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Comment by aydyn | Hacker News Reader

Is that because it doesnt have a backlight?

I think a large part of it is because modos is really good at partial screen updates. This is also, in my understanding, how they achieve the high FPS rate.

The parts of the screen that doesn't update, courtesy of being e-ink, don't use any power at all. LCD will use power if you're looking at a static image, eink won't. And a lot of the time, 95% of the screen is a static image and only 5 percent actually updates. One of Modos' biggest innovations is successfully taking advantage of that.

So it's not actually 75hz all the time then? Depending on what's on the screen?

That's unfortunate.

I'm imagining a fast scrolling game with complex backgrounds where most of the pixels are changing values every frame, I assume it completely breaks down in that case.

It's 75hz when it needs to be, but if 2 frames are mostly identical, it doesn't needlessly move ink around. Effect: 75hz always as far as the user is concerned, but sometimes it uses less power than that when possible, due to very clever optimisations at the firmware level.

Or that's how I understand it anyway.

I saw that Alex Soto himself is in this comment thread, he'll know a lot more than me, I'm just spreading what little knowledge I've gathered from his blog posts and some of the discussions in the modos mastodon server.

I've probably misunderstood a lot of that too, I'm not a hardware engineer, just a lowly java dev with a strong but hobby level interest in eink.

Modos is my dream laptop, but it's currently unclear when that'll become reality.

Again, Alex Soto will know more.

For a fast scrolling game it makes more sense to use a display which is made for that.

The display can only show a video well that has this property of only updating parts of the screen but not everything at the same time? What if the video content is like so?

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