Ask HN: Why no transflective LCD portables? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why no transflective LCD portables?

58 pointsnetworked53 comments

There hasn't been a notable portable computer with a transflective LCD display since the OLPC XO. Is the technology simply worse than e-ink that it doesn't get as much attention?

View on HN

The Daylight DC-1 was discussed earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834

Oh, I heard the name, but I thought it was an e-ink device. Thanks for telling me.

My understanding is that this uses a reflective display (like an old calculator), not a transflective display.

It's indeed an RLCD, but an atypical one with microperforations for the backlight, rather than transreflective. See one of the comments from one of the Daylight employees in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834

As a person who still wishes he could really replace his Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110, it pains me to note that:

- they're dim (in comparison to an otherwise equivalent display)

- they don't showroom well (because they're dim)

- marketing them is difficult --- not many folks are willing to pay a premium to avoid the need to do the "hipster dance" and shade their screen (or just wait a bit to use their device)

The ideal would be for a retailer to set up a daylight viewing booth in all their spaces (expensive) and then convince folks to test/compare devices in what is essentially a suntan booth (health implications).

I wish that someone would revisit the Lenovo Yogabook which had a secondary e-ink display as keyboard/drawing area/e-ink tablet as a reasonable compromise.

EDIT: I will note that there are (or were?) some such devices available from specialty suppliers for nautical use, or in rugged devices intended for use on construction sites.

I would also note that mass market display technologies are just getting so good. If you want a display that performs well in direct sunlight conditions with good battery efficiency mini-LED has you covered.

These niche displays are offering less and less benefit compared to more mass-produced display technologies as time goes on.

All of the upsides of transreflexive displays that are downsides for other displays can be overcome with a $10 battery pack, or by doing things like making the processing and LED backlighting/OLED displays more power efficient.

How is transflexive LCD going to compete with emerging technologies like tandem OLED in terms of overall picture quality, brightness, and certainly having reasonable enough power efficiency? If you can surf the web for 10 hours without plugging in your iPad Pro what aspect of a transflexive LCD device is going to convince you to give up the best looking display on the market?

Being able to see the screen at the beach in full, bright, direct sunlight?

Are there any devices currently rating 2,000+ nits?

In the past, my comment has always been, "Trying to outbright the sun on a battery-powered device is a stupid strategy" --- what device would you suggest trying to change my mind?

> Are there any devices currently rating 2,000+ nits?

Wonderfully chosen limit, as the newest iPhone model now has a 2,000 nit screen.

I will accept that as meeting the specified criteria (which is what seems to be necessary to be visible in bright, direct sunlight).

Will look forward to trying that when someone I know gets one, and look forward to the replacement for my Galaxy Note 10+ having a similar screen.

The iPad 12.9” with double-stacked OLEDs is very good, but not as bright as miniLED. 1000 bits typical and 1600 in high brightness mode, says Apple. Of course that mode won’t last super long in the heat, on battery. I’m not sure what good portable bright miniLEDs exist.

Cheap E Ink readers are such a natural fit for sun and sand.

And yep - iPhone 15 and up have 1000 nits typical, 2000 in high brightness mode. Keep in mind it’s a logarithmic scale.

> essentially a suntan booth

Why would the booth need to emit UV light?

It wouldn't, but it would need to simulate full, bright, direct sunlight for a valid comparison --- is that possible w/o UV?

The lack of transflective and reflective display in common use is a mystery to me too -- while e-ink dominates on power usage and contrast, reflective and transflective displays (potentially) allow much greater pixel density and refresh rates, and the power requirements keep going down to the point where I think that they would be competitive.

Adding to the mystery, transflective is the only game in town for boat applications.

You can get a nice fish finder like the Lowrance Hook Reveal 7 (I have one) with a 800x480 7" transflective screen for $290. That is including the external ultrasound transducer, signal processing chips, CPU, memory etc. So the display itself can't be much more than $100. The resolution is not huge, but still.

I would be _very_ interested in a "Hat" which would allow connecting such a display to a Raspberry Pi....

I have one of the reflective LCD monitors previously discussed on HN. I think many people are underestimating how low the contrast is for RLCD as a computer/tablet display. In sunlight, it works well. After sundown though, you need to provide rather bright illumination to maintain that contrast and that's probably going to interfere with sleep. The angle of incidence for the illumination matters as well. The farther off the perpendicular, the less light is reflected so that external side lighting like a LED bar pretty much doesn't work at all. It's not a drop-in replacement for a conventional monitor unless you only plan to work during daylight hours or in very well illuminated room or are willing to accept some workarounds after dark.

We modded x230s for a while with the Pixel Qi display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNLMDiFjCjo

They were okay, each eye would receive a slightly different image due to the poor viewing angles of the 2010 tech.

It would be really cool if someone made a modern version that fit into a standard laptop housing: eDP 30/40 pin + 14.0" / 15.6" / etc.

Most of Garmin's smart watches use MIP transflective displays but that's slowly being phased out for AMOLED

That's a shame, because the transflective displays were really nice for not blinding myself at night.

Garmin has rolled out a sleep mode feature that makes the AMOLED watch face sparsely populated, and you can set the brightness to the lowest setting for sleep mode.

Compared to my watch set to the lowest sleep mode brightness, the brightness in this image is not set to the lowest level (probably for the purposes of showing the sleep mode watch face features), but this gives you some idea:

https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2022/01/Garmin-Epix-Sle...

I hope they maintain at least a few MIP options. I have a Garmin and the fact that the display works as well in bright sunlight as it does in a dim room is a killer feature for a device that is explicitly for fitness tracking. The highly-readable, always-on display and the 28-day battery life also make it great as a watch. Obviously, the tradeoff is that it's not good for email or video calls, but if I wanted a mini-smartphone strapped to my wrist instead of a watch, I'd just get an Apple Watch. It seems like a mistake to me to sacrifice the strengths of a product that make it far superior in its niche, in order to try to compete in a market that is already dominated by Apple and Google.

Seems it's definitely showing up in fewer devices. Fenix 8 only offers it on two of the 3 sizes. It remains on the Enduro 3. For those that aren't aware, Fenix 8 blends the Epix and Fenix together. It's available in 3 sizes with two different displays (AMOLED and MIP) but the MIP option only exists on the 2 larger sizes, and AMOLED is on all 3.

There are a couple of other models but they're older, the Fenix 8 and Enduro 3 just came out earlier this month or late last month, I forget as time flies. But there's the Forerunner 955 and 255, then there's the Instinct 2 series (2S, 2, and 2X). There might be others I'm forgetting, but I'm assuming there isn't likely to be a lot of MIP options going forward.

Coros watches are MIP though, which I would probably switch to if Garmin stops making affordable MIP watches... the pricing on the Fenix 8 and Enduro 3 are nutty. $800+

Where's the demand for it? What's the use case that would make me want one over a traditional LCD or OLED-based device?

What benefit do I get from turning off the backlight? Battery life? Why do I need that when batteries are so cheap/abundant?

It's far easier to just toss in a big battery. For example, the Odin 2 is a handheld gaming device where you can get about 8 hours of battery life playing extremely demanding emulated games like PS2 and GameCube, or play longer than you can stay awake with older games like Super Nintendo or Game Boy Advance.

Or look at your typical PC or Mac laptop, these devices are going the entire workday with the backlight on with no problem.

And of course you'd get even more run time with an external portable battery.

These devices are clever but just make less and less sense over time as our more prevalent technology improves.

Plus, we have more panel choices in the traditional space than ever. Mini-LED devices are fantastic in bright sunlight because the backlight is just so powerful. OLED is incredible for contrast and great color quality and accuracy.

What is transreflexive offering over those solutions?

I liked it on my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 because it meant that I could view/use the device _anywhere_, which allowed usage as:

- a mapreader in the car/truck when traveling

- an ebookreader when traveling

- controlling a CNC on my back deck when cutting tropical hardwoods

- viewing reference materials for building sandcastles at the beach, or for writing/editing

I feel like my current phone could accomplish all of that, including being generally visible on a sunny day on the beach.

And the best part about the phone is I already own it.

I wish the screen on my car's infotainment system was transflective. The backlight is bright enough for most situations, but with sun directly behind you can't see anything on the display. This is somewhat important for, say, navigation with Android Auto.

I spent a long time looking for one (and also just a transflective/reflective monitor that would work well in full sunlight) and I'm dumbfounded that there's nothing available. We had the tech for this 25 years ago and it's supposedly way cheaper than lcds. Refresh rate and colour quality are lower than LCD/oleds, but surely the vast majority of the working population doesn't care all that much about how true to life colours are? Especially if it means that you can actually _see_ those colours in bright sunlight? I'm hoping something will be available in the coming years as I really enjoy working outside but under the current conditions it's not really possible.

The best work-around is to use an e-ink reader (or tablet), if need be, by pointing the web-browser at a page which lets you work on your device.

> "...and also just a transflective/reflective monitor that would work well in full sunlight..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31203809

I was excited to order that until I saw:

>32"-diagonal reflective TFT LCD >1920 x 1080 resolution

The contrast is already on the low side and higher resolution would probably lower that further. Not much point in additional pixels that are hard to see.

The Hannspree Hannsnote 2 is now available as well with more RLCD devices on the way. Biggest concerns with their first release include dark display (comparable to eink kaleido 3, but with more colors), no frontlight, and weak battery.

I had an amazfit smartwatch that used a transflective LCD for its display. It absolutely made sense for that use case. (Running in daylight). .

Maybe this is perfect for "beach reader" ereaders.

I still have one of these Amazfit smartwatches (the Bip S). Not only does it get easier to read as it gets brighter outside, the battery life is amazing (easily two weeks) and I can read the time from any angle.

The Bip S is getting a little old and it's a bummer to see that Amazfit has joined other manufacturers in mostly optimizing for brightness and color.

Me too. For some reason, I have a soft spot for these displays, also eInk.

I've recently bought Hisense hibreak phone just because I am interested in these things.

and… how is it? i’m tempted to get one too but privacy concerns are holding me back. how hard is porting lineageOS to a new device? ha.

I mixed up companies. I bought bigme hibreak. And I had Hisense A5 cc some time ago.

I used both as a cycling computers, without sim and almost without internet.

It is fine, not great yet, but not bad. Just a bit on a slow side. But overall it is a working solution for my goals.

Screen seems to be worse for maps then I remember screen from hisense a5cc phone. Maybe it is just my memory, though.

Same with battery: it.seems.to be a bit worse then in A5 CC.

Overall, I think color eInk technology is not there yet, at least

Physics prohibits the existence of one-way mirrors. If you make a transflective screen, it will also reflect less light than a purely reflective screen.

So it is better to make either a purely emissive (OLED) / transmissive (LCD) screen, or a purely reflective screen with an added front light.

And why are there so few devices with reflective LCD screens? They are quicker, but they reflect less light than the electrophoretic screens from E Ink.

That there is fundamental trade-off between two features does not mean the only viable choices are to maximize one feature. In fact, it is usually the opposite.

I think the issue with transflective LCDs is that even purely reflective LCDs are not very reflective.

E Ink in white state is white at the top, while transflective LCDs display black and white by blocking or allowing reflections at the other end to go back up layers of polarizers. I'd guess that that difference makes E Ink significantly superior to LCDs. This is totally "old man's why it can't be done" hallucination, though.

Simple answer - oled/(something)led are much better at daylight, because lcd have semi-transparent layer of electrodes over display, where lost about 20% of light.

If somebody invent cheap lcd without electrodes on cover glass (may be all electrodes on back side), things could change, but for now people buy lcd because of cheapness.

I don't think it's the same technology but the Playdate [0] has a very reflective screen without a back light. I belive the screen is made by Sharp.

[0] https://play.date/

The Playdate has a Memory-in-Pixel display. https://www.sharpsde.com/technologies-for/memory-in-pixels/m...

Like the one in the Gameboy Color, that used colors but no backlight?

I hope the technology has improved from that point though, as you couldn’t see anything on that thing.

You didn't have the flexible USB LED (literally, an LED) lamp attachment?

Not usb though, custom gameboy link port. Looks KINDA like usb-b-mini https://cdn.tindiemedia.com/images/resize/mPpRW6By7ryrVtGTSo...

Oh wow. I wouldn't have known at the time, I was just assuming in hindsight.

Transflective means a backlight; but one you can turn off and still use the display.

The closest Gameboy to a transflective display was the original Gameboy Advance SP, but that was a front-lit reflective display.

I've still got the Notion Ink Adam with Pixel Qi transflective display and it beats everything modern in bright sunlight.

I have an Eyemoo Epaper S1, and am very happy with it. It works great indoors with the front light set to a low brightness. The screen is noticeably more comfortable than a regular LCD or OLED. Combined with a tablet stand and either a Bluetooth speaker or wireless headphones, it's perfect for what it is. It filled the biggest gaps I had when only using a monochrome e-ink monitor. It allows me to comfortably view websites in color and watch videos at a normal refresh rate.

Unfortunately, most reviewers seem to have completely missed the point of the device. If you want high contrast and color accuracy, use an OLED. If you want to read outside in the sun, use e-ink.

https://eyemootech.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com