Why make this for a desktop? E-ink is mostly useful for wireless applications and anywhere power is limited or there's a need for always on, static display.
You'd save about 0.5 kwh a day in electricity, more if the AC is running. So I could see them becoming popular once the price comes down. People who run 2 monitors might be interested as well.
There may be, but some studies have shown there's little difference.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22762257/
Methods: Participants read for several hours on either e-Ink or LCD, and different measures of reading behaviour and visual strain were regularly recorded. These dependent measures included subjective (visual) fatigue, a letter search task, reading speed, oculomotor behaviour and the pupillary light reflex.
Results: Results suggested that reading on the two display types is very similar in terms of both subjective and objective measures.
That depends on the environment. Natural light fights against the functioning of light-emitting displays. Reflective displays cooperate with natural light.
You in the dark? Use OLED. Under the sun? Use EPD.
And you could read OLED at noon in the tropics under an umbrella (I know I did) - but I was exactly talking about optimal use.
--
A good scientist can file with a saw and saw with a file
~~~ Ben Franklin
A wise guy does not, unless necessary
~~~ We, here and now
HN is nth standard deviation sensitive. There is always market for some.
> additional lighting discounts any power savings
Not necessarily. Lighting today can cost fractions of watts, and on the other hands EPD can be energy costly - it depends on how many cell updates you are causing. So, the matter is probably less with energy consumption, and more about getting a better effect based on user and environment.
> This product is not for in-field use
Sure, it does not seem specific. But it can have its places. Be it some production site - maybe a quarry near the tropics -, be it personal - maybe you want to do some work in your garden...
Depending on the workload, that might be a worthy trade off. I tried coding on a grayscale eink display for a while and noticed a big difference in eye strain and overall concentration levels after a long session. But the display I had was too small and I didn't like living without syntax highlighting, so I went back to a normal screen. This product would solve those issues.
Authors and writers in general might be another target audience for this product. It's niche for sure, but eink has a lot of applications beyond price displays in a store.
I think this will expose another, possibly larger, problem. My room is too poorly lit other than the screen.
If there is no light coming from the screen, I am forced to turn on a light to read the screen. Maybe that's a good thing, I am not sure.
If you are young or if you are old with eyestrain issues it may be worth your while to learn about things like bias lighting, blue filters, PWM dimming, etc.
If you are old with good vision then I guess just keep doing what works :)
E-ink vendors tout this, but the jury's still out. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22762257/
An e-ink display with sharp text and without a backlight could be useful for such a use case.
But agreed that mobile contexts seem more broadly useful.
With that being said, I would love to see one in a smart phone or laptop.
Check e.g. the Hisense.
There are already plenty around. If you need to read a long document, transfer it to the tablet in its best format (PDF, markup etc). If you need to browse a lot of documents, create a VNC connection and use the tablet as a display.