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Comment by dbingham | Hacker News Reader

That refresh rate is pretty awesome. ...if that's real, and I'm a little skeptical, I kinda want a remarkable with one of these screens. That would be amazing. The poor refresh rate is one of the few things I don't love about my remarkable.

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One of my coworkers has the grayscale version of that. The refresh rate goes up to maybe 20Hz on "fast mode" which sacrifices quality for speed. It looks pretty good regardless, but IMO the real benefit of these screens is in consuming long-form text content.

My ReMarkable 2 has a perfectly fine refresh rate, especially for writing/drawing. Is yours the first gen maybe?

> IMO the real benefit of these screens is in consuming long-form text content.

Hard disagree. E-readers already do this and are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper. Long-form text content barely need 1 Hz refresh rates.

The real benefit of these screens is being able to use a computer without the associated eye-strain. Most jobs that involve looking at a screen all-day don't really require high refresh rate screens. The main exceptions are any folks doing design or editing work. This is a huge game changer for the vast majority of folks on HN that are looking at a terminal, text editor, or docs for 90% of their day.

> This is a huge game changer for the vast majority of folks on HN that are looking at a terminal, text editor, or docs for 90% of their day.

Hard disagree. Unless you're not typing all that much and particularly insensitive to input latency, you're not going to want to do too much typing on these. I know I couldn't stand it.

Input latency is really bad even at 24hz. My typing speed slows down dramatically and typos feel so painful to correct compared to 60hz and above.

Some of us suspended the habit to look at the text while typing (on systems with latency), and look at the typed only periodically (off, on, off, on).

I get that you're talking about situations like typing into a remote terminal, but this technique still causes eye strain which brings us back to square one with slow eink displays which are like this all day long.

I was talking chiefly about typing on EPD :) (Soooo many keystrokes, so many hours.) I personally felt no eye strain - it may depend on your ability to adapt into the process.

Way back in the day I remember using a terminal (TeleVideo maybe?) where the characters just sort of faded in as you typed. The latency was really bad. But I got used to it pretty quickly and didn't find it really bothersome.

> Long-form text content barely need 1 Hz refresh rates.

The problem with such low refresh rates is that your eyes may have to work much harder to locate where you're at after you've scrolled the page.

Not all content is formatted to never break sentences or paragraphs, and not all software even supports pagination as an alternative to scrolling.

> The real benefit of these screens is being able to use a computer without the associated eye-strain.

Depends on your eyes. For my aging eyes e-ink is much too low-contrast. A high-DPI OLED screen on the other hand…

I think it does depend a lot because my aging eyes, even high-DPI OLED screens tire me right out. E-Ink, on the other hand, requires much less strain as my eyes only have to take in the ambient light and not be staring directly into a high-nit source.

I normally set the brightness of displays so that they are similar to the brightness of the environment (which is the general recommendation for ergonomics). Similar to how bright a piece of white paper would appear in that environment. I’m thus usually not “staring directly into a high-nit source”, regardless of the display technology.

The problem with e-ink is that their “white” is light gray instead of white, and their “black” is gray instead of black.

I've got a Remarkable 2. I use it primarily for note taking and planning. Sometimes I need to move large chunks of notes around on the screen and reorganize things. The refresh rate becomes a real problem there. Also I often use the infinite vertical scroll, and scrolling up and down is a pain in the ass. Because of the refresh rate (I assume?) scrolling is limited to half pages and it's very slow.

I have a remarkable 1. The refresh rate certainly keeps up with writing. It's just a bit slow if you want to hit next page a bunch of times in a row.

Yeah, paging can be a little slow. I use mine for reading through PDFs and it's fine for the most part. I think it might partially be poorly optimized software, not necessarily the screen, but who knows.

I definitely wonder, the build is quite slim, I don't think the tech inside is that impressive.

> impressive

If electrophoretic displays were trivial to make, we would not be still developing the technology.

> My ReMarkable 2 has a perfectly fine refresh rate, especially for writing/drawing. Is yours the first gen maybe?

That's because it does not refresh the display when drawing - it transitions the pixels directly (it's called a direct update, or DU mode). I worked on the third-party SDK for this device (hi!) and the DU modes do suffer from ghosting (similar to e-ink monitors) until the display is properly refreshed to correct the charges in each pixel, but this ghosting is typically not too bad when drawing, especially since there is typically a full refresh whenever you zoom, pan, or switch pages.

We have had 12.5Hz with "A2 mode" since a long time.

And that display is a traditional B/W EPD with a colour filter on top, so it can use similar (fast and imprecise) "EPD waveforms" and yet have an effect of colour.

Not sure if this is the same product, but in my job I've met one of the researchers working on this tech. The screens they were able to produce had refresh rates high enough to watch a movie.

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