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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> ..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.

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