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
seems a little slow and the screen refreshes sometimes excessive, but much better than I expected
- 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?
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 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.
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?
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...
(Not that that's a good thing...)
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.
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.
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.)
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 other cases are videoconferencing, where someone is basically showing a fairly static powerpoint, sprint planning board, or other, text-heavy content.
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.
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.
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!
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...
This is my hope with the future PineNote running a Linux distro.
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.
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.
...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.
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".
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.)
> 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!
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.
Out of experience: not really.
Remember, it's not about the objective value of the device. It's the perceived value that matters.
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.
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.
I have an iPad for that.
In a word: yes. But I was 10 or 11 years old before we had a color TV.
a netbook style, or even like old kindle keyboard sized up would be pleasant.
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.
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.
> how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
Plus
There are no 8 bit eInk controllers
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.
The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus has an E-Ink display on the outer side - but I think it remains an outer side.
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....
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.
But yes, I agree. I've wanted an e-ink laptop for working outside for years.
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.
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 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
You get the reflective non matte display and according there were no plans for a matte or EPD option.
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
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).
http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/screen/olpc_xo_resolution_d...
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.
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?
Image quality goes down, but I was very very very impressed...
edit: I mean, kindle videos feel like you are reading a real paper, while here feels like you are in an actual screen.
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?