E Ink Gallery 3
eink.com
eink.com
Seems like we're still a long way off from reasonably priced large e-ink displays -- very curious to see any progress in this space.
"reasonably priced"? It will always be more expensive than LCD/OLED because the volumes are completely different, like 1000x different.
1) Product has to exist - and now it does tick 2) Has to be useful tick 3) Has to have possibility of being make cheaper by mass production no idea 4) Has to be put into mass production depends on 3
So we're currently stuck on 3.
Not sure there's much demand for a colour e-ink tablet - but maybe could be layered with a transparent OLED. I'd cough up an extra £100 for that. Normal tablet - with reading mode. Spend a while looking at static image, OLED turns off, e-ink layer fires up. Scroll down and the OLED takes over.
No, that's not true. If you're making a black and white screen, and you sell it at the same price as a color screen, nobody will buy it. Volumes won't change if your product isn't better than something equivalently priced.
Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. Add color to it and it's the perfect screen for a lot of computer work.
I'm genuinely interested, are you talking about Onyxboox Mira or Dasung ? Because i thought that they manufactured official e-ink patented products
Citation needed. I'd love to see some evidence backing up your incredibly confident claim.
> Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. Add color to it and it's the perfect screen for a lot of computer work.
I've never heard of that. Please share some evidence for this please. 20 fps electrophoresis? In my opinion, that's physically impossible unless the screen is 0.1mm thick. How did they escape Q = vA ?
That's not 20 fps. That's A2 mode which is a 1 bit mode and is a non-stable state so it will decay. I'd recommend you read the user manual about how that works.
How does the 'Q = vA' law you mention apply, to reason on an example, to the case of A2, as a limiter to the rate?
> A2 mode which is a 1 bit mode and is a non-stable state so it will decay
It makes little sense to use A2 on a long-lasting render - nonetheless, I suppose the decay time will be relatively long (I have never notice an A2 dot change state...).
It's fine to be dubious of a claim, and it's fine to ask politely for sources or rationales. Just be nice.
I was not aware that "citation needed" is considered impolite. It is something I use at work a lot when interacting with colleagues. My apologies, I'll refrain from that in future.
Rather than saying the equivalent to "I think this cannot be true", a request for citation merely means "I am interested in this claim and would like to know the source" (even if phrased more tersely). The content is more indicative of the intent than the phrasing, and requesting a citation is not an accusation at all, it is a request for a source for further research.
Citation needed.
and it would be lovely if he could share what leads him to believe that.
We will have to just wait until the patent runs out in order to see great advancements in this tech like what we have seen from the aftermath of the expiration of certain 3D printer patents
I'm genuinely curious. Which patent is that?
That's equivalent to me making a claim like "Microsoft is blocking progress in operating systems" and then said here's the evidence: https://patents.justia.com/search?q=+Microsoft+Corporation
I'm sorry you feel that way, however challenging your incredible claims and asking that you provide some evidence before we believe you is not the same "be so toxic with me".
It's not.
It's the condescending tone you display in every of your response, exactly like this one.
It is unfortunate that you continue to persist in not providing data but instead redirecting the energy of the conversation into allegations of condescenion which I can't defend. All I said was. I'm sorry you feel that way, however challenging your incredible claims and asking that you provide some evidence before we believe you is not the same "be so toxic with me".
Can they produce large format screens, like a few feet on each side?
Or do we have to buy small ones and tile them? We probably can’t tile them as they need electronics around each border.
I want to do e-paintings. So if you tell me which Chinese companies, ie their websites, I would try to reach out !
My personal take: E-Ink screens have too many drawbacks for 99% of consumers to be at all interested in them.
Color e-ink has a killer app: Changeable photo display in homes. This is much harder to achieve with alternative technologies (any display emitting light is an immediate no-go for just hanging on your wall). In contrast, e-readers have a significantly smaller advantage over the alternative of just reading on your phone or tablet, yet that seems to have been enough of a market for them to become cheap. And unlike e-readers, where you only really need one per person, there is hardly any limit to the number of displays people would put in their home if they do not emit light, have nice UI, and are cheap.
Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.
Visionect sells some eInk signs for showing the status of meeting and conference rooms. I thought that was a clever application -- saves companies from having to run wires and mount a bunch of hardware.
Color photo displays could be cool, but I suspect it'd be hard to compete with the incredibly cheap Google Home and Alexa devices with screens.
Not really. That particular person’s entire business depends on eink being a high margin business product.
That claim doesn't seem to be very reasonable to me. Why would Visionect want eink to be a "high margin business product"? A Visionect panel is not a Veblen good as far as I can understand. Could you share your evidence for why you would think that?
But I can’t really find any other large format e-ink displays with the driving hardware (which can be even pricier than the display), so I’m inclined to believe him.
I agree it's certainly more authoritative than a random person (that's why I said "beyond"), but it's still just one man and we still don't know his incentives well.
People have tried changeable photo displays before, with LCD or whatever. Of course, these require more power, but they are plugged in devices and I'm not convinced non-technical people think about the power consumption of their devices outside of really niche situation where everyone knows they supposed to care (large appliances like washing machines). And, even the best e-ink screen looks kind of washed out when displaying color, right?
Like I'm all in for an E-ink terminal, latency be damned, if someone make a no-fuss one for less than a couple hundred dollars. But I can't imagine wanting an E-ink picture frame over (say) an OLED one (although I guess burn in would be a problem there).
I too would really dig an e-ink terminal. Just needs to do VT-100 sequences and let me run Emacs. But I think it's likely a niche product.
I haven't seen a color e-ink display in person so I can't speak confidently, but the demo videos don't look washed out to me.
Thank you for providing the link. I agree in general with that opinion as well.
One can dream..
Of faster than light travel? :-) They're limited by the physics of electrophoresis.
Transit was one of the two core practical applications the Visionect founder mentioned in Nov 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25067359
I love eink. I have several readers, a remarkable which I adore.
I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding. The price just makes it impossible. Having color for this task, even if washed out, would be an absolute boon.
As for all eink announcements, they may have the tech, but they might make it so so expensive that nobody is going to translate it into mass production product. Without volume, we'll never get better prices.
Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..
> Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..
They seem to act that way, but what would be the actual incentive? (As apposed to just bad business acumen)
Accessible pricing may result in eink screens taking consumers, businesses, hobbyists and whatnot by storm. But meh...
I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay.
(See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)
would be largely worthless as visual isn't really the primary way we detect and destroy aircraft anymore.
EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. '
For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy.
EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI)
I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.
(Admittedly, I was being a bit silly with the missile use-case.)
I occasionally see referrals in flow text to a Chinese claim they invented "holographic quantum" radar and can see all current stealth low echo aircraft and subs. I suspect it's bullshit but in war, if stealth was a purturbation, and deep water subs a more historical perturbation toward MAD and now, this is another perturbation much as drones have altered the symmetry for tank and mechanised ground warfare.. "shrug"
You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)
I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.
Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.
Isn't kindle firmware published open source? What is in this stuff that they provide? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Huh? What e-ink driver board? There's no such thing inside a Kindle. It is a straight NXP SoC that drives the e-ink panel directly. There is no MCU. The driver is open source. https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable/blob/master/refer...
"Secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells"? You mean like a voltage table that is also present inside every LCD or OLED? The difference would be that the electrophoretic display would need a much bigger table so it would have to be kept on the SoC since it can't possibly fit into a single voltage driver circuit. That's not software, that's just a big table of voltages that's hardcoded for each unique panel. Is that what you think is "secret sauce"? Do you also want to extract that table inside each LCD drive circuit as well? I guess you could use it to make your LCD or OLED panel show brighter colors but at the risk of burning and damaging the crystals. I imagine the same risk would also be true for electrophoretic panels or anything where you can change the physical voltage that is being applied to the material.
In hobbyist displays, the tables are very simple, and I'm pretty sure this is one source of quality differences.
Just curious, I previously saw claims on HN that E-Ink is a very brutal cruel company that is evil and attacks everybody. That didn't line up with how their staff, at least the materials science guys, seemed to be when I encountered them at SID. I've been asking for evidence for this on HN. Did they try to take down your tool or anything like that?
Anything with a mouse pointer can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
Anything looking at a web page can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
Anything playing video can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
This leaves us with e-readers, but that market is very limited in size. Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.
Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.
Otherwise, I take from your comment that we're in agreement that "e-Ink is a solution looking for a problem".
In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety.
I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.
That's not true. Electronic shelf labels sold to supermarket chains and retailers, far outnumber the number of e-book readers sold to consumers. Especially that electronic price tags usually have a fixed shelf-life (~3 years or even shorter if they get damaged), so they need to be replaced often, while consumers generally keep their e-book readers for many more years.
You'd need the PUK from the manufacturer based on the device S/N to unlock them first, but the S/N of each device is tied to the store that bought it so the manufacturer will know it doesn't belong to you and not give you the unlock PUK.
Plus, at the kinds of volumes retailers are buying ESLs, I doubt they'd go through all this trouble to pair a few stolen units.
Someone definitely flunked the messaging on this one, and I find it very disappointing :( The key advantage to an e-ink style of display is less eye strain, because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second. (And battery life, of course; you can put your book down and forget about it until later). And that this limits the device is fine: a lot of people do a lot of reading! People like reading! Alas, as more and more people grow up reading all sorts of things on LCDs, so the inconvenience and the discomfort is just a normal part of reading for them, that becomes a much harder sell.
LCDs update 60 times per second (or more… 120 Hz displays are becoming more common) but they don't flicker the way CRTs used to, so there's no reason to think this would contribute to eye strain. Brightness could be an issue but you can just lower the brightness of the screen to match the surroundings.
As I see it the advantages of e-ink displays lie mainly in their visibility in direct sunlight and minimal idle power consumption.
Some displays do this as a feature though (known as backlight strobing, motion blur reduction, etc.): LCDs take time to transition, so if you keep the backlight on at all times, you'll potentially see blurring from persistence of vision while the display is mid-transition. Instead, you can turn the backlight off until the screen has transitioned and then turn it back on so that you never show a partially transitioned image.
Slow refresh is a fine way of supporting healthy data dieting.
There's lots of places I would like to put an information readout, but not have it be an attention draw through anything.
More related to the fact that eink uses external lighting I suppose. Still.
Also I wish I had an eink screen for code.
Of those notes: I have used mouse pointers with E-Ink and had little issue - only, I also had touchscreen so the mouse was in general unnecessary. That statement about hypertext is absurd: hypertext consumption is fine on E-Ink - provided your purpose is to read those hypertexts, instead of using the web in some "different" way, by the way alien from what it was intended. And video is usable, though suboptimal, if needed - the technology was not born for that, but just in case it can cope.
The practical verification is given: there are people who have been using large E-Ink devices, coupled with keyboards, for a long time, to work on documents.
And again let us suggest an important thing: if you actually have to work intellectually on a document, the same contents will remain in front of you for a relatively long time. This makes a technology "cheap on state retention, costly on state switch" the sensible solution.
The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should.
Makes no sense. What is your point? "A huge part of woodwork deals with nails, and one cannot easily use a screwdriver for that". Well, if you are into woodwork, use a hammer! Evidently, we are not talking about woodwork here. Clarify your assumptions. It may seem you wanted to state "EPD is not the best solution for [some website] users", which brings nowhere unless you contextualize the statement with some idea (very preferably a plausible one) that makes it logically productive.
> Even if we confine
Confine? A screwdriver is optimal for driving screws. To """confine""" a screwdriver to that is "proper use". Hypertext (the World Wide Web, as intended, none the less) is something meant to be /read/ and at the same time explored non sequentially: it is properly consumed with reading friendly technologies. EPD is meant to be that.
> needs scrolling
Absolutely false, and also irrelevant: scrolls have in fact disappeared as standard practice centuries ago, and we invented tablets and paging in 3300BC, in Sumer (not to mention sheep and cattle raising eight further centuries earlier, from which the folio comes): paging has been the standard for over five millennia. And when we used scrolling, it was because some technology had that as the most appropriate use. Clay? Paging then. Papyrus? Scrolling then. Paper? Flipping then. What has changed?
Hypertext and sequential text do not need scrolling - we have paged since forever. And when the user wants, scrolling is available and perfectly usable with EPD. Slower than LCD? Well LCD has a number of properties inferior to those of EPD: if you have no use for these, why should you use EPD? Clearly the balance determined by all properties changes according to use case. This is really basic.
> The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should
Very trivial principle, contextualize it - it can be applied to CRTs and brass plaques: there exist a number of properties for two or more technologies; some use cases will turn the balance in favour of A, others in favour of B etc. You will use a hammer when it is appropriate to use a hammer, and a screwdriver when it is appropriate to use a screwdriver, and you will do just like Ben Franklin recommended and "saw with a file and file with a saw when pressed". Again, all of this is as trivial as reasoning comes; to make the reasoning productive (and debatable), you have to add the uncommon assumptions, not the foundationals. You have confirmed the opposite point: just refer your statement to LCD!
It seems, outside analysis and towards immediacy, that you just do not see use cases for EPD: - it's you. We have tried to tell you: you do not have the need, others do. Just trust it, you will see it when you will want to see it. Some people do appreciate «working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow».
"Ah, and all the compromises then are overcome by the benefits"? Yes, that!
There is a lot of effort required to scale up technologies to the point that it is affordable for consumers. In the software space I see it with solutions (think $500+/year/seat licensing) that could be broadly useful, but the company doesn’t want to make intuitive or bug free (enterprise software users will tolerate a lot of abuse). In the hardware space, there is a risk of building a million units of something that doesn’t sell (think Surface RT).
The principle characteristics of e-ink displays are size, resolution, refresh rate, and colour gamut.
(Even B&W displays have a range of greyscale gamuts.)
Small displays are now reasonably cheap, with displays of ~6--8" available for $20--50.
Larger displays, suitable for advertising, marketing, or other commercial/industrial applications are much more expensive, as noted here. Some of that is likely cost-driven, but another element is that if a larger supply were offered, the price would fall. Absent some way of bracketing specific applications, there's little to keep, say, advertising or commercial users from making do with cheaper consumer-grade displays.
There's a somewhat similar rationale that was arrived at in the 19th century by French engineer / economist / polymath Jules Dupuit, in describing the rationale by which 3rd class rail carriages were so much poorly fitted than 2nd class --- if the 3rd class accommodations were merely sufficient then they would cannibalise 2nd class ticket sales. Instead, 3rd class was made intentionally bad.
That's a dynamic which is replicated today in both transporation (e.g., airline coach class seating) and free-tier Internet and information services.
I don't know that this is what's driving EInk's business strategy. But I have my suspicions.
Even further, a Chinese colleague hinted that they will never sell to you if you are doing anything in the consumer space (except you are one of the big e-reader makers of course). And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. It's all very very odd to me. I would suspect a cartel, but it doesn't make any sense - e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. We had good use cases: industrial PCs, outdoors informational displays, and so on. But apparantly not good enough for e-ink.
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[1] There is a look-up-table in the microcontroller that tells the display how much current to use to switch a pixel to a given color. It depends on the previous color of the pixel and the temperature. These "waveforms" or "wavetables" are proprietary and secret. It looks like they are just "good enough" and small enough to fit into the cheap MCU. I suspect you could get better results by using larger and better tuned tables, and I've seen a hobbyist actually get higher color depth by using their own waveforms.
I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere.
As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.
If it's been that long, do the blocking patents expire soon?
Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc.
This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.
That can be overcome, especially with sustained collaborative effort.
But the production of the displays, controller software aside, will not be "cheap".
Or perhaps that's just what they want you to think...
If you want one using anything developed in the past 5 years...oh, look, that's why eink still has a research division; they've been slowly improving things (not as fast as actual competition would cause, but enough to make it hard for someone to just leapfrog them using seed capital) and so would-be competitors are now running up against patents with 15+ years left.
Wondering if either they just fundamentally aren't capable of scaling up their business, so they are getting as much as they can out of what little they can make.
Or maybe there's some confusing IP situation and they just want to create a minimal number of devices to keep some sort of... copyrights or patents alive or something (as far as I know they don't work that way in the US, but maybe other countries?)
Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things?
Or maybe, actually, only a couple nerds like us want these E-ink screens. Assuming tech nerds are generally pretty well off overall, but a fairly small-ish group, maybe E-ink screens just end up being fairly price insensitive as a result?
I dunno. Seems weird though.
There was definitely a time when I really wanted a color e-ink screen. But now, with iPads having 10 hour battery life, I can get all day performance and better colors and refresh rates from that device, so my desire for color e-ink has greatly declined.
I do love my b&w e-reader though and use it every day.
I currently do that with an x260 but it's not cobfortable at all, no matter how much brightness and battery life you have.
In the very short term they're probably right, but I think they'd be wrong in the long term: once the price drops it might take time but I think people would come up with a variety of novel products and use cases. Amazon for example has made a big bet on digital comics w/comixology. I'm sure they'd love to offer an affordable color comic reader. Or cheap 8.5x11 tablets could become the default note taking devices for a lot of students, especially for many STEM classes.
I've seen this sentiment a lot when eink displays are discussed here. But, I'm not quite sure I get it.
I've typed in platforms with significant lag between a keystroke and the character showing. It's horrible! So often, you think maybe you made a typo, but have to wait to see it and fix it, instead of a quick few backspaces and ONWARD! I find it really disruptive to my train of thought and it breaks the brain-interface link.
Maybe the eink displays refresh fast enough to make this be a minimal issue, but my few years old Kindle Paperwhite doesn't have me confident that's true.
Or, maybe I just type way worse than those of you that want an eink dev environment.
With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)
For regular typing, I have no doubts it can work without disruption. What is harder is modifying blocks of text. Scrolling quickly. It can be done, but would eventually require a full screen refresh to get good quality due to ghosting again.
(Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)
In a sense, it's like working remotely with a slow modem. The latency is not high, but you need to be smart on what you display (the original vi editor would actually be a _perfect_ fit for this ;))
The question is why I would put up with all this effort and limitations with eink. For me, it's because eink is MUCH easier on the eyes. It's pretty much the only display which is truly readable outdoors. So far I wasn't able to use any single tablet/phone/laptop outside, despite owning devices with pretty bright 500nit screens.
When you say "high refresh rate video playback", you're referring to A2 mode at 8fps right? Because that's the only demonstration ever seen, and I wouldn't call it vapourware because that's what you're using when you use a Dasung panel.
I would be interested to see some proof of above, I haven't myself seen a usable implementation that successfully controls all those behaviors and latency. People will often point to Dasung but I've used it and I feel it is unusable.
Just curious, have you actually sat down and used and looked at a Boox or a Dasung display? I think you'll find that A2 mode is not really what the marketing videos make it out to be, at least in my usage of it.
I think it is technically possible, I'm just not sure many would accept the cost/functionality trade-offs. But I may be wrong.
There were other passive e-paper display technologies like the one by Liquavista (based on moving colored oil droplets) or Mirasol by Qualcomm (mechanical micro-shutters create colored light via interference). These were capable of achieving high refresh rates, but unfortunately they have long been abandoned.
I believe the monochromatic electrophoresis displays by E Ink had higher reflectivity and lower price, which is what mattered for e-readers, so all the others went out of business.
???
To your statement: I do not see how «modern devices», on literal terms, can be the issue: they are *organizers* (meant to optimize your time). If people use them differently, that is not a fault in the device.
To your statement again: focus and attention are skills that individuals develop. If they are underdeveloped, they should if sough be developed. If your point is elsewhere, please make it explicit. I must presume you do not think that it is the responsibility of your sofa to sculpt your abdominals (nor, for that matter, to make you use your sofa wisely).
I used to think of attention in the same way you do, blaming and hating myself because I felt like I wasn't disciplined enough. It's so important to understand that this is something billionaire tech giants have done to us, on purpose.
0 https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/stolen-focus
1 https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/2f84e8d4/your-at...
But let me confirm my point: if «tech companies have been intentionally [etc.]», this must involve their users, who have been using those services (I can guess which ones they may be) willingly, though innocently. Many of them should also have experiences the other side in life - I hope they received a decent scholarization - and could and should have seen the difference from that side to the other side, and act accordingly taking measures and distances. Many of us have tried experiences in our life, and noticed that they were leading them into something undesirable, and consequently relegated those experiences to appropriate spaces (if any) - this is perfectly normal.
In short: if visiting intoxicant.com makes you intoxicated¹, you should probably avoid it, or greatly reduce it, or manage it differently (actively)¹.
¹and note that while they may try hard, it's not an overpowering "injection" - I suppose it must be some bad habit they attempt to instill in users, and which the said users may dodge instead of adopt. You do have a will.
...Just like the snipers here that leave a cheap track of their disapproval on the basicmost behavioural "standards".
In the 00s, there were reflective color LCDs in things like phones and portable game consoles. The kind that isn't black when off. Why is this technology not developed further any more, and all modern color LCDs rely on backlight? If it's a dead end, why?
Smartwatches are the obvious application, and it's why all Garmin watches use this tech. For most other things, it just makes more sense to sacrifice battery life or put in a bigger battery to get a massively better quality screen indoors.
i didn't realize there was a chance they might own some passively lit screen technology already. you've gotten my hopes up.
Why is the ReMarkable 2 screen able to follow your pen stroke with such low latency, then?
I still wear a pebble 2 daily, but am going to upgrade when price drops on the garmin
Are there any truly thin smart watches? The leaks for the new pixel watch kill all hope in my mind that I'll ever get a smart watch again since they are all thick and heavy. Even fit bits are thick compared to the pebble time.
Wow, that's probably the first time an always-on electronic device actually surpassed my Nokia 6310's 21-day battery life in the last two decades. It's really hard to imagine a cellphone charge lasting for three weeks today. How far we've come :P
I have the Coros Pace, so can vouch for their battery life claims. I get between one and two weeks between charges, depending how much I use the GPS.
I would pay $75 for someone to replace the battery in my Pebble and maintain water resistance. I don't trust myself to do it, but eventually I may try. My current fallback plan is a Fossil hybrid smartwatch, which is nicer looking, but has a worse UI/UX.
The garmin instinct 2 solar has the same screen tech as the pebble and NEVER needs to be charged. It really is game changing and I am finally ready to upgrade. In fact by you want to buy my in box pebble 2 se I have 3 for 100 usd each!
I love it for reading technical blogs, code, tech books. I wanted an ereader I could install android apps on and preserve color syntax highlighting.
Disclaimer, these devices phone home to China so most people install apps like NetGuard to curate an Allowlist of apps that can access the internet.
Some people push this stuff to the extreme and code on them. I would not enjoy that and do not recommend it but it is possible.
Like flexible solar panels, I suspect 1) engineering tradeoffs, 2) shorter longevity (would that just be brevity?).
They are dirt cheap but only a handful of chinese manufacturers are using them.
On top of the e-ink IP stronghold, I think there is also a Product manager issue in consumer electronics. Everyone wants to show case Macbook-esque glossy displays whereas a large number of consumers want displays that they can use outdoors and without eye strain. Everybody complements garmins transflective displays but somehow nobody makes the leap of slapping them on phones or laptops.
Not only could you then use any device on the market, but your books are truly yours. Immune to Amazon revising them in the future, and immune to having your books revoked. They'll last as long as your preferred backup methods last.
And that's a good reason to do this even if you keep using Kindles.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041407/e-ink-color-gall...
...And now for the rant: the opening:
> E Ink has a new version of color electronic paper, and, while it isn’t as pretty as an OLED
These people must be those who use EPD at midnight and OLED at noon. (Of course it can be done, it just makes no general sense.)
In general, I find e-ink displays relatively expensive for modestly sized ones (say 6 inch +). What's some of the best deals/value for e-ink displays for some personal projects? Broken e-readers for parts?
For larger ones, I think the best option is something like a recycled kindle. There was even a post on HN a few months ago from a company selling Kindle displays hooked up to breakout boards (may have even had on-onboard microcontroller, like an ESP-32?)
https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro
The problem is that it states "Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS operating systems" are supported. The Dasung specifically states that they support Linux, so that's probably the one that I'll order anyway despite the price.
- use a Dasung screen or Boox Max with your desktop (expensive, plug and play)
- use a hacked-up Linux e-reader (super cheap, fiddly)
- build something with WaveShare kits and an Arduino/Raspberry Pi (moderately expensive and fiddly, but allows for interesting creations)
- use some app (Termux) on an Android E-Reader (Boox, moderately expensive, quite versatile).
The tech is a bit inaccessible, but not as much as it may seem. Just check out: https://hackaday.com/tag/e-ink/
I get that that's how it will probably actually happen, but re-shoot for a little bit of polish...
Also the webpage didn't correctly fit on my Android browser (both Firefox and Chrome).
I don't think that's what happened. The rollable video shows two of the same pages in the same order; it looks more like a slideshow they didn't time right.
The problem was that E Ink Gallery was extremely slow to refresh, but with E Ink Gallery 3, the technology is now "just" slow instead of extremely slow. Though perhaps still a bit too slow to use it in actual e-reader devices.
But indeed at the end of the day e-ink is suitable for slow changing content (mainly reading blocks of text).
You're thinking of gyricon where the balls rotate. That's different. The bulk of the industry now uses electrophoresis which is moving ink particles electrically.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002467730675.html?algo_e...
And there's eink phones AND tablets both. Reasonably priced. Yet we see none of that kind of innovation here... I guess we might in 5-7 years. If it's profitable.
That's also a contributing factor to their products being affordable - because they don't have any R&D costs to recoup, just those associated with espionage.
sigh
I have been wanting a color e-ink Mac I can work with under direct sunlight for so long now. I will be waiting many years longer.
When I'm under a tree in the park, there's no power (so yes, battery life helps - it's why I mostly use Mac Airs), and my screen has to fight the sunshine. Which makes battery life even worse because I've gotta run the backlight at full power. Sitting under a tree with a sunscreen attached to the computer helps some, but I would be delighted if I could sit out under the sun.
I'm also probably not gonna sit out in the direct sun for hours on end, I tend to stay in one spot working 2h at the absolute most. Gotta get up and take a break to bike around the city every so often.
There is a misunderstanding there: I meant, your current machine probably uses OLED. I meant that your struggle for working outdoors, hindered by power consumption and screen visibility, can be already supported maybe by a portable power sources and tricks (solar etc.), but if the display you are using is OLED then I guess (by experience, not by numbers which I have unfortunately never checked) that you are using the "least" outdoors-friendly option.
> I mean e-ink
A bit pedantically, 'E Ink' refers to a producer of ElectroPhoretic Displays (EPD). You probably "dream of" a "good EPD" for working outdoors, but the limits of EPD, as seen in 'E Ink' products, do involve a number of compromises. Contrast can be an issue, and real EPD instances may require care in lighting similarly to (and in a way more than) more traditional displays. Saturation will similarly be a "difficult" area.
If you insist on being excruciatingly precise, then what I have been wanting for multiple years is a Mac that has a display that works via reflection, rather than emission. I do not care in the slightest whether it is by moving around electrically-charged bits of ink, flipping around tiny little tiles, shivering the atoms of the screen into a new configuration that reflects the desired wavelengths, by broadcasting a magical sigil into my brain that makes me think I'm seeing an image when I'm actually seeing a piece of bare wood with a spell carved into it, or any other implementation details. I merely care that it is working with the sunlight instead of fighting it.
And I am sad that the R&D funding for reflective display technologies seems to have largely dried up, leaving only a slow series of underwhelming announcements of new displays from E Ink Holdings, Incorporated. Whose name is sufficiently generic that it would probably be at risk of becoming a generic name for any reflective display technology even if they weren't the only people making any attempt to push it forwards.
This is what "I have been wanting a color e-ink Mac I can work with under direct sunlight for so long now. I will be waiting many years longer." is intended to unpack to.
Right. Very many of us have been wanting that, you know. And we are all very «sad that the R&D funding for reflective display technologies seems to have largely dried up». Last time, when CLEARink vanished.
So, again: practically, for your work outdoors, if it involves graphics, * you may have a chance within some months to combine your Mac with a VNC connected large enough Kaleido or ACeP based tablet, and bear with the compromises each involves, or * bring around some batteries, but if your Mac is OLED based that will make little sense, unless * you bring around an effective shader (umbrella, shield, pizza delivery box etc.) - many of us do. This was the suggestion.
I don't understand the legal aspect of this stuff, but if the EU bureaucrats were able to impose USB-C standard instead of custom-charging-ports, surely they could do something about this too? Am I totally wrong? Seriously curious....
One more thought: colored rollable e-ink can have so many good uses, from being used in education to cut back on paper-books to displaying advertising and more utilitarian uses in our every-day life. gatekeeping this tech is absurd to me.
I read an article posted here on HN about how using an iPad to cut back on paper basically never becomes worth it (from an environmental perspective). If you already have an iPad, sure, use it for not taking and it will be better than using paper. But don't go buy an iPad specifically to save on paper, because that will make the problem worse.
I wonder how much of that same principle applies to e-ink displays. They obviously use a lot less power, so maybe it would be worth it. I'm really not sure.
edit: did a quick Google search. I believe this was the article: https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/paper-versus-the-ipad-i...
"thanks" to patents is 100% a monopoly.
But maybe there is hope https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2015/03/02/german-court-fi...
Invalidate all patents? That would do it, but I'm sure there's plenty of opposition.
Maybe there is a market for novelty or in a construction trade?
I have worked on 8'' (not a Kaleido) and it's very doable if you accept the real estate compromise.
You can have it already and spend maybe around 200u, plus your time to set it up.
> PURCHASER IS PURCHASING THE PRODUCTS FOR COMMERCIAL USE AND/OR IN A BUSINESS CAPACITY. ORDERS PLACED BY CONSUMERS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED
It's a Taiwanese company.