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Comment by landgenoot | Hacker News Reader

LCD and e-paper are different things. E-paper keeps its content without power.

You are using both terms. What is it you are using?

Sharp “Memory LCD” is just reflexive LCD with SRAM(?) bits integrated to pixels. Visually more cold in tone than typical displays, somewhat of black chrome on satin. Agreed that calling them “e-paper” is a loose usage of the term as it does require power to hold display content.

There is no legal definition of e-paper, but I have been using this term for over a decade to refer to Memory LCD and it's worked out fine. This definition nitpicking is getting oooooold https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3828249

No this nitpicking is people wanting to know the specs of something they might buy. What most people on HN probably think of as e-paper is not the same as and LCD tech.

Part of the problem is there's some use of e-paper to mean "e-ink but we don't want to trigger their trademark lawyers" polluting the space. (The part of the description that actually made sense to me was where it said "same display tech as in Pebble!" ... which is pretty neat, and not-at-all-eink...)

Almost every single reader will assume you’re talking about a completely different technology with significantly different properties. That’s not nitpicking, that’s reality check.

(It’s not very papery in appearance, either. All up, I don’t know how best to convey the type of display that it is, but e-paper ain’t it.)

> E-paper keeps its content without power

You're thinking of e-ink. e-paper has always been used to describe this type of low power LCD screen. I first came across the terminology with the Pebble watches.

I cannot think of ever having encountered “e-paper” being used to refer to any kind of LCD, but I’ve come across it being used to certainly refer to electrophoretic displays many times, and that’s all I obviously find by a general web search too.

(Pebble? I dunno, I thought they used e-ink. Never saw one in person. If it is not so, I’m curious whether they ever used e-ink, or whether it was an extremely widespead misunderstanding through all of their history.)

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