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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

That is impressive.

Though personally, I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments. Just setting the brightness at a decent value gives a good enough contrast; after all an e-ink display just reflects light so if the ambient lighting is constant you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness. I think the scrolling issues of e-ink would be a much greater source of eye strain and discomfort.

You can also use an off-white color as a background. Like HN does! It gives a similar feel as paper.

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Power usage could be a huge factor. Modern LED/OLED panels can get bright enough to fight the sun, but pay for that.

I'd love to see what this thing can do with a mobile processor and a laptop battery. I bet you could get days of battery life.

Yes, although people probably want to use a normal monitor when at their office.

> I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments.

Yes, but that is a huge deal. I consider it one of the biggest life changers that will come for a large part of the population. We've built our lives around the limitations of emissive displays. What if you didn't need to shield out the sun to be able to do office type jobs? What if the boss in the field on a work site could just sit down where they are when he needs to do some computer stuff and be able to show designs to his workers without having to bring all inside a room or go make prints?

I think it also depends greatly on where you are. For Europeans, e-ink might not be so interesting, since it's dark and cold there. And when the sun actually shines, they are on holiday anyway. But for places with a lot of sunshine, e-ink will change a lot of things. That might mean we'll have to let go of scrolling as a paradigm. But let's face it: scrolling only became the default because of bad UI choices and lazy designers. Paper moved from scrolls to pages eons ago.

Maybe you could put ambient sensors all around the monitor and simulate the effects of lighting on paper?

Or you could use the front camera, and you could even have 3D effects, so a real world light could be reflected in shiny stuff on screen, and cast shadows for non-flat content, etc.

> you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness

This is the kind of thing I would expect my monitor to do for me (unless I manually override it). Brightness AND color (so, cooler during day, when the sun is shining through the windows, warmer at night, when the lightbulbs try to approximate incandescent lighting).

I wrote software to at least adjust brightness: https://len.falken.directory/backlight-auto.html

If you're lucky, your monitor can be controlled over HDMI or DisplayPort commands.

Matching the room brightness is exactly why I wrote it and because I wanted a nearly-dependency-free binary.

This is a great idea.

However keep in mind that sun shining through the window, even if natural, can be a source of eye strain too.

Strange as it sounds, I prefer the constant lighting of the fluorescent lamps in my office.

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