Eye comfort a priority for all-in-one desktop PC with color E Ink display | Hacker News Reader

Eye comfort a priority for all-in-one desktop PC with color E Ink display

newatlas.com

187 pointsclouddrover159 comments

This uses E Ink's Kaleido display, which uses colored pixels (subpixels) to create color. Subpixels are standard for emissive color screens, but for reflective screens they result in very dark images (and consequently very low contrast) compared to paper.

For example, to display a red image, the screen simply turns the green and blue subpixels black. So two thirds of the screen area is black and only one third is red. For printed paper the whole sheet would be red. And to display white, the subpixels can't turn white (they can only turn black), so they have to mix white from red, green and blue. So each subpixel only reflects around a third of the visible spectrum, while for white paper the whole area reflects all visible wavelengths. Making the colored Kaleido screen very dark in comparison.

The problem is well known. If you want acceptable contrast in a color e paper screen, you need a display technology which can change colors inside the pixels, not just the brightness. E Ink does have such technology, but it is very slow and offers only very few colors.

> E Ink does have such technology, but it is very slow and offers only very few colors.

The new displays demonstrated by Eink corporation this year have the complete color spectrum at perfect vibrance. But they are extremely slow, taking some 12 seconds for each refresh.

Those seem like an excellent replacement to the “billboard tv” you see in various buildings now

For day-time advertising they seem to be superior to anything, including high-quality print.

For night-time advertising, the advertisers will want the brightest possible display. A huge amount of insanely bright billboard screens have popped up in my neighbourhood recently, that are so bright as to become traffic dangers. Just waiting for them to be smashed by vandals, honestly.

Edit: Here are the new E Ink Spectra 6 displays I was talking about, pardon my Chinese:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7V2EFAcbtU

Apparently E Ink managed to move four different types of colored particles (white, cyan, magenta, yellow) through the fluid inside the pixels:

https://www.ineltek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ACeP-How-...

The cyan, magenta and yellow pigments are transparent like in inkjet printers. They are used to subtractively mix red, green, blue and black. The white particles are not transparent, so they block the rest when they are on top. So E Ink is able to create the eight primary colors:

https://technewsspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/1681215...

I'm not sure whether they are able to create other colors inside a pixel, but these eight are enough to create full color displays with dithering. But the problem seems to be the time required for separating the pigments. 12 seconds is absurdly long for a full refresh. I think the electrophoresis screen technology is fundamentally a dead end here. Moving solid particles in a fluid introduces drag, which will always be slow.

I thought the second generation "SMI" Mirasol screen technology by Qualcomm looked a lot more promising. It doesn't require subpixels and probably would have been fast like the first generation. Here is a video from 2014:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VMDaJB2y4vc

However, Qualcomm stopped investing in developing the technology shortly after it was shown. It would have worked by moving solids (MEMS) through the air instead of through a fluid, which doesn't introduce the drag problem present in E Ink's electrophoresis displays.

I wonder why they don't try layering a transparent LCD panel over an E-ink display. It seems like you could either intelligently turn it on and off when higher refresh rate and color are needed, or simply give the user the ability to turn it on and off manually for a lower power, easier on the eyes, mode that doesn't provide color.

The problem, at least indoors, is not emissive (LCD/OLED) vs. reflective (E-ink).

You can very closely simulate a reflective display using an emissive display and ambient light sensors. That's what Google's Nest Hub Max does, and it very often looks like a framed photo (i.e. reflective).

It's not like photons coming from an LED in a panel are more damaging than those same photons coming from an LED in the ceiling, that then reflects off of e-ink.

Outdoors, the problem is that transmissive displays are not bright enough to beat sunlight. That's where e-ink makes more sense, and where I think there could be a real health benefit (outdoor sunlight exposure, ability to focus at long distances).

Aren't LCD's not emmisive unless you put in a backlight? I assume that is what the parent meant.

Yes, there are transflective LCDs.

My angle is that we don't need complicated e-ink + LCD displays. Just make LCD less straining (reduce glare, automatically limit brightness).

Transflecrive are the best of both worlds. I don’t get why there aren’t that much interest in them?

For a start, colored ones suffer from the same darkening problem the OP was talking about.

But I also don't know why they aren't more explored. Grayscale ones would make for excellent e-readers. And you can always make the bottom layer both reflective and emissive, making the thing work well both outside and in a dark room.

My guess is that LCD just standardized on a level of quality, and you won't get anybody producing anything different.

The first e-book reader, the 1998 Rocket eBook, actually used a reflective LCD screen, similar to a calculator or an original Game Boy. The problem is that these screens are quite dark even in their monochromatic version (without subpixels). The reason is that LCDs require filters for polarized light, which block a large portion of the light even for "white" pixels. This is likely why the Rocket eBook failed. E-book readers only took off when Sony in 2006 introduced devices with an electrophoretic display made by E Ink, which had contrast approaching actual paper. But unfortunately that contrast only works when no color subpixels are involved.

At the time quite a few other e-paper screen technologies popped up which had much faster response times than E Ink's electrophoresis displays (Liquavista, Mirasol) and some even had (in theory) better potential to make subpixel-free color screens possible. Unfortunately none of them could quite match the contrast (and perhaps price?) of E Ink's monochromatic screens. Which was fatal, as e-readers were the main application of those screens, and those really only require a black-and-white image. So the other technologies were abandoned.

> meaning users are treated to a 25.3-inch Kaleido 3 E Ink screen

... yet the largest Kaleido screen size mentioned on E Ink's official website is 13.3-inch. And such screens most certainly don't have a ~60 Hz refresh rate like in the mockup video from the article.

So I'm a little skeptical here, to put it mildly.

60Hz is not mentioned anywhere on the Kickstarter page. That's just shoddy reporting AFAIK.

https://www.eink.com/news/detail/E-Ink-Launches-E-Ink-Kaleid...

> Available in sizes ranging from 13.3 inches to 42 inches, the latest E Ink Kaleido 3 Outdoor color ePaper technology will be showcased at Touch Taiwan 2023 from April 19-21, 2023.

> 60Hz is not mentioned anywhere on the Kickstarter page.

The article has a video showing smooth scrolling on the screen, which is completely impossible with current e-paper technology, unless there has been a recent revolution that I'm not aware of.

I was going to say, that "video" of the e-ink screen looks a LOT quicker to refresh than anything I've previously seen.

I remember seeing e-ink panel demos where the integrator claimed the usual slow refresh was a side effect of the low power requirements rather than a limitation of the panel. They claimed that a controller designed for fast refresh could show moving video on an e-ink panel. It kind of makes sense because you can address individual pixels in the panel and they can change state faster if you apply higher tensions. The trick is to refresh the whole panel at least 30 times per second.

You can also fool the human brain by rendering motion blur.

15fps already looks kinda cool on eink, even with the ghosting artifacts. Not that I'd recommend watching movies like that, but still. Harry Potter newspaper in reach. :)

This is true on black and white eink displays.

But for color, I'm not so sure.

you are incorrect.

As mentioned at the top of the article, Dasung launched an Indiegogo campaign for a 25.3" color e-ink monitor recently, so the display module exists: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-color-world-fir... I'd agree about the refresh rate; the refresh rate seems fairly low in Dasung's promo video for it and the campaign description seems to lack any mention of refresh rate.

The refresh rate of this display was somewhat demonstrated in this[0] LTT video on the KickStarter display.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZXrJRpA0Jw

Do you consider this LTT video truthful and worth a watch? After their recent bruhaha on the tubes I have pretty much stopped looking at them. The content is arrogant and dismissive, generally low quality. I try to avoid sources that are known for factual errors and biases towards entertainment/charisma over nuance. A bit sad.

I would consider it truthful though worth depends on what you want to get out of it. I see it as entertainement with some light information. The video basically is them playing around with the display and trying out the different refresh modes. This includes a light introduction on eink and color eink.

I did end up looking at the video and I agree that it was informative and the product spoke for itself.

>recent bruhaha on the tubes

I haven't kept up with LTT, what happened here to reduce your trust in their channel?

TL;DR people claim that there is a relentless pressure to push out content and therefore there are lots of benchmarks incorrect, factual problems and many problems where the correction is blended as a text instead of just cutting out incorrect stuff or reshooting lines.

There are also claims of undeclared interests and biased reviews, also some obvious assholery where for great fun and ignorance they destroy/sell/bash development samples from startups.

Just search for "ltt drama" on youtube and you see pages of tubers flaming it.

I haven't trusted LTT benchmarks or opinions for a while, and I don't plan on supporting them post-drama. That said, GP just posts a video where they use a relevant product in question, and I can see the operation for myself. I think that still contributes to the discussion and is a useful enough resource. Probably the monitor was hand-picked as one of the best-working ones, but this is the normal skepticism I approach any video showcasing a product sent by the manufacturer.

Whilst I understand the distrust of LTT, this user has posted a link yo a video demoing the display, and the downvotes aren't really useful here.

In the video, there is the phone-to-screen projection mockup, which is smooth and, imo absolutely fake, and cca one second where a developer is dragging the window from LCD to e-ink screen, and it shows the real frame rate, about 3–5 fps.

Even at 3fps, the process of repainting an eink/epaper display is unpleasant to look at - though at a microscopic level it's quite beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qIHCUWAgh4

Interesting, thanks. Unfortunately the combination of super annoying background sound and the totally weird voiceover drove me to close the tab about halfway through.

Is there any scientific research that shows clear evidence that e-ink screens are indeed better for eyes compared to LED screens in the same environment?

I have seen such claims for many years but don't remember ever seeing any research quoted, and couldn't find any myself in my previous search. As much as I would like to believe e-ink is better (as a long time Kindle user), I hope to see something more concrete.

What does "better for eyes" mean? Reading in poor lighting conditions doesn't harm the eyes, that's an unscientific myth from American parenting culture.

But e-ink screens can certainly be comfortably read in bright sunlight, where even the best OLED screens are practically unusable.

Whatever happened to transflective LCDs? I remember some Windows CE PDA devices had them. They were more visible in bright sunlight, and used a backlight, or sidelight, for use in the dark.

I guess they went away because their color fidelity wasn't so great in the dark, but they look absolutely amazing in sunlight.

Transflective LCDs, a.k.a. RLCDs, are currently being sold.

There are two iterations of Sun Vision Display's 32 inch monitor, and Eyemoo recently released an Android tablet with an RLCD sceen.

I have the Eyemoo Epaper S1, and an very happy with it, despite a manufacturing flaw that caused a few sparkly dust specs to be between the screen layers. I use it with the built-in frontlight at 10-20% strength which is a good compromise between brightness and comfort.

https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/ https://eyemootech.com/

Thickness is another drawback I think.

Panasonic used to use them in the Toughbook line, but their newer machines have switched to conventional LCDs with an extremely bright backlight. IMO it's an improvement - the newer LCD looks better in all but the most extreme outdoor lighting conditions.

Still used by GPSr units, like a bunch of Garmin models. Since they need to run for a day or more, permanently using a backlight (or OLED) is not as attractive.

Or their watches, which is part of what makes them able to have an always on display and hit e.g 20+d on my Fenix 7 (or more if you turn off continuous HR).

The comparable Epix has an AMOLED display and has to turn it off to achieve the same duration (always on turns it into ~1w)

Many Garmin smart/sport watches also use it. I have a watch with 7+ days battery time (10+ when I don't exercise / use GPS)

Transflective LCDs make sense when `ambient light level x LCD transmittance^2 x backlight layer reflectivity` is brighter than `brightest white LED x diffuser transmittance x LCD transmittance`. Transmittance for run of the mill LCDs is like 40% so the bar isn't that high. The left part of above formula means white level of transflective LCDs can be as low as 15-20% ambient white.

I think what happened was super-bright white LEDs replacing early LEDs and CCFL(Cold-Cathode Fluorescent Light) backlights. iPhone up to 3GS used transflectives, but LCD on 4 and later were transmissive. That was probably the point when cheap sunlight readable backlight became viable.

While it may not be reading specifically that is the problem, a lack of light exposure does promote myopia. https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2466239

> While it may not be reading specifically that is the problem

But that's specifically the claim, and it's hogwash. "Straining your eyes" doesn't damage them. Using your eyes in the dark doesn't damage them. Not using them enough in the light may damage them, according to the article you linked.

> But that's specifically the claim, and it's hogwash.

It's not hogwash. The issue is focusing to read in dim light causes the cilary muscle to contract to change the shape of the lens. For children, who are still developing, this can cause the shape of the eye to change while growing and lead to myopia- so the claim is not hogwash or unscientific myth as you previously stated.

Evidence?

The idea is much older than that. It's the reason Samuel Pepys stopped writing his famous diary in 1669: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys#After_the_diary

I’ve never seen this preference for e-ink over LCD anywhere outside of HN, and I still don’t understand what drives it. Is it some kind of phobia of emissive illumination?

I have my own problems with LCD: even modern displays have issues with uniformity and off-axis color rendition, but e-ink’s solution to those comes at a much greater cost of contrast and refresh rate.

> anywhere outside of HN

Did you forget the entire industry of ebooks and -readers?

It’s solving a battery life problem there, not an emissive-versus-reflective problem, unless you’re someone who likes to read outdoors.

I’m pretty sure 90-plus percent of the market has no preference for the tech over the LCDs of their tablets other than that they go for a long time on a single charge and the display never goes to sleep.

sorry, but [citation needed].

I highly doubt that what you say is true. When I go the homepage of e.g. Kobo e-readers, two of their four sales-points are that the reader is confortable on the eyes. Same for the kindle, where the first two points are "crisp..." and "comfortable on the eyes".

I'm not saying marketing is always right, but if all e-readers are selling their devises on the merits of "being easy on the eyes", you can't just say that's not a thing for people buying them.

Not anyone is looking for a constant stream of dopamine hits from their display.

Sometime to simplify, sit and ponder and save oneself from constant visual interruption is my main preference for e-ink displays.

'Modern' computing has become pretty much intolerable for work for me.

Any display that does not abuse my eyesight and can be passive like paper, is basically my go-to answer.

I do not tolerate having to re-read the sentence I'm looking at because the display looks smooth, but can't hold a static representation to save it's life. My sister's macbook is gorgeous, but impossible to read text. She doesn't read as much anymore.. because of this phenomenon.

Something about the display makes you stop seeing the line above and the line below the one you are currently reading, making it hard to hold a whole paragraph in your head, cause you're constantly re-scanning the same lines you didn't expect to drop. Like you're reading through a pinprick sized hole.

I find it much more tiring and unpleasant to read on a LED screen.

Maybe it's irrelevant for eye health, but that's enough reason to prefer e-ink.

Afaict the eink screens just reflect light, so if you just set the brightness of your LED display to a suitable setting, you should be fine. Unless you are using your screen outdoors.

Easier said than done if your main source of light during the day is the sun through a window.

Ok, perhaps that is the problem then ...

The Sun casting changing light/shadows during the day can be a source of eye strain.

I've always found it substantially more comfortable.

I have used an e-ink phone for messaging and reading for a few years. It really helped with occasional headaches and the general eye strain.

Switching back to a regular OLED phone (because of OS/firmware security), I noticed eye strain again, after just a few days of use.

Usability in sunlight and battery endurance are real advantages I miss.

Waiting for a big manufacturer to design and market a secure eInk phone, targetting the people who prioritize messaging/reading/navigation over TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the like.

They are smart enough not to make any medical claim. They just say it is more comfortable and "easy" on the eyes. It is subjective, and many people agree.

They don't talk about eyestrain, fatigue, sleep disruption, headaches or eye diseases. These are objectively measurable and would take scientific studies, and I think the evidence of e-ink being better from a medical standpoint is limited.

Your threshold for clear evidence may vary. I found several studies, including an attempt at a randomized trial measuring the effects of screen use on the optical surface:

http://doi.org/10.1111/cts.12933 "Effects on the Ocular Surface from Reading on Different Smartphone Screens", Yuan, K. et al, 2020

A few other studies found differing effects on blink rate and visual fatigue from different screens.

http://doi.org/10.1097/OPX.0000000000001616 "How do Different Digital Displays Affect the Ocular Surface", Talens-Estarelles, C. et al, 2020

In this case, screen size was also associated with detrimental effects, with larger screens generally performing worse, and smartphones similar in effect to the e-reader. This may partially account for some hitherto unexplained preference for smartphones over computers among some users. The e-reader was better than the tablet, but not better than the smartphone.

The earliest study to show any effect was Benedetto et al, focusing on visual fatigue, which has been widely cited:

http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083676 "E-Readers and Visual Fatigue", Benedetto, S. et al, 2013.

At least one study found statistically insignificant effects, though the e-reader showed mostly improved (but insignificant) test results, which does not weigh against the existence of an effect:

http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-1313.2012.00928.x "Reading on LCD vs e-Ink displays: effects on fatigue and visual strain", Siegenthaler, E. et al, 2012.

Siegenthaler et al do not measure effects on the ocular surface; such effects seem to have reached scientific interest only in the late 2010s. Also, the difference between e-Ink and LCD peak luminance in Siegenthaler was only 10%; the ratio of ambient to screen luminance has been observed to mediate the relationship between screen usage and eye strain:

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2020.101943 "Influence of ambient-tablet PC luminance ratio on visual fatigue", Yu, H. and Akita, T. 2020.

While I attempted to find any high-quality studies, positive or negative, available looking at the relationship between screen type and eye strain, my interpretation of the data likely reflects (hah!) my strong intuition that shining a light directly into your eyes is bad.

Man I want this to be real so bad. I love e-ink and if I can have a monitor JUST for VSCode/programming, I'm sold.

The guy scrolling CNN vertically looks like a scam, but the lady sitting reading CNN horizontally looks much more real. There's some ghosting in the lady's scroll as one would expect. Guessing like 20 Hz?

Def want to see a longer, "real" video across a wider range of stuff.

I'm highly skeptical this will produce, so I'll wait after kickstarter for this for sure.

Why is vertical monitor a scam? i'm reading this now on 27inch apple studio oriented vertically. It's really good as code editor screen

They mean that the frame rate/responsiveness of that particular video shot is faked.

personally I think it's because it feels like that both the screen and the Iphone screens are edited on. Also, it feels like the finger flick scroll is too instant, I believe flick scrolling in Safari does not stop instantly but slowly slows down until it stops (unless it can be disabled). I could totally be wrong though.

other sibling comments got it, the video/gif of the vertically orientation looks like it's photoshopped/video edited; faked.

there's no scroll lag between devices, nor image ghosting.

They're talking about an e-ink being capable of that level of performance. You'd expect ghosting and noticable artifacts on the screen. E-ink is super slow.

It is 12 Hz, not 20 Hz.

Bigme has been a player in the niche eink tablet market for a while now, so it's likely real, or at least not a complete scam. The fake marketing videos in the Kickstarter are atrocious, though. I would say Dasung and Onyx Mira are the popular brands for eink monitors. If you only want greyscale, those two have decent options available today. It seems like this larger color eink panel just became available, which is why you see both Dasung and Bigme building products around it now.

Makes sense about the color displays just coming onto market.

that's traditionally what's kept me from exploring for coding. lack of colors is a nightmare in code reading.

For me, I find color distracting. I prefer shades of the same color and typography for code highlighting.

I still remember Apple’s Pascal on early Macs with monochrome screens and it did wonders with 1 bit per pixel.

Can you share a config or at least an example for your code highlighting setups? I've always relied on colors because I can't imagine a typography-based highlighter that doesn't use (the atrocious to me in monospace code) italics.

Sure. I’ll find a couple examples I have.

ping?

it's not a scam. the tradeoff is bad ghosting.

I don't see any bad ghosting in the video/animation in article/kickstarter. It is a scam since it is something they can't deliver yet collecting money for.

I'm intrigued by the concept of a color e-ink display, though I'm not particularly drawn to all-in-one systems.

It wouldn't be surprising if Onyx releases a color variant of their Mira Monitors soon. In my experience, Onyx devices tend to lead the pack in the e-ink domain.

As for the 13.3-inch Mira model, it currently operates at a peak power of 6W, which means it can be powered via a standard laptop's USB-A/B/C port. Notably, the latest Raspberry PI 5 can deliver 8-9W through its USBs. This suggests I could utilize a single USB-C cable to power both computer and monitor. Then I use a short USB 3.0 cable transfer power and video signal to the monitor.

This could be an efficient portable setup. The e-ink display performs impressively under direct sunlight, and paired with a typical power bank, one might not need to charge for up to two days.

I love this. shame it's kickstarter stage only.

There's a real lack of anti-glare displays outside of a few thinkpads. I was even considering purchasing one of those huiwon art tablets to use as my monitor because it's a fully matte display.

The Macs are particularly bad reflecting almost like mirrors. I'm not a fan of ultra-hi DPI super glare reflective displays at all.

Macs used to have nice matte displays in the Power era, but now the only matte display they make is the “nano texture” upgrade to the Studio/Pro displays. Only $300 or $1000!? dollars more.

thanks, was not aware of those.

It’s a $300 upgrade.

And it’s quite remarkable; my home desk is in direct sunlight until about noon, and yeah, the Nano-texture is totally visible in what are objectively the “worst” conditions for a screen, never reflects at any time of day.

I have other issues with the display (the camera is as bad as everyone says, and… a display with an OS? So dumb) but the screen at least really is All That.

1000$ update for 32 inch screen.

I guess for a a MacBook that would be like a 150$ upgrade, too bad it doesn’t seem to exist

I've heard it's much blurrier looking than the standard glass https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/buyer-beware-nano-texture-s...

You'd need pretty extraordinary vision to tell. My vision is pumped up to 20/18 with my glasses and it looks better than the retina Macbook Pro that sits right next to it (thanks to the lack of gloss).

I have a kaleido3 e reader and I like it but I do not understand how they will overcome the limitations of the panel with “xRapid”

My tablet is the boox ultra tab c. I’ve put about 350 hours of reading into it since I bought it in July. It’s pretty handy for reading manga, comics, and books. It’s a bit heavy but the screen is nice, the battery lasts a while. E ink color is a mixed bag. I like having it but I can definitely see how it would not be for everyone. I have major eye issues that make back and front lighting physically uncomfortable after about 45-60 minutes so this is a good way for me to be able to read ebooks. The color can’t compare to oled but it’s still pretty decent; I liken it to newsprint.

That all said the refresh rate and ghosting issues are noticeable. I use it purely as an ereader and still notice it. When I first got it I played around with a few games, YouTube, Firefox, etc and found them very difficult to seriously use most of the time.

Boox has an option to put a button on the screen to force a screen refresh for when you notice ghosting. This is mildly annoying but workable for ebooks. I wish they would allow you to just make a setting on page turns. For some reason they really don’t want that page turn screen flash even if you turn it on manually so they begrudgingly force it into a button that you press as needed. But that’s where I question the validity of this project: when you force the refresh of the screen it once again looks beautiful and the ghosting is solved. However, this is a relatively slow process. The full refresh takes a noticeable amount of time approaching a full second, maybe even over a full second. So they aren’t just doing that, obviously.

Everything else I’ve seen from boox that increases the refresh rate greatly increases ghosting. Like insanely and very noticeably. From what I’ve read this is not a boox issue. Other vendors, including bigme, have the same problem with kaleido3 panels and modes that do not force a full refresh. So I have to assume their “xRapid” is probably a lot of hype. I hope it’s not, and I hope it inspires boox and other vendors to improve the software of their products, but I genuinely believe this is a limitation of the panels

Long story short I’m betting the people who buy these will be pretty disappointed. Maybe I’m wrong and bigme is about to seriously overcome the issues these panels have seen to date but I certainly wouldn’t bet my $1800 on it

I have one too and while it's great to just OK for the use cases I purchased it for but I can't feel but disappointed in myself for the price. For me it was similarly intentional to get avoid a media consumption device and encourage reading.

For anyone whose considering a the highlight is the pen: it works great so I am writing notes on call and then sync them to my phone easily, I read articles/pdf textbook chapters and annotate,and sketch with a android app. Other tablets have nice pens but it works well here.

The downside: smaller text in periodicals like Boston globe, retrogamer, or guardian weekly through pressreader is on the edge of readability without zooming in. Regal/ultra settings don't do anything in the app.

The screen itself is limited: without forcing a refresh any images are quite artefacted. If you have it on ultra/regal mode the automatic regular refresh is jarring.

I suspect the next generation of this tech or 2" bigger screen will solve the issue but this ain't it for ~$1000 cdn all in.

Any suggestions for software? Eink bro is a better eink browser than the ones you mention. Press reader, sketchbook, read by qxmd I find work great.

Well I use it almost exclusively as a reader. I genuinely think that’s why I’m happier with it; I don’t know why boox, bigme, et al keep trying to sell these screens as tablet/phone replacements. I just don’t think the panels are ready for that

The main apps I use as a result are Tachiyomi, the included boox neoreader, and kuro reader for vertical scrolling and some formats neoreader struggles with. Because of my vision problems I have things zoomed in and text size pretty large so smaller text is not really an issue.

Do you use the nav ball? I have that setup with the force refresh button and that’s made quite a difference for me. Having that on screen at all times so I can quickly refresh the screen is the biggest help regardless of app or setting.

I am kind of hoping for a firmware update too that could improve things a bit. If you play with adb you can increase and lower the color saturation and I’ve found that increasing the color saturation can improve the image quality. This is great for fixed images like reading where I do forced refreshes regularly because it also worsens image retention noticeably. But on the other hand you can reduce the color saturation which makes things a little less interesting to look at but does appear to improve the ghosting a bit. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/13ue3ip/guide_in... for info on the procedure. Whatever changes you make do not persist through reboot but I still wouldn’t go to crazy especially with pumping the saturation up. Hopefully boox releases a firmware that gives more options on this front. I’m not holding out a ton of hope here though, they don’t seem to release tons of updates for their products unfortunately

Thanks! I appreciate that. The lack of firmware/android updates really does hamstring their appeal.

Imagine if e-ink displays were as advanced as our current luminous displays:

- Outdoor offices would be possible (weather permitting). Levels of Vitamin D deficiency, rates of burnout, and spread of airborne illness would all plummet.

- Entire hackathons could take place in a shaded orchard or on a breezy pool deck.

- Sleep would improve across the office-bound workforce

Downsides:

- sunburns

- insects

- rain

- the Bay Area would become even more crowded

- random people running to your desk, grabbing your monitor and running away

> the Bay Area would become even more crowded

To be fair, you wouldn't need an "outdoor office". Everyone could stay remote and just work in their backyard.

Am I one of the few here who have already got an E Ink Display for coding?

I use Onyx Boox 13,3" Boox Mira.

But the refresh rate can be an issue.

Mouse dragging feels so different that I prefer not to use the mouse and only rely on keyboard.

If it fits your workflow then the refresh rate won't be an issue.

I tried using the Onyx Boox Max Lumi 13.3" as a monitor and did not like it. Too much ghosting.

Onyx BOOX Max Lumi (a rev or two earlier than yours), also 13.3".

Changing the display mode can have a big impact on display quality / refresh rates, though unfortunately it is a trade-off.

I much prefer apps and activities which focus on whole-screen rewrites or paginated navigation. Termux does reasonably well, all told, but I'd probably not be as happy with a GUI desktop unless it were a fairly static tiled window manager, and largely keyboard-driven.

Refresh rates under speedier display modes can display video, though it's hardly stellar quality. More an "it's there if you really need it" than a "this will sell you on the device" thing.

(Notetaking capabilities are more the latter --- I'd had really no interest in that when purchasing my tablet, it's turned out to be quite useful and usable.)

General principles for e-ink displays: Persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are expensive, viewability increases rather than decreases as ambient lighting increases, and colours are usually nonexistent or at best limited when available at all.

I would buy one once they're in stock instead of a Kickstarter pledge. Another thing is their goal is too low (HK $50k) compared with the product's cost (~ HK $11k), why bother with Kickstarter project?

Easy grift.

Yeah, going with Kickstarter with a goal that low is pretty sus. Either they have no idea how much this is going to cost, or, more likely, they already have the product and this is basically a preorder but you have less recourse if they don't deliver.

Seeking an eInk display I would rather opt for an animation-free lo-fi UI than a fast-refresh display. And probably limit the whole colour palette to a humble number of colours. It's not just the eyes, the whole nervous system is overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles.

Why all-in-one? The PC component is just going to get outdated, and the whole thing will be a waste?

There's a monitor-only option for $400 less. It's in the article: "Backers looking for a color E Ink monitor only can also find a B251 version on the project page, with pledges starting from $1,299."

Here's a hypothetical EU directive: Ban all-in-one computing devices that don't also function as dumb monitors. Set a maximum screen size to exclude phones and things with built-in secondary screens.

Apparently the refresh rate is "xRapid", whatever that means.

It means it's faster than xSlow ;)

They should use a clearer designation, like the USB folks.

xFull, xHi, xSuper, etc.

There's an rLCD 32" monitor from a vendor called Sun Vision, at roughly the same price. They usually make outdoor signage displays, but recently decided to produce a desktop monitor too. I spent some time researching it a few months back, but didn't end up buying it because there's no way to test it before buying where I live (only in the UK where they have a sales rep).

Reportedly, rLCD looks spectacularly good in bright sunlight. It also doesn't have the ghosting and low FPS issues that eInk displays (still) have. Its resolution might be lower than eInk (equivalent of full HD IIRC), but that's hard to compare I guess. Anyway, rLCD seems like a more promising solution to eyestrain to me - with enough ambient lighting, those are almost equivalent to a normal display.

Is it lit from behind still though?

Also - FHD is really dreadful on a 14” screen - I can’t imagine it’s going to be anything but on a 30~

IIRC think it’s front lit. About the resolution - I agree, that could be bad.

It looks like this is the product: https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/product/The-NEW-rE-Monitor-...

Note that it says in the US and UK, you can send it back. They don't mention any return costs, but you can definitely try it out.

I think I wouldn’t get import taxes back, so that would probably cost €300 (incl shipping) just for trying out.

These panels have a typical refresh rate of 12 Hz (yes, that is with the xRapid refresh tech). This infomercial for their kickstarter never mentions this, but yet they lie about eyecomfort pretending this is suitable for video and webbrowsing.

If would be so cool if one day they could invent a combined lcd/e-ink display. Like for text and stuff I want e-ink, and for the rest I want something more traditional.

You mean a Transflective LCD like the $100 OLPC XO laptop used?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

Is it one more case where a good technology was killed by incumbents fearing disruption?

Their tech seemed solid and a good match for tablets such as the Kindle Fire family that tries to overlap tablets and e-readers.

There was an article here about using boring technology and how you have a limited number of "innovation tokens" you can use before you get overwhelmed.

The OLPC is a very clear example. The idea of a completely innovative product, with an innovative distribution, an innovative application, for an innovative education method brought way too many small failures. It's incredible that they even managed to put all of the technical innovations together at some point.

Thinking a bit more on this, the PixelQi display didn’t have a use case where it was clearly the best option. You could use it reflectively, but, then, it was grayscale only (because the colors come from the backlight) while, when used transmissively, the colors seemed washed out because the prisms didn’t separate RGB components completely enough, unlike the filters used in pure transmissive LCDs.

A bummer, really. It was a nice technology.

As was the XO, BTW. I have the feeling they should have started with rich countries. My daughter’s school is pushing for Windows laptops for students running mostly Office stuff and OneNote instead of paper notebooks.

I was a huge fan of the OLPC XO-1. Wonderfull tech that sadly didn't make a bigger splash.

That's one of the many sad instances of roads not taken in computing.

What eye confort problem does this solve that is not achievable with a Transflective LCD with actual normal refresh rates?

Specially for the Desktop segment where battery autonomy is not an issue it feels that e-ink doesn't solve anything that an RLCD wouldn't. The main issue is our lack of offer in the transflective segment for 'mostly reading' displays.

Isn't the low refresh rate in any eInk display the real problem? Sure, you're gonna get crispy still pictures, but in motion you're gonna get something that compares unfavorably to the ghosting/smearing of a first-generation GameBoy?

At least that was a common topic every time an eink monitor has been discussed over the years (and there were quite a few), which made them suitable for only a pretty narrow range of use cases. Still pretty decent for those, but that animation of the person sliding up the news page without any lag/ghosting is dishonest at best and outright fraudulent at worst. (And that one comes from the Kickstarter campaign, so it's the manufacturer themselves that are lying, not the news reporting.)

“Eye comfort” requires qualification. E-ink contrast is so low that manufacturers are careful to not mention the actual contrast ratio (generally in the low two-digits to 1). Depending on individual eyesight, that can be quite straining.

Depends, a backlit e-ink display is actually quite easy on the eyes. I'm middle aged and I should get reading glasses but haven't yet. Basically, the backlight creates enough contrast that I can easily read the text. I tend to read late at night when my eyes are tired as well.

However, unlike LED screens, the contrast comes from the light reflecting on the display, so the more light, the better it gets. You can use e-ink screens comfortably in the blazing sun wearing sun glasses. Even the best LED screens struggle to deliver enough contrast under those circumstances.

Yes, I can only (semi-)comfortably read e-ink with backlighting, but then I may as well use LCD or OLED, with the extra benefits those bring. OLED in particular is great for reading at night (light text on pitch-black background).

Actually E-ink contrast is very good if enough light reaches the E-ink display, the problem is that to add color to an E-ink display you need to add an LCD layer to it so you can change the colors. Many e-readers then also add a digitizer for touch screen capabilities.

Each of these layers added on top of each other reduces the amount of ambient light that will reach the E-ink layer reducing the brightness of the white parts of the display, thus lowering the contrast. To compensate for this you need to add LED lighting to illuminate the display which increases eye strain and requires adding a diffuser layer which, you guessed it, lower the contrast.

Compare an e-reader from back in the early days without all these extra layers to a modern e-reader and you'll see just how much the contrast has degraded over the years if you don't have the LED lighting turned on.

Unlike emissive display technologies, E-ink maintains contrast in well lit environments.

On a sunny day, my Kindles and ReMarkable are a joy to use outside, while my Pixel needs it's OLED cranked up all the way to be visible.

In low light environments things reverse. OLED emits light per pixel and cannot be beat, while E-ink backlights are kinda fuzzy (reminds me of the old LCD clock/watch backlights). That being said, for reading static text it's perfectly adequate, and I tend to prefer the distraction-free nature of the Kindle.

the qualification is probably "use a reading light indoors"

I like reading on an e-ink reader - in a chair with a reading lamp. (but this is in my lap, not trying to be a desktop environment)

This looks like a scam.

My first thought also. The refresh rate has got to be shit and the kid holding the phone and scrolling the eInk just smells of false advertising.

Why ? Bigme already have an history of e-ink based products and the proposition is not that new : Dasung and Onyx are already proposing E-ink monitor in the same price range.

To be honest, I even fail to see what is new in the Bigme proposition vs the Onyx Mira for instance. But I don’t see this as a scam. Except that they carefully avoid talking about refresh rate but it’s now easy to judge the Onyx Mira Pro and Dasung monitors refresh rates on YouTube reviews : they are mostly garbage and they require you to adjust your workflow but then again nothing new here.

I would be entirely happy with a 300ppi greyscale e Ink screen which has at least A4 dimensions. With USB-C input for power and video. Possibly just using DisplayLink instead of a video connection, as speed is not an issue.

A matte finish panel for a 13-14 inch laptop what I'm waiting for. For me, e-ink's killer use case is full sunlight / outdoor use.

I'm so annoyed that the ThinkBook Plus Gen 4 Intel [1] has a layer of glossy glass. So close on that one, but no.

[1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkbook/thinkbook-p...?

Using Vivid on my M1 Macbook Pro 16" makes it quite usable for dev work in full sunlight. Vivid brings the overall brightness to about 1000 nits. Screen tends to get quite warm though, and even more so in direct sunlight.

I anticipate that using the mouse will be... awkward. In the demo video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c44sawX5WIE, it's very clear that the frame rate is... low.

If I don't set up my display correctly, it'll run at 30fps. (Large 4k TV that accepts HDMI.) It's very hard to use a mouse at that refresh rate. Scrolling web sites is annoying.

I just lowered the refresh rate to 24fps and the mouse is noticeably janky.

I just don't see this as a viable option for plug and play usage in a modern desktop environment.

Something like this could be used with a bespoke UI optimised around office productivity.

In such an environment, complete screen changes (such as after clicking next) don't need to be instant, and minor text changes as well as mouse movements can be fast enough.

But that's not the software stack we built for the world - so what's the use case here?

I'm not so sure. I used to use a 30Hz display while waiting for a driver update (was a 4k early adopter), and I found programming with a 33ms key latency to be maddening. Even 60Hz feels slow if you've used higher refresh rate devices. (I wrote a toy editor with imgui and tried it on my 360Hz monitor vs. my 60Hz monitor and the smoothness was wonderful; high refresh is good for more than just shooting people in a game, though that's why I have that particular monitor.)

e-ink displays are nice, but I wonder if it's just because how contrast works? The software asks for #000000 text on a #FFFFFF background, and with e-ink, that's maybe a handful of stops apart. But if you do that on an HDR display, maybe it's twice as many stops apart. The solution might be to ask for #555555 text on a #AAAAAA background, or something like that. (I dark mode everywhere, so I'd do the opposite. In fact, I do do that, my terminal background is not black, and my text is not white. I pick like grey10 and grey90.)

> I'm not so sure. I used to use a 30Hz display while waiting for a driver update (was a 4k early adopter), and I found programming with a 33ms key latency to be maddening

Because of stupid software licences, I have to work a lot in remote desktop when I'm working from home. So I work with latency while typing all the time. It was maddening in the beginning, but I got used to it quickly.

I think the key is that you have to be able to touch-type without relying on close-loop feedback. If your error rate is low enough, you quickly learn to trust your fingers. After that, all you need to relearn is cursor positioning - you can't hold down arrow keys (or HJKL in vim) ever. It forced me to rely on moving the cursor x words/paragraphs at a time, and to use the mouse a little more.

Just because the individual pixels have a Xhz frequency, doesn't mean that the whole screen has to - depending on how you do updates.

I could, for example, update a different quarter of the screen at (4 * X)hz, which would introduce a bit of temporal blurring, but would normalise reasonably fast.

With something like a cursor movement, they're often blurry anyway and it's not really an issue. With text entry you can drop your latency, but changes would fade in (in quarters like everything else).

You wouldn't have to go with 2 * 2 updates, the larger the blocks the more quickly the fade in would start, but also the blurrier the screen would appear.

Of course, the smaller the pixel size you're working with, the larger the block size you could reasonably use before things start looking too bad.

I think it would be kind of cool to do a command line terminal type laptop with e-ink. I feel like most of the drawbacks of e-ink would go away in a terminal. B&W? Totally fine. Slow refresh? Who cares, it is probabky going to have less latency than my ssh connection, and maybe i misunderstand but i think e-ink can go faster if it doesn't have to redraw the whole screen.

lenovo's thinkbook might be a good option if the lcd can be fully powered off.

usable outside, i'd guess terrific battery life, and easy on the eyes.

This is a pc display that has to be experienced for yourself. On the website this display looks no different from other displays.

This seems like a really good idea for stuff like plain text editing and simple static web browsing. Though I would rather wait for a namebrand like onyx to jump on the color caleido screens for a desktop display. Low framerate really does not bother me as t much as long as it is above 15 or so frames.

So xFast == notFast == slow, obviously.

But without a clear spec, how can I know its not too xFast, before ordering one?

It is cool tech, and anyone wanting/needing a nice screen like that won't mind slow to a point, but still want to know what that means.

You have to go through a few clicks (I can still barely find references) but I found:

"China's Bigme, which was recently the first to launch with E Ink's Gallery 3 color ePaper technology, has announced a follow up to its S6 Color enote that comes with a Kaleido 3 display and a snappy 12-fps refresh rate."

12.

Snappy.

On the one hand, yeah, for some uses. But they might want to mention that earlier on...

I got one of Samsung's "The Frame" art TVs with similar tech [0], and am planning on reframing it with an ornate wood frame. [1]

I outfitted three large flatscreens in my home with ornate frames. One with dielectric mirror glass as well. They look fantastic as a mirror or a screen.

Hiding the hard edge of the TVs under beautiful frames gives an impression of nice furniture instead of tech. Hard to describe, but the rooms feel more old-world and relaxing to be in.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs/the-frame/highlights/

[1] https://www.pictureframes.com/ornate-black-and-gold-wood-pic...

12 fps is blindingly fast compared to some of the early color eInk displays which took 20-30 seconds to update -- while wildly cycling through different colors.

Still, doesn't mean I'd want to use it as a computer display.

Oh for sure, I expected 3. I'm amazed it works at all.

But for each different purpose it might as well be easily found as a spec.

I'd use that for a phone display, to be honest.

My eInk triton display from _two decades_ ago did around 10 fps. On paper kaleido has more contrast but it is barely noticeable and still crappy overall.

There has been no large improvement in eInk for years.

And I dont remember any eInk display that took 30 seconds for a refresh, except maybe the large scale (advertisement) ones.

> I dont remember any eInk display that took 30 seconds for a refresh

This was specifically some of the early multicolor displays which had exceptionally long refreshes. There's a demonstration of a similar display going through a couple of updates here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ12-eW7--M

ACEP is not one of the "early" ones, it's actually one of the latest ones!

I'm honestly still mystified as to whether you have super insider access or if I'm just confused, but maybe you can explain.

From my own memory of when I was able to buy things, from my memory of the state of eInk technology based on very few degrees of separation from the inventors, and from my ability to research online the first commercialized eInk device was the Motorola F3 on 28 November 2006.

It was not color.

I worked in a lab that had original prototype eInk displays almost exactly two decades ago. None of them were color in any case, it was obvious 20 years ago that the technology would be exceptionally hard to make use color because of the use of distinct pigments and relying on electrostatics. There's just only one kind of electric charge, it's hard to make that selectable. I'm honestly shocked they can hit 13 FPS.

You are indeed missing something. In all the screens we are discussing here (triton, kaleido, etc), there are no distinct color pigments. They are just standard "black and white" pigment over a color filter. The result is as terrible as you'd expect (low contrast and 1/3 resolution).

Also, a mobile phone as the first eink device? Where did you even find that? The sony readers at the very mininum are much older.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining, that makes sense. Yeah, sounds pretty bad.

I found it via Wikipedia link chain since I didn't know the date and my memory was only that I couldn't buy it. It was merely the first phone with it, my bad.

Indeed the Sony Reader seems to have been 2004. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reader

Though to be honest that isn't actually at my threshold for "much" but it is earlier.

I really want one of these eink monitors but the price has to come down. I totally see the appeal and have lots of use cases in mind but I just can't justify the cost yet.

This looks spectacular for Emacs. I don't need more than 5fps.

Framerate is one thing, but you should consider typing latency. At 5fps, you get an average of 200ms of extra latency from the display alone, on top of everything else (keyboard, OS, application, GPU, etc).

https://aresluna.org/keyboard-secrets/typing-delay/

EDIT: oh and remember, you're going to get an awful lot of perceptible jitter, depending on how close to the exact time of refresh you've hit the key.

Just like back in the days you did server admin over dialup. I'd say vi is more suited to high latency though.

E-ink is a bit funny with refresh rates. An entire display can take a long time but a character cell can actually be pretty quick, and they aren't tied to a clock rate. However, connecting it to Windows graphic drivers may make it hard to have that kind of incremental update.

Indeed, which makes me hopeful it will at one point be viable to DIY a cheap, low-wattage computing/hacking device, based around an SBC or a beefy MCU. I haven't done a full sweep of the e-ink landscape in a while, but the consensus a couple years ago was that all the low-latency solutions are still on the expensive side (you're better off with a regular screen).

I'd still stick to: 30-40 min of LED monitor with 1-2 min eye break, where I look further to relax my muscles.

Also: flux for when you can't/won't sleep.

I'm skeptical not of the claims but of the usability long-term, tablets like the BOOX Tab Ultra C look great but they commit to violating the GPL rather than giving users a chance to mess with the internals.

I've been loosely following the works of Wenting Zhang and their modos.tech which have a fully open hardware controller that can run at 60FPS[1] with 1bit BW and still seem pretty decent latency-wise with grayscale on[2]. Sadly most of their public activity nowadays seem to be on building a DIY MILC camera so don't know if we're ever going to see a full version of this.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XduK7wn9SE4 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=480xteW2wq4

The best eye comfort is being outside in nature without computers.

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