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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

E Ink (the company) keeps improving their electrophoresis display technology. Unfortunately the technology necessarily has very low refresh rates since it it is based on moving around solid particles submerged in a liquid.

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.

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In a notification-heavy, video-ad intensive world, maybe slow refresh will someday turn out to be a feature rather than a bug. Confining one's portable device to applications that preserve mindfulness, focus & attention...

every now and again i read hackernews and reddit stuff on my boox ereader and having a slow refresh rate is definitely a good "feature" since it makes it a lot more tedious to read things compared to my phone, which helps me spend less time scrolling aimlessly

This reminds me of the time when I bought my first smartphone, which was quite late. I delayed it as long as possible, but as soon as I had it, I stopped reading books on the train. The Web is just too addictive. At least with snappy refresh rates.

The user is the one supposed to be disciplined, "not the dumb device".

Yes, definitely, this and all related problems people have with focus and attention on modern devices is just because they aren't virtuous enough.

???

To the original point: "crutches" are not a feature, they are a device. They are not universally useful - the same way that prescription glasses are not. A low refresh display may help some people: it is not helpful in general; some people find featureless text editors less distracting, normalcy greets happily the availability of features and options and hides the GUI with a keyboard shortcut.

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).

You should read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari[0]. People all over the world today are struggling with focus and attention, not because they're not virtuous enough but because tech companies have been intentionally hacking our brains and stealing it away from us. If you don't have time to read the book he did an outstanding interview[1] with Bari Weiss on her podcast Honestly which I urge you to listen to.

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...

Dear mdoms, first of all allow me to grant you that I will check the material you kindly indicated, when time will allow.

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.

And I will also add: suppose that somebody claimed "they cannot help it" (that somebody lures them into it is a different matter) - that when presented with a situation that requires control they lose it: then, you understand, they should treat that as an issue to be overcome with some degree of priority.

...Just like the snipers here that leave a cheap track of their disapproval on the basicmost behavioural "standards".

That's an interesting point.

The high refresh is what makes epaper notebooks such a joy to use though

Might be a dumb question, but I'll ask anyway.

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?

These still exist. Some smart watches still use them.

Garmin uses them extensively in both their smart watches and handheld GPS devices like the GPSmap series. The displays are not very impressive as far as color reproduction or contrast goes, but the readability in bright sunlight is superb - way better than any LCD or OLED screen. Which is far more important for outdoor devices.

Brightness and contrast in reflective color LCDs are very poor, because the polarizing filter blocks half the light, then the color filter on each subpixel blocks a further two thirds, so a fully "white" image will only return one-sixth of the incoming light. Power efficiency has also improved for backlights, so there's less of a benefit to omitting one than there once was.

These displays can also work wonderfully, see the Amazfit Bip.

But since human vision perceives brightness logarithmically, a 6x drop still looks like a surface darker by a constant amount I think. This is an issue that regular, backlit LCDs also need to overcome.

The recently launched Playdate handheld gaming device uses a monochrome Sharp brand Memory LCD with no backlight.

Yeah, so the reflective LCD technology isn't quite dead. I guess when both reflectivity and quick refresh rates are required, monochrome LCD is still the only solution, since Liquavista and Mirasol were discontinued. For color displays there is simply no solution at all with decent reflectivity I believe. The E Ink Gallery 3 display seems to mostly solve the low reflectivity problem, since it does not rely on standard additive sub-pixel color mixing. But there is no similar solution for higher refresh rates. There were improved Mirasol prototypes which apparently solved the issue, but shortly after they were shown, the development of the Mirasol technology was discontinued.

No question reflective LCDs are rare, but you can look at the pebble smart watch or playdate game console for modern devices using reflective LCDs, for an idea of where that tech has gone.

Power. I don't think there were cheap blue LEDs when these displays first came out, so the backlights were all fluorescent, which was the main power draw in the display. Once LEDs came along it massively reduced the power consumption of the backlight to where it could be used even in low-power devices.

It's just a strange set of constraints. If you need a miniscule battery, long battery life, where the device will often be used outdoors, and don't care about color accuracy at all, they're perfect.

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 think in the failed first e-reader wave actually used reflective LCDs. The problem was that these were quite dark and somewhat viewpoint dependent. The successful second wave (pioneered by Sony and dominated by Amazon) used electrophoresis displays by E Ink and another company I can't remember. Those were much more reflective, somewhat approaching actual paper.

Garmin GPS watches use "transflective" displays that are always-on, daylight-readable LCDs with an optional backlight for use at night. They're not as glossy as an Apple watch, but the battery can last for a month in some modes!

The new instinct 2 solar is the first smartwatch that lasts indefinitely without plugging in. If you are outside enough it will go forever. And it has so many impressive features. We have really entered a new era, thanks largely to this screen tech.

I wish Qualcomm's Mirasol display had seen light - you could even watch videos on them comfortably (as per the demo). They were building a huge plant to manufacture those displays commercially and suddenly the whole thing tanked. I think Apple bought parts of it.

Their last innovation was called Mirasol SMI, which let them change color within one MEMS block (instead of just switching it between color/black), so that they wouldn't need subpixels to create color. They were way ahead of E Ink in these respects. Unfortunately Qualcomm pulled the plug shortly after the SMI announcement. I'm not sure which part Apple actually bought, whether it was just labs or actual IP as well.

apple device with back light toggle would be fantastic. the pulse width modulation used on their current screens makes my vision slightly blurry even after only a few minutes of use.

i didn't realize there was a chance they might own some passively lit screen technology already. you've gotten my hopes up.

I thought the color in Mirasol displays was achieved by electrically adjusting the distance between a transparent and a reflective plate, creating a controlled iridescence. Were there shutters on top?

No you are right, the term "shutter" wasn't appropriate. Not a native speaker...

> Unfortunately the technology necessarily has very low refresh rates since it it is based on moving around solid particles submerged in a liquid.

Why is the ReMarkable 2 screen able to follow your pen stroke with such low latency, then?

There are full updates and partial updates. The former involves refreshing the whole display multiple times to remove ghosting, and a complete redraw. The latter is a targeted change at specific coordinates, which typically involves going from white to black. Very fast, but it's a single point/block at a time.

I do wish there was a reasonably priced color remarkable equivalent. Very frequently, I start reading a paper on the remarkable and have to bail when a chart distinguishes lines by color.

Remarkable owner here. RM display doesn't anti-alias actual pen strokes, pretty sure this makes the screen refresh faster. Everything else that is anti-alias tho is a bit slower to refresh.

If you don't do a full screen refresh you can get 10Hz refresh rates on newer products. The quality is similar to the newspapers of yesteryear.

Yeah but newspaper refresh rates are terrible…

And tons of ghosting.

You can watch videos on modern eink devices from boox and hisense. Looks like an old TV.

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