It's interesting and I clicked on the OP, but why? The variable ambient light conditions, refresh rate, etc would seem to favor standard LCD/etc.
Battery capacity isn't much of an issue for a small screen, and weight carried by the bicycle.
That being said, seeing that there are now eink displays capable of 60Hz, I wish they (and projects like this one) could take over in this specific market.
Refresh rate is a solved problem for eInk as well, but it comes with energy tradeoffs and... might still be proprietary. But 60-120 fps eInk exists AFAIK.
E-ink, instead just lets the sun reflect off of it, does want some sort of light in the dark, but, perfectly visible in full-bright/direct sunlight.
1. https://www.panelook.com/ED047TC1_E_Ink_4.7_EPD_parameter_25...
Compared to the full contrast range of the sun lit real world, all displays emitting light function in a very narrow and very dark contrast range. An eInk display does not emit light, so in that environment you have a clear separation between bright and dark.
Even if it had been true, claiming the e-ink has the same or better contrast as LCD is still false. The sun-lit world has higher contrast than any display, yet it does not make e-ink's contrast any good. In fact it makes the low contrast display much worse as you are likely to be looking at much brighter scenes than your bike computer's screen immediately before looking at it and thus having even less ability to distinguish slight brightness variations on the low contrast screen. A transflective TFT display in bike computers also does not emit light, it's still higher contrast in the sun than e-ink.
Frankly, I don't understand why you are arguing, when it is so ridiculously easy for anybody to test for themselves. Just bring your LCD or OLED device out in the sunshine along with your eInk device and see which one you can read from more easily.
TFT displays are really good in the sunshine, but eInk is still a bit better, only beaten by paper for real world contrast.
Has it been a long time since you've used eInk? Maybe they were worse in the past? My oldest eInk device is from 2018, so I wouldn't know about the screens that were before.
You obviously have not done what you are suggesting. Paper is low contrast too, on the level of e-ink.
>Has it been a long time since you've used eInk? Maybe they were worse in the past?
No to both questions. E-ink inherently is low contrast and there is no way to enhance it in this technology: both black and white are done with a pigment, same as print, which caps at ~30:1.
I read books on my Kindle outdoors in the blazing sun, and so do most of the millions of people who have Kindles or similar devices. Contrast is excellent. In the same conditions an LCD phone is just a black mirror which you can hardly make out any kind of information form. An OLED is better, and you can see everything on the screen dimly if you strain your eyes. A TFT is even better, but none of them compares to eInk or paper.
So maybe you live in Britain or in Norway, or somewhere similar where it's cloudy all the time? You saying that paper is low contrast baffles me, actually. It seems like you are hung up on the contrast within the device, which is irrelevant for outdoor use, where the only thing which matters is the contrast as part of the real world environment.
Let me ask you, who is the faster runner: The fastest runner on your street or the slowest runner in the Olympics? Because you seem to be arguing for the former because of measuring within limits that do not confirm to the real world - where there is a sun.
Also, if you really try to do what you suggested - you should not use an LCD phone, phones do not have reflective LCD displays but use backlight instead so the contrast on those decreases with increase of the ambient as both light and dark areas reflect the same amount of ambient light and the only difference is the backlight's emissive portion, the higher is the ambient, the lower of the ratio i.e. contrast.
That is the internal contrast of a screen or printed material. I agree, and that type of contrast is important if the screen emits its own light.
However, for outdoors use the only contrast that matters is relation to the real world, aka physical reality. And brightness of course becomes the main factor.
Also, thanks for pointing out you are talking exclusively about transflective/reflective LCD. It seemed to me for a while you were talking about any type of LCD. But even so, eInk and paper has better contrast in real life outdoors use, because we have to measure contrast in the human eye and not within the device.
The human eye adopts to the brightness in the environment and makes a contrast "scale" according to this. The nearer your screen's black color is to the black of the human eye's black in that situation, the better. And the nearer your screen's white color is to the human eye's white, the better.
If either your black or your white is too far from the human eye's calibration, then your screen is no good to use, no matter how good the internal contrast of it is.
There is no limit to how bright things can be or how dark things can be. So the internal contrast between a very deep pitch black and a very dark gray can be 1:10.000, but within a real world sunlit environment it all just looks like black. And this matters, because direct sunlight is 30.000 - 100.000 lux, while an office is maybe 500 lux.
For you perhaps. I, for one, use screens to get information encoded in symbols and graphs, if all these symbols and graphs had no contrast with background I would not be able to distinguish them from the background. You seem to only care to compare the screen's brightness to the real world, perhaps losing your screen and then finding it in the real world, aka reality, is the main usage mode for you?
> But even so, eInk and paper has better contrast in real life outdoors use
You need to give a citation for this which would be pretty hard since we are already discussing a 12:1 device as shown by the spec sheet I've posted earlier. Or are you using "contrast" do describe brightness? In this case I agree - eInk's "black" is just a darker shade of gray so it reflects more light i.e. contributes to higher albedo. It's not great when you are trying to read from that screen but if you are just looking for the lost screen in the wilderness it won't hurt I guess.
You seem to be unfamiliar with bike computers but appear to be using your imagination instead of looking it up so I will state for the record - bike computers are affixed to bikes, a rider checks the computer during the ride and it's always in the same position, bike computers are not thrown into the wilderness to be searched for afterwards so locating one in the real world is rarely a problem facing a bike computer user. If one is detached in a crash, they always have radio and often speakers for more reliable mode of finding than the light reflected from the screen.