would want to do it differently anyway. A 20" LCD is dirt-cheap these days, so if you're already spending 5x or 10x that on the same size of E-Ink display why not get both?

> ..try setting your mouse or keyboard to have even 50-100ms of lag, a lot of people would find that very distracting to use

Except that Remarkable 2 has 20ms latency, same as iPad's. [1]

That makes pencil behave like a real one; that is a user cannot perceive the difference between writing on eink tablet vs writing on paper.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/remarkables-redesigned-e-p...

While the 20ms latency on the Remarkable 2 is very impressive, let's please not say that users "cannot perceive the difference". At best the latency "does not bother" users. There are whole swaths of professions for which 20ms is a huge amount (professional gamers, musicians, etc), and even personally (And I generally view my lag perception as quite poor) the 20ms on the remarkable was noticeable enough that it did not feel as nice as having a good pen on paper.

20ms latency is about average for a text editor: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

(Not that that's a good thing...)

Apple pushed an update in iOS 13 which brings the latency on the Pencil down to 9ms.

Which I remember vividly because it's when latency on the Pencil subjectively "went away" for me. Especially for tight loops in cursive, on iOS 12 the line would 'catch up' with the stylus, but at 9ms I don't perceive that.

Edit: crosshatching is an even better example of a technique which feels completely different at 9ms rather than 20ms.

In addition to the videoconferencing others have brought up, pretty much every Fortune 500 out there has extensive training requirements for their laptop-using employees - that content is a mix of video and slideshows. Those corps are the biggest purchasers of "work" laptops.

For the uninitiated, the training I'm referring to covers everything from sexual harassment to infosec to insider trading to "why you don't really need unions".

The only time I’ve “needed” to watch video at work has been for cheesy, anti-harassment training showing pre-recorded situations that are obviously illegal.

The other cases are videoconferencing, where someone is basically showing a fairly static powerpoint, sprint planning board, or other, text-heavy content.

Not much of a market, I have to do media based training all the time, even though my 95% case is text based.

Are you implying that contrast and color is disrupting your focus, and that full-screen flicker during movement increases your focus?

Basically every enterprise of a reasonable size is going to require their users to consume multimedia content of some sort - web calls, training materials etc.

If the crux is that even you, clearly a passionate eink advocate, wouldn't be able to use it as a sole device then that essentially makes the market tiny. In fact, a secondary eink display sounds like exactly what you need.

When the refresh is more capable it'll be more of an option, and I cannot wait for that to be the case. But it's just not feasible to sell a laptop with an eink display as yet.

This sounds more like a usecase for the Pixel Qi screens, transflective LCDs which are sunlight-readable but with normal refresh rates and which have a full-color backlit mode. Still not sure why the tech never took off...

In this day and age it's pretty hard to imagine a use case for a work laptop that completely excludes multimedia.

No Zoom calls? No online learning videos? I think most workers today would hit a brick wall pretty quick if this was their only display.

Zoom or watch videos on their phones? They’re carrying one anyway.

Manufacturers need to do this at scale. It’ll be so expensive if they only make a few thousand units.

"IT gave me a crappy black and white laptop. They are so behind."

No manager would consider signing off on devices that don't make their PowerPoint deck look great. Without the corporate or consumer market you're going to struggle to find revenue.

And these days: if it cannot make video calls it is not a computer for work.

A YouTube search for "Hisense A5 pro cc video call" did not return precise results, but some can be suggestive of the possibilities. See for example

Title: Hisense A5Pro CC Review 3- Battery, Videos & Games | Eink Kaleido 1 handling fast scenes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KqASRsIWVw

Some would find those results jawdropping. I presume that Video Calls using E-Ink displays are now much more than possible.

Possible but lackluster

If you get enough shoulder-taps, a device that can't take video calls might be the best one for work.

Ideally, yes ... but in large orgs with different internal agendas and politics it might be problematic to get through :)

My work computer can’t take video calls. It is better that way.

I have an iPad for that.

What if they made the display modular, so that you could swap it with a regular display for when you want to do gaming and other stuff like that?

I personally would buy an e-ink laptop, but then again I'm very much into e-ink, I have a Kindle and ReMarkable 2, years ago I also bought DPT-S1 but I returned it because it was too expensive.

Also colour e-ink displays have been getting better and better too! So I'm sure that in time, it'll be amazing!

> so that you could swap it with a regular display

You may just want to lay an EPD tablet on the original screen and link the two. Check:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmenti...

Issues? Yes. HDMI does not allow for the touchscreen, and you may want that. And the hardware system must optimize battery life, which can be awful on the HDMI connection.

What you really want is an optimized data connection and screen mirroring to the tablet.

Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android...

> Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android...

This is my hope with the future PineNote running a Linux distro.

Mind you, Android can be pretty effective on the tablet for some tasks. But when you will want to use a complete Office Automation suite, instead of the more toyish mobile alternatives...

What I finally did, this June, was: I coded my own word processor for Android.

A dual boot system (Android vs Linux Desktop) would be the best solution.

I used to run a full Debian chroot on Android. It was very handy except that if you ran it on an unrooted Android device you couldn't be a user with full root capabilities. But gcc, make, tar, gzip, and git worked well enough to compile working stacks for other languages (the first software I built on it was Perl from source) as a regular user. Thousands of packages available and the ability to build from source, right on my phone in my pocket. They had other distros for it, too. Unfortunately that project - GNURoot - seems abandoned. Possibly fortunately a new one is from the same maintainers. I think I never used X on it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula&hl=en...

There's another called Debian noroot (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu...) that appears fairly up to date but I haven't tried it. It's well rated but said to be slow. It includes XFCE and apparently starts it by default. It uses PRoot.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=studio.com.tec... is yet another, and also uses PRoot. I have concerns about their page saying they have closed-source modded versions of F/OSS operating system distros though, and that they'll only provide source to developers who register with them. That's kind of unneighborly if they're customizing BSD or Apache licensed portions of a distro and illegal if they're doing it with GPL or LGPL portions.

https://github.com/guysoft/cuntubuntu

...But that seems to be a fork, last updated in 2013 of

https://github.com/pelya/debian-noroot

which was updated in 2020.

I'd love to test that on the Onyx Boox Max2 plus BT keyboard... I will try it and see what can be done with it.

I'm idly curious about the word processor you put together. You're not saying "text editor", which suggests some level of interesting/novel functionality.

Exactly: full fledged Word Processor, optimized for the contextual technology of a ~13'' EPD display (so, for example, no scrolling, corner-to-corner (but the margins) use of the display in two columns landscape - for use with a slotted BT keyboard). Native Java for Android (no need for NDK). Rich text and full paragraph justification, spacing and indenting - from scratch: text is rendered and placed on the bitmap of the screen canvas bit by bit whenever necessary upon editing. Functions through touchscreen and keyboard shortcuts. I structured a markup (using both paragraph styles and ad-hoc "direct formatting" - bold, italics etc.) which allows for simplicity and comfort in file manipulation, but the translation to .fodt (or .xml in general) is almost trivial (there are libraries around to manage typical formats: I have checked but not implemented as for personal use I do not really need the feature). Battery wise, I managed to remain very conservative: sometimes even 2%/hour (~100mA, equivalent to many days of work) of consumption (fortunately, also the use of BT keyboards consume very little).

It was started this June (2021), and I have used it for many hundred of hours with good productivity. I have not published it (yet) as I would want to polish the code first. It was quite rewarding to get it done (the best tailored product is the one you develop for yourself) - but still with a sensation of quite absurd oddity, since I had been using full-fledged word processors in the early nineties, and "there I was", almost thirty years later, with tablets much more powerful than the desktops of yore, coding a word processor because all was available for Android was unfit for use if compared to desktop tools, and I was just losing time waiting for "the product"... It's not "normal".

Oooo.

Wow, this sounds awesome.

I hadn't thought of the concept of writing into a multiple-column layout before. That's really really neat. It keeps the individual runs of text short (faster for proofreading, I've heard), scrolls less, and lets you keep more context on the screen.

I'm definitely very interested in this when it comes out, I don't currently have a tablet-size device but that probably won't be the case for too long and I can see myself giving this a go. A single-column option for phones (in landscape mode) might be practical.

I do completely agree that Android feels structurally broken (for want of a better way to put it) in terms of application support - it honestly feels like someone figured out how to bolt WebKit onto a feature phone and add capacitive touch and eye candy, while (somehow???) maintaining the same "smol device" fundamentals of "toy" and "not full PC". IMHO the PC experience isn't really one single cohesive vision, but rather the emergent result of years of many thousands of little independently-evolved self-sustaining threads and ideas (particularly in UX design) intersecting and bouncing off each other in a sort of cohesive balance that resulted in (comparative) miracles like Windows XP. Microsoft et al didn't invent the fundamentals of the ideology and language that emerged; rather, they just figured out how to capitalize on the net result and realized that if they knee-capped it too heavily they'd kill the thing they were trying to benefit off of.

From a distance it kinda looks like Apple/Google are trying to (re)invent everything - conventions, expectations, design language, (tens of?) thousands of tiny details, etc - from first principles, without giving sufficient consideration to whether their fussing about accidentally edits and rewrites the technological aspects of the goal narrative. I think advertising and the exponential over-valuation of user data are to blame for the current insanity - and sadly so, since it's obvious that won't change soon. I think the fundamental incentive to refine and optimize for technical experience/competence has become diluted by All The Ad Revenue™ from the current status quo, producing the current ecosystem, app store offerings, app quality level, fragmentation, etc. Basically everything seems to be working as intended, or in other words I don't mean that "current status quo is fundamentally bad and evil" (for want of a better way to put it), I rather mean that between ad revenue, internal politicking, Google/Apple/Microsoft competition, antitrust regulations, overall public perception of how invasive ads/tracking is, etc etc, the system as a whole has basically reached a steady state that simply doesn't have room for pure technical excellence, which I don't think will change until the ad bubble collapses. I'm tentatively hopeful that might actually happen in my lifetime, although as a counterpoint, hopefully it doesn't take so long the world ends up in a WALL•E-style dystopia with everything paperclip-maximized around ads instead of garbage. Haha.

However, this all provides a unique opportunity for anyone prepared to make the effort to make apps that are actually interesting: can I interest you in a "Buy" button? :P

You mentioned cleaning up the source code - and while I certainly won't dissuade you from open-sourcing something like this :D (it would be a genuine net improvement, and you could list on F-Droid as well), I'm reminded of the "source code is <license> on GitHub, but ready-to-go APK in Play Store is $.$$" model, which I think could work quite well for this sort of thing. There are a lot of small, focused apps out there that have loyal followings.

Maybe you could do an "early beta" sort of thing to cue users to understand the first versions are free but you plan to change that at some point. (The Play Store management dashboards probably make it straightforward to grandfather everyone who started with the beta into free updates for life or something like that.)

I was wondering if you can freely customize the system (install software like a normal Linux Desktop OS) and checked, and I found a curious detail ( https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote ):

> NPU (Neural Processing Unit) Capabilities: * Neural network acceleration engine with processing performance of up to 0.8 TOPS; * Supports integer 8 and integer 16 convolution operations; * Supports the following deep learning frameworks: TensorFlow, TF-lite, Pytorch, Caffe, ONNX, MXNet, Keras, Darknet

Very odd for an EPD tablet!

The modularity of the Framework laptop comes to mind, maybe one day, we’ll see.

So... An eInk laptop wouldn't be for media. It'd be a different product with different pros/cons. Easier on the eyes. Better in sunlight. Easier on battery. Quite usable for reading, emails, code and any "mostly text" use.

To the OP's original point "why doesn't this just exist..." IMO, it could, but it would need to be a different product class. Just sticking the monitor onto a windows machine isn't good enough. It needs its apps/etc. The market is probably much smaller than the phone/tablet and laptop/desktop markets. Perhaps potential vendors don't think it's big enough to support the necessary OS, apps & such.

My view, you are describing the Kindle.

Amazon sees the same potential - and risk - and has been quietly iterating for over a decade in the segment.

If you want to go seriously explore it as a product, I’d start with a deep dive study there and develop a few theories how you think you could be different enough to blow it wide open.

It needs to be significantly cheaper than current monitors to make business sense.

Remember, it's not about the objective value of the device. It's the perceived value that matters.

Perhaps this might be relevant: https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/.

> It needs its apps

Out of experience: not really.

The thing it doesn't needs is apps.

Not ready for primetime? Is it the button on the side of the display so that a user can manually refresh it?

> Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.

In a word: yes. But I was 10 or 11 years old before we had a color TV.

how does this criticism not apply to monitors or tablets, which boox already makes?

Yeah, a lot of negative comments, from people coming up with all sorts of multimedia use cases, when there is clearly a market gap and plenty of people that want work houses without multimedia capability.

I would LOVE a laptop that ran linux well and had an eink screen. I'd buy it today.

1% is 1.6 million units per year that's a billion dollar company

I doubt an lcd display in a laptop costs a vendor more than $10. So that would make it a 16 million dollar company. If a E-Ink display costs $100, it would still only be a 160 million dollar company...

a good display is several hundred dollars. Market valuation does not equal to annual sales. A niche notebook like this can be sold at higher premium. The idea would be to offer notebook not the display.

Try reducing your screen's refresh rate to mimic that of an eInk display. Interacting with the machine becomes a horrible chore. Every input feels laggy and sluggish. It's hard to control the pointer. Even at 30Hz it becomes very difficult to focus on the actual tasks because the computer doesn't seem to respond to your commands.

What mouse? The use case I have for an EPD is entirely terminal-based.

That's a fair use-case but I suspect it's a _very rare_ one, which probably answers the initial question:

> how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?

How many software developers and authors are there? Time was when 100,000 units a year was enough to make a highly successful company.

When did we decide that only trillion dollar companies were worth considering? At that point we lose economies of scale and get into rent seeking. We'd all be much better off with a hundred $xxB companies than one or two $xT companies.

How many developers and authors have a workflow that doesn't include a GUI with a pointer?

I for one would not like to go back to terminal-only. There's a lot to be gained from decent graphical interfaces, and having them smooth makes working on them more pleasing, which reduces my stress and allows me to be more productive.

LCDs of the 1990s had ghosting, and this was solved with pointer trails and other accessibility features, like disabling animations. People should be able to make the choice of outdoor visibility versus update smoothness.

Outdoor visibility can be solved with a brighter screen.

I have worked under bright summer sunlight on my Air whose screen is 400 nits. It was not comfortable but it was workable. The M1(Max|Pro) laptops are "up to 1000 nits sustained (full-screen) brightness, 1600 nits peak brightness". Surely that would work well enough outside, although I haven't tried it.

No amount of trickery like pointer trails will make up for the fact that the pointer lags behind the input by a very noticeable amount. It's like trying to play a musical instrument with 200ms latency. You'll get distracted and lose your tempo and timing. Or at least I would, and I suspect the vast majority of computer users, pro or otherwise, would as well. This should again answer the original question:

> how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?

Outdoor visibility can be solved with a brighter screen.

To an extent, but eye strain is reduced quite a bit when surfaces are front-lit by the environment rather than back-lit by a uniform light.

No amount of trickery like pointer trails will make up for the fact that the pointer lags behind the input by a very noticeable amount.

As I understand it, small parts of an e-ink screen can be updated very quickly, but sacrificing grayscale accuracy and glitchiness. Either way, I'd 100% buy an e-ink laptop with specs comparable to current developer laptops, so how many people does it take to make a market for that?

Fair points, and I'd love to find that out. Perhaps start lobbying with one of the existing laptop manufacturers? They might do some market research to understand if there is an actual market for it.

> I'd 100% buy an e-ink laptop > how many people does it take to make a market for that?

I honestly have no idea but my guess is, more than one. Probably _a lot_ more. Not only the company would need to sell the first batch but they'd have to keep improving on it, selling more and getting them replaced constantly, otherwise it would become vapourware after the first (few) iterations. If the first iteration is not great, at least some users will hold off and think twice about getting the second. If it's not good enough for a lot of the users, I suspect it would go totally bust after the second iteration.

It's not just the cost of the hardware either, they would likely need to solve drivers, and if it's going to be a dev laptop, they'd at least need to support both Linux and Windows. This is no small feat.

Sure, they could try to offload drivers and software to the display manufacturer, but now you'd have to prove to them that there's a market worth pursuing as well.

Hard sell, but a laptop with a reversible 2-1 screen, one side OLED, and one e-ink, would probably be a winner.

Or something like the framework laptop, but with a plugable/ unplaggable screen, and you switch as needed.

I would buy one. Espacially on travel, where the prospect of working outside in nature, and having a one week battery life would be fantastic for work.

> a laptop with a reversible 2-1 screen

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus has an E-Ink display on the outer side - but I think it remains an outer side.

Yes, that's the deal breaker. If I can't type with the keyboard, or if I have to add some additional keyboard for mobility, it gets very cluncky.

At the same time, there have been so many convertible tablet/laptop systems that either have the pivot at the bottom center of the screen or less commonly a screen that turns over between two arms on the sides that it's hard to believe someone couldn't do the same with a two-sided screen enclosure.

I've read previously on HN that there's one company with a stranglehold on the e-ink patent and so the prices are artificially high for the screens. This probably would make a e-ink laptop or tablet more expensive than it should be.

But yes, I agree. I've wanted an e-ink laptop for working outside for years.

We saw the same trajectory with high refresh rate displays. Back in the CRT days, you could set your display to 200+Hz on some monitors, 85Hz was common, and 72Hz was the minimum. At the same time, you had devices with reflective LCDs that worked outside.

Then LCD monitors came along, and suddenly we went from 1600x1200@75Hz to 1280x1024@60Hz. Anyone who complained was placed in nutjob territory -- "you can't see more than 24fps", "human reaction time is over 100ms", "you're holding it wrong", etc. Then, finally, high refresh rates became common, because they are objectively and subjectively superior.

Eink will go through a similar process of nerd shaming as the patents expire and new competitors emerge, but eventually outdoor capable displays will also become a normal, acceptable option.

> Eink will go through a similar process of nerd shaming as the patents expire and new competitors emerge, but eventually outdoor capable displays will also become a normal, acceptable option.

Which patents? How will any company get past G = τ / γ ? You do realize that in the last 30 years of development in electrophoretics, the update time has remained around 700ms right? Those who do better like Clearink do it by sacrificing bistability.

Please see my comment history, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740452#28746303 , for why I strongly doubt your claims. I don't see how your observations about LCD apply to electrophoresis, unless there's some new physics that you're describing.

> I've read previously on HN that there's one company with a stranglehold on the e-ink patent and so the prices are artificially high for the screens.

I wouldn't believe such extreme claims without any evidence. Please see my comment history for my repeated attempts to get to the bottom of this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740452#28746303

It would be expensive and mouse cursors are not the most enjoyable with these things. You really have to crank the speed to use a mouse cursor without extreme frustration on eInk and that comes with a huge quality loss. I imagine most people need color for certain tasks even if it's not accurate like making a PowerPoint or something. For most people I think it would be more of a frustration than a help when running Windows.

Boox and others like Boyue do make Android eInk tablets which are pretty flexible. You don't need a mouse either which solves that problem. Very good for reading PDFs. Termux and a good text editor like Emacs or Vim can let you get some work done.

> mouse cursors

Touchscreen and keyboard commands. I use those systems this way and efficacy is high.

> You really have to crank the speed to use a mouse cursor ... and that comes with a huge quality loss

You must mean, "use the A2 mode". Not really, on the contrary: on GU (Grayscale Update) they mouse cursor will leave a trail that can be more helpful than an annoyance.

Yeah, I retried it directly connecting a mouse to my Note Air and it's better than I remember. I think before I tried a screen sharing app with it connected to a PC and maybe that's why I thought it was so bad.

The old OLPC laptop had a weird screen which kind of became a black and white e-ink screen when the brightness got turned all the way down, and was a quite normal colour screen otherwise. No clue how it was made though, and if there has been any further work in that direction.

If you're curious about this, it's an interesting story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi and I still want a device with one

The model number is the XO-1 in case anyone wants to investigate.

I don't understand your post. First you state that you don't understand how there isn't a market for a laptop using this screen, then you underline that there is a huge market out there (somehow "typical ThinkPad users", who apparently don't care about color or anything else, and just want to read and write), and then you ask why these things don't sell much and if the problem is that the device is lackluster compared to a normal cheap LCD display.

Have you looked at these displays in use? They're slow, flickery, have low contrast, and cost absurd money. They're still desperately trying to crawl out of the "enthusiast / early adopter" stage. I really want one. Everyone really wants one. But nobody wants the overpriced rubbish the current generation is.

No colour. I want an e-ink with syntax highlighting. This is great and all, but even 16 base colours would go a long, long way. Oh also, would be nice if it were built into a MBP and I could switch between monitor types quickly, but I know that's a pipedream.

I'm currently using (on a color LCD) a syntax highlighting theme that uses about 4 shades of gray, plus typographic differentiation. It would look fine on an e-ink screen.

What you _can_ do, is buy the boox lumi, a 13 inch Android e-unk tablet. Then get a Bluetooth keyboard folio for it. You now essentially have a 13 inch laptop chromebook.

The OLPC had a dual-mode display that worked great for reading both indoors and out. For some reason nobody has since picked up on this idea.

http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/screen/olpc_xo_resolution_d...

The OLPC used a transflective LCD. Basically, the low power mode was a grayscale LCD with the backlight turned off. The background was a reflective surface that reflected enough light to give a, rather low contrast, image.

>Allows me to actually work outside!!!

This can also be achieved with a transflective panel.

Edit: Here's one retrofitted to a thinkpad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuegrU_kIq8

Yeah, this is the real answer to the "outside" use case.

Lots of fitness smartwatches have them, and they're awesome. Once you walk outside there's clearly a reduced color gamut, but other than that, everything else (fps, etc) remains the same, and the screen is perfectly usable.

Can't wait until other niche mobile devices come out with this tech (tablets, phones, laptops).

I work on a beach a lot. Laser printer costs $100 and paper is like 0.01 cents. Probably better usability.

This thing is not hardened for outdoor use. I dont think it would work in cafe. If it drops on floor, liquids, sand, salty water....

I really would love one of these for the 2D AutoCAD work I do which mostly involves electrical diagrams and 2D building layouts for fire / gas alarm systems. One of the main problems I see is the finite lifespan of an E-Ink display vs traditional monitors. Not to say the old 1440P TN displays I use at work will last forever, but I'm not sure an E-Ink display having to refresh constantly for 8 hours a day of work will hold up nearly as long.

A lot of counterpoints here, how about a half normal display, half e-ink? Left side of the monitor is LCD m, and the right side is e-ink. Might be a bit cramped for some use cases, might work for others. Or, how about a rollable, flexible OLED that can dynamically roll out and cover more and more of the e-ink display, so that you could roll out the OLED when needed, or tuck it in when you want full e-ink?

If you just want it for reading, you could buy a $200 laptop and use this as an external display. If you're not running hot you could leave your laptop closed inside a backpack or case while you used it. Still kind of fiddly but it sounds good to me.

I would prefer a modular laptop where I can swap between OLED and liquid paper screens. Just snap another screen before going to work in a park.

Does the framework laptop have a modular display option?

No I specifically ask this to one of the founders and the display is not customizable unlike the rest.

You get the reflective non matte display and according there were no plans for a matte or EPD option.

You expect anything from a market that till very recently sold 768p displays and hdds?

Lenovo ThinkBook has an eink screen. Not exclusively, but works quite well.

They could partner with framework to offer the one in their marketplace.

I did that in the old days with a repurposed kindle.

patents if i recall.

a netbook style, or even like old kindle keyboard sized up would be pleasant.

eInk Inc. levies giant patent royalties on eInk screen manufacturers.

Plus

There are no 8 bit eInk controllers

A little slow? I was pretty amazed by how fast it is in that video. I haven't kept up with E-Ink technology, but I own an old Kindle and it takes it 0.5-1s to refresh, but that 13.3" display is keeping up with finger gestures when scrolling.

Yes it would suck for watching movies, but it seems to be really useful for anything involving text, e.g. i.e. a secondary monitor to read documentation on, or even program on. I suppose the lag in text input being updated might be more distracting than when using it purely for reading.

Fast for eink, but also absolutely terrible ghosting, which makes the speed considerably less impressive considering how straining it looks. What's the point of a fairly quick response to screen updates when you have to press the manual refresh button in order to read what's on it?

I spend many hours of text editing / word processing on an Onyx Boox Max2, 13.3'', and have no problem with ghosting. It depends on the so-called "waveform", or firmware level algorithms for dot switching (and it's probably using Regal, though I am not sure about the details): I would say really almost-zero problems with text rendering (and update).

I haven't used this product, but if you look at the linked YouTube video starting at around 11 minutes you can see it going from "ghosting" that's hardly noticeable when reading an article, to really noticeable ghosting and lower resolution (but much faster refresh rate) in the "video mode". If you're watching a video presumably the "ghosting" would all mush together.

E.g. at 11m47s[1] the reviewer is in the text mode, hasn't pressed the manual refresh button, and when I pause the video the text doesn't seem to have any visible artifacts (maybe some for around half a second, until the image "settles"?).

I agree that it would suck for a lot of applications, but as a secondary screen to read text/documentation, or even watch the scrolling output from a CI system this seems amazing.

Have you used this display in person? Is it worse than it seems to be in that video? If so for what (if any/all) modes and use-cases?

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBfWkxOfUfQ#t=11m47s

There's "fast" mode. https://youtu.be/oBfWkxOfUfQ?t=994

Image quality goes down, but I was very very very impressed...

for some reason, from the video, screen doesn't feel the same quality as other e-ink readers like kindle.

edit: I mean, kindle videos feel like you are reading a real paper, while here feels like you are in an actual screen.

Maybe I haven't kept up with the eink market but this seems super impressive especially the video part around 14:33. I have a Remarkable and it's pretty slow to switch pages but I assume that's to prevent ghosting. With a little bit of computer vision magic, they might be able to add a content aware feature that swaps the modes based on what's being displayed.

https://youtu.be/oBfWkxOfUfQ?t=873

I have a Boox Note and the excessive screen refreshes are really annoying there as well. But I'm impressed by the part in the demo where they show the playing of a video, this works pretty smoothly and I don't see any flickering.

Now I'm wondering why those screen refreshes in 'normal' apps are needed? Is this just some artifact because the apps were written for normal displays and haven't been adjusted for e-ink?

This is pretty on par for e-ink at the moment. Since the pixels are physical material, there is the mechanical movement time that has to be taken into account.

try this https://jvod.300hu.com/vod/product/0cecde96-786d-418d-a5b7-3...

I own a Boox Note Air 2.

Bought it when I was looking for a large screen eReader for the technical epubs and pdfs I’ve amassed over the years that require a big screen (big pages on the pdfs)

pros and cons of this company are pretty clear

Pros are that they have large eReaders and support any file format

They also run android so if you use an app like Pocket or an RSS feed to read articles, they work well enough

Cons:

The company’s documentation is more or less broken. Google how to fix something and their docs are missing, outdated, and often in broken english.

The screen itself is big but slow to refresh and in most modes leaves traces of the previous pages. They have a manual button to full refresh the page, but a user shouldn’t have to do that.

It’s not a certified android device so you have to jump through a bunch of somewhat insecure hoops to get the play store installed and log in.

Privacy: There privacy statement basically says “lol we promise to be private k?” So I want to run this thing through wireshark to see how true that is. My only skepticism is that it’s a Chinese company, and that might not be fair, but given the information I have on my device it would be good to confirm.

All that said, they have a color eInk screen that’s coming out soon that looks wonderful.

This is the sort of device you either replace the OS, or put on a segregated network.

I use NetGuard on mine to prevent it from phoning home, and restrict internet connections to Firefox and a couple of other apps that I trust. I also mostly use mine with wifi off, since it's an ereader/notetaking device that doesn't need to constantly drain battery via wireless internet.

I am a little nervous about the trustworthiness of Onyx, but at the same time... I don't really trust my smart TV, or my old Kindle, or visiting friend's Windows laptops either. So I guess it's kinda moot.

It’s not moot. Choose devices with FLOSS like https://pine64.org/pinenote.

What is Onyx? I didn’t see that mentioned.

Onyx is the (parent?) company that produces Boox devices. I don't truly understand the hierarchy, the names seem to be used interchangably.

> insecure

Compared to...running Play Services? Doubt.

security, privacy, and anonymity are separate concepts

$800 to pre-order. (Corrected: $1800 for the pre-order, $800 for the smaller one)

E-ink is one of those great technologies that seems like it has potential but won't "arrive" until after the patents all expire.

>it has potential but won't "arrive" until after the patents all expire

This is somewhat of a misconception. The high cost today has nothing to do with patents anymore, for the most part, though that' still a speedbump. It getting good yields in the fabs for the e-ink films that's the problem, and that's where e-ink has the secret sauce and why others can't compete even though they know how it works.

It's like saying TSMC's 3nm won't get any traction until it's patents expire, while the true vale comes form the fact that only they can get that process to scale profitably and their competition can't, even though they have access to the same tech and materials and $$$ funds.

So, I'm sure there are competitors who can replicate the e-ink tech. But to fab it profitably at that scale? Nope.

I would love to be a fly on the wall when the unit price calculation for some high tech item is made. I wonder if it just goes like “component x + y + margin%”… what those components are in stuff like processors, screens etc must be so interesting!

It cost us $X billion to set up the line, materials, marketing etc. We expect to sell $Y quantity. Price = $X / $Y.

Or more usually, it seems: "We think we can get $N for it; so if we can make it for $N/10 we'll announce production and find a manufacturing partner to make them for us on credit."

> It getting good yields in the fabs for the e-ink films that's the problem

There is a decent market for rigid (heavy) 20-30" ~100 dpi panels as desktop monitors. Lowering the pixel density would certainly increase the yield, as would the rigid back. There is a high premium for light panels for e-readers and portables, but for use as a desktop monitor, we can deal with a lot more weight and, since we see them from further away, we can deal with lower densities.

From where I sit, it's hard to tell whether my laptop has a high-density screen or a more normal 1080 one.

I'd love to have one, but I wouldn't even consider it if it's twice as expensive as a 4K HDR 120Hz LCD monitor.

>There is a decent market for rigid (heavy) 20-30" ~100 dpi panels as desktop monitors.

Do you have a source for these claims?

Looking at what seels well today, and what most average consumers go for, it's bigger screens with high pixel density. Low pixel density displays are mostly found in bottom of the barrel, discount bin products whith poor margins for their manufacturers, so the market has already spoken with their money in this regard and separated the winners from the losers.

So I think, that market you think of, exists only for you.

>Lowering the pixel density would certainly increase the yield

That's not how yealds work here. Small display sizes gives you good yealds and affordable price. That's why you mostly see them on electronic shelf labels and ebook readers.

That's why large e-ink displays, like the remarkable tablet, are so expensive.

> Do you have a source for these claims?

No. There are no products in this space that can compete with the midrange LCD displays.

> So I think, that market you think of, exists only for you.

I'm sure Boox would be happy to be able to sell a 24" 1920x1200 display for $200, if they had an adequate supply of panels.

> That's not how yealds work here.

If you increase feature size, you, usually, have fewer defects. A 20" 200 dpi panel has 4 times more places where something could go wrong than a 100 dpi one, and its features would be more prone to fail for defects the same size. Lower resolution should decrease the areal density of detectable defects because the defects would be less likely to disable the pixel. Unless I'm completely wrong and the kind of defect on e-ink panels is completely different than defects on ICs and PCBs.

Yield for smaller displays works differently - areal density of defects being the same, a smaller panel has a smaller chance of having a defect.

> That's why large e-ink displays, like the remarkable tablet, are so expensive.

The Remarkable is a high density display and they sell it for the price people are willing to pay.

>No. There are no products in this space that can compete with the midrange LCD displays.

Then how can you make such claims? You're just blowing smoke at this point. My take: The are no such products because nobody would buy them, that's why nobody makes them.

If you think the market is wrong, and there's such a huge demand waiting for a product that doesn't yet exist, why not put your money where your mouth is and go all-in funding such a product? If you're right, you'd get rich. Or you're actually wrong, and it will flop massively. Which one is it?

>Yield for smaller displays works differently - areal density of defects being the same, a smaller panel has a smaller chance of having a defect.

Yeah, that's why cutting the e-ink film into smaller displays gets you better yields, since you can throw away the smaller sections with the defects, instead of discarding larger ones, and lower the costs, which, like I said previously, is why you mostly see smaller e-ink displays based products, and why the ones with large screens are so expensive.

>A 20" 200 dpi panel has 4 times more places where something could go wrong than a 100 dpi one

Genuine question: do you have any industry experience working with e-ink displays, or are you just making uninformed assumptions for the sake of an armchair argument? As, that's not how yields scale in e-ink film. Source: I worked designing devices with e-ink displays.

> Genuine question: do you have any industry experience working with e-ink displays

No. I’m doing math. A 200dpi panel has 4 times more components per area than a 100dpi one. You can check it, if you are not sure.

Do you have experience with e-ink panel manufacture?

>No. I’m doing math. A 200dpi panel has 4 times more components per area than a 100dpi one. You can check it, if you are not sure.

Defect rates don't scale linearly to density IRL as you assume, and the type of defects changes as well. This is not the same as semiconductor manufacturing though plenty of parallels can be drawn.

>Do you have experience with e-ink panel manufacture?

I have deep insight in this industry due to my development experience with this tech. So the manufacturers tutor us on the nitty gritty details of the tech which stem from the manufacturing limitations, as my employers are making expensive purchases from them.

Of course, you are free to believe that I'm wrong and your kindergarten math is the answer to a profitable product to which the industry are completely oblivious too.

Rumor I heard from someone in the industry is that the patents have expired, but now the original holder pressures the few fabs to refuse work from competitors or get black balled.

As a results it’s extremely hard for new people to enter the industry and the original e-ink people have zero interest in actually building stuff vs. just leveraging this kind of power to screw others and keep margins high.

Seems bonkers to me. If they'd been more permissive with licensing the tech, they'd have made a lot more money, advanced the tech, and they could have exploited spin off. The way it was handled seems petty and small minded in a stupid and greedy way.

Might be motivated by FOMO. Fear is a bad advisor <edit>sometimes</edit>.

This is an interesting old thread about einks business model and parents:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779

Some of the early parents have expired but there are a lot of them…

Came here to link to this thread. Also make sure to check out the color e-ink displays by Clearink that the top comment mentions. They are quite impressive. (Unfortunately, I recently heard from the people behind the Supernote tablet that those displays by Clearink are very low in contrast and therefore require lots of ambient light. There goes the dream of color e-ink displays…)

$800 to preorder the smaller 13in one. The other one (25.3in as in the title) is $1800

Is it expensive because of the parents or because it's not cheap to create a big sized e-ink display? I mean small e-ink displays for ebook readers or e-ink tablets are quite affordable these days.

The $800 model has an "Add to Cart" button for me (in Germany). The 25.3 model shows "Pre-order".

"BOOX Mira Series only supports direct mail from China. And US, EU and UK warehouses are not supported for shipping. Some countries may levy tariffs on the imported goods. For the amount of tariffs, please consult the local customs department."

Given the prices of e-ink displays in general, this is not too bad. Still outrageous though.

The rival here is the Dasung 25.3" model, currently waiting for a new batch:

https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink...

I'd love to hear from anyone who's worked with a monitor like this.

I got the smaller Dasung about half a year ago, I posted a comment about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429093

Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Thanks!

* Do you use it as your main daily monitor?

* I find screen time quite addictive (which is one reason why I am on HN so much). Do you notice any difference from this perspective when using an eink screen?

* Has the screen quality degraded over time?

* How big a difference has it made to your life?

Let's see:

* I use it daily, but really only for my shell, including vim for coding/writing configs. Depends on the day, sometimes I spent more time in the shell than in the browser, sometimes it's mostly browser (and thus plain old screen, not E-Ink).

* I think that's hard to say since my main screen is so much larger. I did notice a difference in the evening between a tablet with Youtube vs a Kindle with a newspaper or a book. Although I do remember one or two evenings where I turned off the main screen and only used the E-Ink screen - I think there it helps with going to sleep later due to less blue light.

* I haven't noticed any degradation so far.

* I like it. I've barely had problems with eye strain anymore and eye strain was the main motivation for getting it. It's also just a bit larger than my laptop, so it's great when I travel somewhere where I'll use my laptop a lot since I'll get a second screen on the go/for the hotel room/etc.

I can't speak to e-ink but regarding screen time addiction, I used Gray-Switch (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vegardit.g...) to turn my phone display black and white, and immediately my phone use decreased by 66%.

I do this too on my iPhone - like all the really good iPhone settings, it’s an accessibility option, under Display -> Color Filters. You can also set up the “accessibility shortcut” so triple-clicking the side button enables or disables it.

It really reduces the intensity of the phone - you never realize just how garish the color choices are for almost every app out there until you see it in B&W.

This is a genius idea, I'm trying it out now. Had an iPhone for years and never had a clue about this feature. Thank you.

Thanks for sharing this.

This is now built in to newer versions of Android (I think 11+, and AppleOS may also have it).

where would the settings for that be? accessibility?

On my phone it's Settings => Display => LiveDisplay => Reading mode ("Grayscale mode for long-term reading"). I can also add a reading mode toggle button to the quick settings in the notification bar.

The search box in Settings will probably find it if you search for gray or reading.

This is on LineageOS 18 (Android 11), though I recall it being mentioned in some Google events/announcements so I'm 99% sure it's a core Android feature and not something specific to LOS.

thanks

They need OLED.

Put the transparent OLED layer on top of the E-ink.

Now you can use E-ink for your static content or the OLED when you need dynamic content.

E-ink saves a lot of the OLED burn-in (which is at it's worst with white background) while OLED gives the ability to do more/better colors and fast response times.

I couldn't (easily) find information about refresh rates and such, what I want is to know if this is usable for coding. Frankly I'm down to go with lower stats for this, because I so want to be able to use a computer with just natural light.

If anybody has been doing this I'd love to read about your experience!

Might be a bit of a struggle without syntax highlighting? Contrast won't get you very far.

You might be surprised how far contrast (and cursive, bold, etc) can get you. Eg: https://github.com/fxn/vim-monochrome

edit: Also, and probably a lot more controversial, code structure matters a lot. No syntax highlighting will save you if your code consists of opaque blocks of text.

I'll admit that that example did more than I expected with the limited tools it has, but it is still rather far from the things full color highlighting can do.

You can, indeed, do a lot without colors. I actually find it a lot less distracting to have various shades of the same color and highlight with bold, italics, and a couple shades of gray. The other day I was wondering if I could add some non-ascii chars to htop's monochrome mode (looked like a pain, will pick it up later) to explore textures instead of colors.

I remember using Think Pascal on the Apple II (too slow to be of any use) but it did a great job of highlighting the structure of the program under the source code. This is what I want syntax/semantic highlighting to do for me.

These screens are higher resolution and can have multiple shades of gray, which is much more than what those pioneers had to communicate with their users.

Horrendously expensive though.

I remember having a chat with Andrew Gerrand at some Go conference, about how syntax highlighting is mostly done wrong, we just got used to it being that way. It's not like we colour words in a sentence based on their type, but we do enjoy tools highlighting misspelled words or grammatical errors.

In my experience syntax highlighting as a tool mostly help with certain classes of errors (e.g unclosed string or comment), not visually tokenising text for me to understand.

I've seen some such uncoloured theme (nofrils) that would de-emphasise either comments or code, and you could toggle between the two states, which I found quite useful in nicely commented files:

https://robertmeta.com/posts/syntax-highlighting-off/

There are a bunch of learnings and a couple of links to references in that article. Ironically one of the most prevalent I experienced was this one, which I found very odd because picking a colorscheme for my $EDITOR is quite literally a choice that would affect only myself:

> People on the internet will get very angry at you if you tell them you don’t like syntax highlighting. VERY ANGRY.

Some of these vim "color"schemes:

    https://github.com/robertmeta/nofrils
    https://github.com/clinstid/eink.vim
    https://github.com/ikaros/smpl-vim

They pair well with vim-airline's "raven" theme.

> It's not like we colour words in a sentence based on their type,

All of today's human languages were developed in a time without computers, pens (and their predecessors) have trouble switching ink color for every word. If goose quills and inkwells could change color as easily as computer monitors, I bet there would have been at least a few languages that use color to denote meaning.

Somewhat tangential: but I love the LiquidHaskell demos, mostly because they show what would be possible if our tools would just be a tiny bit smarter.

Example:

    1. Goto here: http://goto.ucsd.edu:8090/index.html#?demo=Order.hs
    2. Run Check, it should turn green
    3. Break the code, e.g. turn around the >= sign in line 147
    4. Run Check again, it will turn red and highlight line 147 and 148

What happened here?

We told the compiler that elements in an ordered list will be in increasing order (l.119). Now the compiler is able to check that constraint and by turning around the comparison we violated the it.

Ie by telling the compiler a tiny bit about our goals (have ordered lists) it is now able to check that our algorithm is correct.

That example is a little misleading though, since it's using a shade of blue for comments and strings.

But in general, I'd agree, I've been using a monochrome color scheme for a few weeks (although mostly for the novelty) and it's definitely usable. When given the choice, I will use a full-color one though.

Good point. Here's the same image desaturated: https://i.imgur.com/jBCZGEO.png (GIMP -> Desaturate -> Luminance)

I feel like it does not really lose anything in grayscale.

Bonus: On a eInk display black on white is probably nicer: https://i.imgur.com/99DSGrV.png

(Does Imgur allow direct links to images?)

My favorite part of that example is the language it's written in :) I'm sold!

I had to look that up ... is that Euphoria?

As stated above, I think that how the code is structured also heavily influences readability. Maybe even more than syntax highlighting.

Case in point: I was fortunate enough to work on a Haskell project some time ago ... and one of my colleagues from another team at asked me how I manage to make my code look that concise. No secret there, it is just pretty easy if the language is that expressive.

> I had to look that up ... is that Euphoria?

It's Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org/), but wow, Euphoria looks pretty slick too! https://www.rapideuphoria.com/

Ah ... I could have known that ... some of the Haskell enthusiasts around here actually moved on to Elixir some time ago.

I don't care about syntax highlighting, being coding in black and white terminal for a really long time. I care more about screen to be more like paper than screen. LED color screen really hurts my eyes. Coding in natural light on paper would be much better.

I enjoyed using my OLPC XO-1 for writing, programming, terminal usage, web browsing, etc. whilst sat outside on a sunny day. Was certainly a contrast to 'phone screens, which were barely visible, even with a backlight and shielded under a hand!

(The XO-1 uses a different display technology to these e-ink monitors, but the result is similar: a high-resolution greyscale display, lit externally)

While not coding per se, I write fiction on my Boox Note 2 in Wordgrinder through Termux and it’s pretty great (especially if I increase the refresh rate). And that’s an older slower device!

I can't wait until this reaches maturity to get a 11" or so sub-notebook which is quiet, low energy, with a good keyboard for reading and writing (text/code editing, emails, PDF reading of scientific papers).

Looked into this a couple of years ago and it was too early, now one could almost design & build that.

The Boox tablets are full android devices and support USB-C connectivity and Bluetooth for keyboards. They even have a clamshell keyboard case/attachment for sale that I have and use with my Note 2

Termux + Termux.Styling set to Black on White is surprisingly powerful, and works better than I expected. Adjusting the refresh rate helps too.

Can it talk to my laptop via bluetooth? That would be rad. I'd use it outdoors, with my laptop running but still folded in my bag.

In what way? It’s got Bluetooth and can do anything an android device can :)

If there’s something specific you have in mind I can give it a try?

Yes please! I just want to know if such a screen can serve as the UI (including touch input from the user) for a laptop that's folded and put away somewhere nearby.

Ah! I'll have a look and see what Android apps will do that, if any, and give it a try! Send me an email (in my profile) and I'll let you know how I go in the next day or two?

It's 100% possible though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaEnd4VzYZM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k4HHOe56K8

And these are both older devices with older software. That Deep Guide one is the best demonstration!

A comment on that video is relevant:

> just tried and it works perfectly on my note2. The good thing I just realised is that you can use the touch screen to control as a mouse on note2, which makes the experience even better!

Supports touch/keyboard input too; and on the Note 2 :)

You can already get a 10 or 13" eInk Android tablet and do all that already. Just need to bring your own keyboard.

> PDF reading of scientific papers

Unless you have perfect eyesight, at 11" those types of documents won't be a pleasant reading experience. I'm in the market for a good e-ink tablet to fulfill that role, but I don't consider current offerings quite there yet (maybe I have too many criteria in mind, like price, specs, supporting software, hackable if company goes bust, etc).

>Onyx Boox is a brand of e-book reader produced by Onyx International Inc, based in China

China is the only country innovating right now. The rest of the world really needs to start building combined manufacturing and innovation hubs like Shenzhen.

Isn't Onyx one of the more famous GPL violators? Maybe innovation is easier when you let others do the R&D and you just use it.

What is the lifespan of high refresh e-ink devices such as this monitor? Is it measured in a billion refreshes for example? E-ink displays have been slow to update but like this monitor there are a bunch of e-ink tablets which even allow you to watch videos and play games. In my head it feels like it detoriate the device faster.

It will deteriorate relatively quickly if you're using it primarily to watch video. Of the three vendors of e-ink monitors (Boox, Dasung, Waveshare), I believe only Waveshare is clear about this in their support documents ("The e-Paper display cannot work as common LCD displays, the lifetime of the e-Paper display is short and it is related to the update times. You cannot use e-Paper to display video for a long time, which will shorten the lifetime of the e-Paper display.").

With e-ink, the dots do not fail right away; the contrast deteriorates around the 10 million update mark.

> lifespan

The declared generic (update frequency agnostic) lifespan for E-Ink displays a few years ago was:

10 million switches per dot

At 30 switches per second for video playback (which this device supports), a lifetime of 10m switches would be gone in around 93 hours.

That would be, of course, if for 93 hours one played a 30Hz flashing B-W-B-W... The average dot switch, on a binary (B/W) threshold, on normal video, is probably well less than every second. A value between 1'000 and 10'000 hours is more realistic. The technology was not born for this use.

Nonetheless, the lifetime values one can find do not seem to be precise and reliable (that of 10 million is one piece of reported official information and not the only one). Having tests would be better, I am not sure how much these speculations can be trusted. Anyway, given the presence of EPD based smartphones in the market, together with the monitors, information will have to come out of users' experience.

How does this compare with the Dasung Paperlike 25.3? Looks like the same E-ink display, but perhaps different driver?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGblzUc_Z1I

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-253-the-first-2...

Interesting limitation listed on their site: "AMD GPUs are not supported for now."

Could it use Nvidia G-sync somehow?

I adore Boox. My Note 2 is amazing (and keeps getting better and faster note-taking with firmware updates every few months).

I’ve ordered a Mira, the 13.3” one, which I think is a more useful size for the type of documents and uses e-ink has.

This is super cool though!

Their devices look really neat, but I don't think I can bring myself to buy one until they resolve their GPL violations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/fz4yka/max3_revi...

Maybe someone can convince Naomi Wu to go visit their office in person like she did for Umidigi.

I saw the original video on the Twitters, but didn't check out the followup until now. I'm thrilled that her visit worked and that the files were posted!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

My dad has bought the 25.3'' E ink monitor from Dasung. From what he tells, it does not have a backlight and is itself to dark for his taste outside of middle of the day. Maybe it will be better during summer or in bright condition but sitting further away from these devices may require more than just reflectiveness for some users.

That's kinda the point of these things, to not be backlit; you're supposed to provide the needed amount of light yourself.

> and is itself to dark for his taste outside of middle of the day.

Indeed, from the description it sounds like their work setup doesn't have enough ambient light for confortable reading conditions.

Contrast ratio of E Ink is like 10:1. I don't know exactly how it compares but backlit LCD is approx 1k:1, OLED is 1m:1 in contrast(pun intended).

You can't compare the contrast of an emissive (backlit LCD/OLED) and a reflective (eInk) display.

Put your OLED display in direct sunlight on a bright summer day and you will get effectively get no contrast at all, the screen will reflect so much sunlight that your puny LEDs won't do much of a difference. Backlit LCDs will get some weak contrast because the backpanel is a bit reflective, but eInk displays will always be 10:1 because they use ambiant light instead of competing with it.

These ridiculously high contrast ratios of OLED displays only take into account emitted light and only make sense in a dark room, or VR headset.

10:1 is nevertheless quite low. Black is really dark grey, and white is light grey. Having bad eyesight, I find e-ink displays too straining to use in most lighting conditions.

> Put your OLED display in direct sunlight on a bright summer day and you will get effectively get no contrast at all,

Recent iPhone oleds are dull but usable in direct sunlight.

Which brings us back to another thread, brightness.

Freakin' OLEDs are brighter than the bloody sun!!! The sun! I half expect my face to get sunburned looking at them!

It’s certainly not, not even close. Try this: set your brightness to maximum, put it in the direction of the sun and use another device to take a photo of them both.

It is as if the sun has become one with my PDA.

Huh, weird. I got the small Dasung with a backlight, but I almost never use the backlight since avoiding that is one of the reasons I did get an E-Ink screen in the first place. You do need the room to be somewhat well lit, so in the mornings and evenings I'll turn on the overhead lights. Probably slightly harder to read than a book since the background isn't bleached white, but it's close-ish.

I think the difference in this setup is that you sit further away from the large screen than from the small one. And then, it becomes more of an issue. I haven't seen it myself though, only hearsay.

Edit: Also, you are probably not in your late fifties. Eye-sight under low-light definitely decreases with age.

eInk is not transparent, you canno have backlight. It's objective is to emulate ink on paper.

It might be true you cannot have backlight, but for sure you can have front light. My ~7 years old Kindle paperwhite has that.

I guess that may be what I meant, i.e second 24 of the video.

Here are my problems with such devices. I own an Onyx Boox 3 for a year now, I guess I qualify.

1) these screens still have bad contrast compared to a printed page at the same DPI. They mostly compare to yellowed dog-eared 50-year-old books. The dots are also rather fuzzy, so not really comparable to what you get in a decent LCD at the same density.

2) if it comes to desktop use, no OS/environment except classic MacOS up to version 8 and maybe GEM gives a shit about monochrome displays, especially those where only 1-bit colors look decent (so Windows 3.11 would likely count too). On DEs which you can still theme, themes that look like printed pages (two colors for UI, no gradients, no exceptions to this rule) don't exist at all. There's GTK's "High Contrast" theme, but it renders everything also BIG and FAT, which is cumbersome to look at unless you need it because of eyesight problems.

Also, there should be a way to disable all UI animations and most hover effects, but it either doesn't exist or keeps getting reinvented in any new major version so you're chasing it every once in a while.

3) Have you ever seen how Android renders colors on displays with no colors? God damn it to hell. I tried a terminal emulator. Some text was black, some white, some nigh-invisible, and some was white with a black (fuzzy) outline. I thought a monochrome display couldn't be ever described as garish, but now I've learned the errors of my ways. The only way it can work is if you export TERM=vt100 so it doesn't try to draw you rainbows where there can be none.

4) While the refresh speed got better compared to most Kindles I owned, when you're typing, it's still more annoying than a CRT with big afterburn.

Maybe it's kind of acquired taste, I dunno, but not for me. Yet. I hope.

I wouldn't mind a strictly 2-colored theme on a regular laptop screen as well, mind you.

Re 3): Doesn't Android support a black-and-white mode?

Internal boox apps are good because they were designed that way. But things from the play store are shite on such screens.

And yes, that’s the android’s idea of how to render color (or maybe it’s the driver, who knows). It’s like Microsoft Paintbrush on mono screens where you got different dithering patterns instead of colors, except worse.

I wonder how well one can modify the framework laptop to use the 13 inch e-ink monitor. Even if a small hdmi cable needs to run outside the case, as long as the lid can close (no need auto sleep) I'd be happy. I don't know anything about 3D printing, but it will likely be necessary (perhaps not sufficient though).

One of the only non-modular parts of the Framework is, very unfortunately, the display (it's glossy).

If you just want to use an HDMI connection, a piece of plastic is sufficient, see:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmenti...

But do not think the solution is without issues (I mentioned elsewhere: touchscreen, battery...)

I'd absolutely love to try something like this for programming, but it's much too expensive for me to try out on a whim

Wait for it to show up on Amazon Prime, then use the 30 day return policy as a method to try it out?

Looks pretty nice, especially the USB-C input. I might have gotten that one if it had been available when I was shopping for an e-Ink screen.

I got a Dasung 13" one a while ago, the larger Dasung wasn't launched yet (and I was struggling a bit to justify the price tag of the 13", now I'd probably go for the larger one). It's very limited, basically only works for black and white text, but for that it's great. I use it pretty much daily, just keeping a shell open there. I've changed my terminal to be black on white and all colors map to light/dark gray (for light/dark versions of the basic terminal colors), which works decently. I did change themes for things like tmux and vim to work better on a grayscale screen.

Reading text on it is great, but compared to a Kindle Oasis (whatever the newest model was last summer) its DPI is quite low, so you can't have text as small without it getting blurry. I mostly got it because I noticed that I was getting some eye strain staring at a regular screen all day and as best as I can tell it really has helped with that. It's also powered off of USB, which makes it usable on the go as a second screen.

My main gripe is using a Mini-HDMI-Port with a custom cable to inject power from USB (I think HDMI->Mini-HDMI plus a separate USB cable for Micro-USB input also work, never tried), but it's also a bit annoying that the inputs are on the sides and not the back. I also use it with a monitor arm at home, the included pole for standing it up is ok for on the go, but I really wouldn't use it permanently.

TL;DR: expensive, but if you want to reduce eye strain while reading a lot of text it really helps. Main driver for shell / coding tasks and I sometimes read longer websites/Google Docs/etc on it, though less frequently.

I love these E-Ink guys. They've been plugging away for a quarter century and their stuff keeps getting better.

It's only taking so long because they won't allow people to actually help progress the tech.

> *Please confirm your ports (USB Type-C and HDMI) support secondary monitors by connecting your devices to another monitor first. AMD GPUs are not supported for now.

I have no mental model of what this device is. Apparently it's not a display in the normal sense. Perhaps what's sent via HDMI/USB-C are effectively control signals rather than the colors/shades you want that get you the shades you want accounting for the response characteristics of the eInk display. What I'd like is for any of this extra logic to be in the device itself and not in software that requires installation and updates to keep working with OS updates, or other OSes altogether.

e-ink has some special sync settings (where it's a tradeoff between speed and ghosting). Probably what usb is used for. You can also aprtially refresh the screen&stuff. Probably easier to do it in software.

Man, I can't wait for something like e-ink to become usable as an actual 120Hz monitor. I've been sitting in front of shitty screens my entire life. Give display that do not shine and you could play games on.

Won't happen in my life though

Would love this as a second or third screen to read books / documentation from.

I am delighted to see that they have Linux support for their software. You don't see that so often, especially for such niche hardware. Really cool!

“Remove ghosting with one press” is a feature that they use to sell the device?

How bad is the ghosting/how often do you need to press that button?

Seeing the no-ghosts button reminded me that it's very likely my young kids are never going to have the fun of pushing the "degauss" button on a CRT.

My old and only eReader, a Kindle 3, had ghosting issues, but it self-fixed them by refreshing often. But there's a cost to that, because a full refresh takes significant time. In complex UIs that are more than just text you often can get away with updating only a portion of the screen, at the goat of bits of ghosting. My understanding is that this is still a limitation of this tech.

E-ink monitors are really cool (I've had a couple different ones for a while). However if your primary goal is reducing eye-strain, there are much better ways: https://twitter.com/levpopov/status/1466835595984977923

That promotional video didn't show a visible page refresh once. Which was what I was most interested in seeing, since lag while typing might be the thing I'm most worried about [well that and my syntax highlighting (:]

I don't need touch, and I don't need a sub-one-second refresh rate. I do need a monitor I can read documents on without eye strain that doesn't cost ~8x what an equivalent LCD monitor costs.

> *E Ink monitors' refresh speed is not as high as conventional monitors',

So what is the refresh rate then? I can't seem to find it in the Specs section.

Wow this looks like a nice companion device for reading documentation. Anyone know if Boox eink displays works with ipad hdmi adapter as a secondary display?

Why hasn’t anyone built a short throw projector for office work(coding) yet?

- reflective light just like eink so less eye strain

- better refresh rate and latency

- better color range

Is it the resolution?

I think the market for people who want to (and are able to) work exclusively in a very dark room is probably pretty small. I'm also not sure what features a work-focused projector would have that a normal projector wouldn't.

Do projectors have less eye strain? That's quite intriguing if so. What if you had a front-projector projecting on an e-ink screen, such that various parts of the screen could be in color/motion mode (e-ink off, projector only), mixed mode (e-ink on, with color overlay for syntax highlighting or the like), or ink only (projector off). That seems like something that's doable with off-the shelf components and software, at least as a POC...

Looks nice, but feels like another year where ebook hasn't arrived. Still waiting for the day of sub 500 eink 50 inch screens.

You guys go ahead and buy, take one for the team and work out all the bugs/defects in Rev.A units :)

This kind of thing needs Bluetooth. Then I could read outdoors with my laptop running in my backpack.

Related, does anybody have any suggestions for a cheap/large/easy to look at monitor that could be used for a digital picture frame? I was thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi to rotate through my photos in my home, but the hardest part of the project would be choosing a good discrete/mountable display.

Not a word on refresh rate.

Unless they have some wizz-bang new tech that no one else is using yet, which they would shout about if they were, with eInk you can pretty much say “if your use case makes you care much about refresh rates then eInk isn't a good choice for you ATM”.

I agree, but even among e-ink displays there are refresh rates that make it difficult to enter text or view terminal output.

In text editing, I even set refresh in batched bursts of max 500ms (a few chars per display update), to be battery conservative. No problem.

repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629455

Serious question: wouldn't just turning preferences of a normal monitor to black/white give you the same result? And is e-ink really better for eyes? Not sure I've seen research in this regard.

E-Ink doesn't emit light. There's lots of research that shows problems with looking at light-emitting screens all day.

The main difference is that there is no backlight, so it's more comparable to a piece of paper (reflective light source) than a light bulb (direct light source)

It's not remotely the same thing.

If you haven't looked at an E-Ink display try tearing a page from a magazine or newspaper and comparing that to reading the same size of font on your laptop or PC. E-Ink is practically indistinguishable from reading a physical piece of paper, whereas the backlight alone from an LCD eventually gets tiring to stare at.

Another huge difference is being able to use E-Ink displays in direct sunlight.

Interesting question. Now, I’m curious myself. True that LCD panels need backlight and may not be true equivalent in black& white mode. However, we have many OLED panels now. Would OLED panels in black & white work for this case?

These products look amazing but a major drawback is the lack of colors. Any chance e-ink will get color support?

They exist and they look cool kind of like comic books. They are expensive and the refresh rate is slower though.

https://www.waveshare.com/5.65inch-e-paper-module-f.htm

It's all how you explain it. 4k e-ink has ~ 8M balls, and can refresh ... let's say 10x per second. giving a stunning refresh rate of 80megaballs per second.

That's an incredibly high rate!

You can use Kaleido (E-Ink EPD with RGB filter on top) - it's already available. Or, wait for cheap and fast E-Ink ACeP ("Advanced Color ePaper").

Quality, you will have to assess.

What about f.lux (and others?) --> "Effects and extra colors" --> "Grayscale" ?

Still doesn't fix the problem of rather bright light being emitted from the screen into your eyes. Think also about all the power wasted on backlighting where ambient light could be just fine.

Also, I don't know if you have noticed, but you can't use f.lux and friends and grayscale simultaneously, because grayscale is applied after gamma change, making it pointless.

What would be the benefit of this over a quality OLED monitor?

If you are in context in which it is preferable to have * light reflecting instead of light emitting, and/or * bistable instead of kept on through energy.

Some people use EPD at midday, black on white under the sun, and OLED at midnight, white on black ("off") in the dark.

would smooth scrolling of text be possible?

799 USD

Nope, that's the Mira, the Mira Pro is 1800.

I am sad they go with the health angle. There is no evidence that suggest backlit or blue light are any more damaging for the eyes than a piece of paper with the same text. It's focusing that strains the eyes.

https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/are-computer-...

> Long hours staring at digital screens leads to decreased blinking. Blinking less sometimes causes a series of temporary eye symptoms known as eye strain. But these effects are caused by how people use their screens, not by anything coming from the screens. The best way to avoid eye strain is to take breaks from the screen frequently.

> The amount of light coming from a computer has never been demonstrated to cause any eye disease.

Lots of people are bothered by the backlight on their monitor. Lots.

Eye strain != eye disease, or eye damage. A parallel, is you can strain a muscle, and it will be find in a few days with light use.

This is precisely how many feel, when "over exposed" to endless bright light in their eyes.

I looked at their product page, and did not see anything about "permanent damage to your eyes!", but... I certainly could have missed that.

Sadly, I'm being forced to defend a company I dislike greatly, for their phone-home-to-china firmwares in other boox products. I can only imagine what any accompanying software they may include, to auto-adjust/etc the monitor, will entail.

Anecdotal but I consider it absolutely farcical that you could claim using an e-ink is no better for your eyes. I can literally feel the difference when using my ereader.

On the other hand it is well known that it contributes to sleeplessness.

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