If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica
If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now
If I could get a laptop with a screen like this, I could finally sit outside in a park and code like nature intended.
Also a lap desk. And a coffee thermos. And headphones. Second screen.
God, I'm too spoiled for nature, ain't I
This device runs android, but it's pretty close https://shop.boox.com/products/tabxc
I'd totally buy this if I had fuck you money.
That... would actually be pretty dope
I’m thinking at those prices this is probably intended for corporations that absolutely need a readable display in bright sunlight areas but don’t really care about refresh rate or color depth.
I did see something a few months ago about a company making large color e-Ink displays for applications like that and outdoor advertising at bus stops and the like
I can see how this would be very attractive to a writer.
Not necessarily just corporations, but certainly text-based workflows. I can see this being great if your day job is writing code, working on spreadsheets, editing documents, etc. In those use cases, framerate hardly matters. Would be great for reducing eye strain.
How many seconds per frame does it get?
Not sure yet, we're still waiting for the first frame to finish.
I think it says 23Hz or something
Enough to run doom
It can display Oblivion Remastered at it's native framerate though.
Wow, relive the early days of really fucking terrible LCD displays for just under $2000.
What a time to be alive...
Why, for the love of all the gods, do people keep saying and writing "LCD display".
Tell me what the "D" in "LCD" means!
What does the "D" mean, hmmm!?
The same as the M in ATM machine and N in PIN number, V in HIV virus and C in UPC code!
Oh, the dreaded RAS syndrome!.
I'm off to read some DC comics.
I'll remember that the next time I enter my PIN number at an ATM machine.
You really need to learn about RAS syndrome.
Ok, so what's up with that LC display.
This kind of redundancy creates semantic resilience, thats why we take the type name out of acronyms.
Instead, when designing acronyms leave the type name out of it.
Diode?
it means peDantic
Dichotomy of humanities ego and id and how it affects the standards of morality and self expression in a pre post scarcity world?
For a work machine with a lot of text and little graphics, this is great. Less eye strain for long periods.
In theory yes. But after seeing a review yesterday I am fully disappointed. Even text looks like shit on this monitor.
I'm really keen on one of these displays eventually, as I can set aside the issues with refresh rate and colour accuracy, but the price needs to drop way down. It needs to be competitive with regular LCD monitors.
I look at terminals all day for work, this would make it so much more comfortable.
Might not need anything except economies of scale. But getting that is the problem.
Tablet sized eink displays found a niche that couldn't quite be displaced by smartphones and regular tablets. That let them have a market for getting costs down.
There would need to be a similarly wide use case to get the price down on larger eink displays.
economies of scale
And competition. AFAIK, E Ink Corporation holds all the patents (there's 47 pages of them), so they can ask for as much as they want for the tech.
I think the use case would be for laptops, for people who want to comfortably use their laptops outside or just want their laptop screens to be easier on the eyes. Only slightly different to a tablet insofar as it has a physical keyboard, so i imagine the tablets could be adapted.
There are some annoying usability limitations still, but it has progressed far since early ebook readers, so I'm hopeful.
If you're coding with them you can already try small ones, unless you need bigger than A4 size for each it isn't insanely expensive.
I'm good.
What is the refresh time? They carefully avoid mentioning that. There's a comparable Pimoroni monitor whose refresh takes 14 seconds so I'd call it a static display rather than a computer monitor.
The article mentions another display with a 33 Hz refresh rate. But be aware that there would be significant ghosting even just scrolling a page of text, more so than even a measly 33 Hz refresh rate would lead you to believe.
I'm happy with say 3 hz, fast enough to not be too annoying when flipping pages while reading. It's fine to not be good for video. What I really want is a 16 inch or so e-reader though.
These guys make eInk monitors:
if you can live with a black-and-white eInk monitor, they say that their fastest model can do 60 Hz.
Maybe it’d be useful as a low powered interactive kiosk display? Price needs to come down tremendously before this thing becomes competitive.
Obligatory Linus video for a similar, but not identical, monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUxxn53mBE
This Dasung model is mentioned at the bottom of the article. TL;DW: These things have the exact list of drawbacks you think they do including miserable contrast, color accuracy so bad it's fallen off the bottom of the chart, a low refresh rate, and quite a bit of ghosting. So it's awful, but surprisingly not as awful as you'd think if your primary experience is an e-reader form the first couple of generations. Linus being Linus he does attempt to game on it and gets... a result... but this is a display technology with niche applications and still best suited to displaying mostly static content.
Thanks, that was actually a pretty good look at them.
I do think that they did raise one point that I wouldn't have thought of. The color eInk doesn't have great resolution, but they were viewing old comics printed using halftoning (what the guy in the video was calling "cheap dot patterns"). Comics at the time were, had to be, designed to deal with being printed that way, and that results in images that could deal with really low color resolution. So specifically for viewing them, the color eInk display was a pretty good match for the content.
Problem is, I just can't see how many people would buy a monitor just to view old-style comics.
I think that eInk is a good match for a portable e-reader that you potentially take outside, where it's already available in the role. Outside of that...
I own this. It is horrible. If the specs were real it would be great, but the specs are not real. It is a 3k black and white monitor with a fixed color filter over it. That means you need 3x3 pixels to resemble a color.
I consider it a scam from Dasung.
Boox on the other hand made a sane black and white display. Much better. I own a Max 2 Pro. Sadly they fail to understand that when you report a display as 20px smaller than it really is over an HDMI port and then rescale the image of the computer display on that, that it becomes really uncrisp. Their suggestion is to use the display with 200% scaling (so you don't notice as much I suppose).
Epaper is really promising and nice. However both of these companies should either get some real competition or lawsuits.
Looks awesome on the photo, but I guess I have better uses for such money and night sky and trees for enjoying what I see.
Also lower refresh rates are not such a terrible problem when it's not a CRT blinking in front of you.
Grainy look is kinda fine. That's about the "compromises" part.
So a cheaper one I'd probably use. Being part of some dream computer to be useful in transport, while walking, at home, with battery life longer than nuclear fallout effects and unbreakable box and EOL date of the kind castles in Europe have. Otherwise nah, many other things to break my eyes against.
What's the refresh rate and can I play Hunt showdown on it? They say a similar model has a 33hz refresh rate but don't mention this model
I don't know if you can play games on this, but I know you definitely won't want to.
Choice of Games makes games that are unchanging text. You could probably do okay with that.
Actually...come to think of it, they should figure out some way to hook up with an e-reader manufacturer, sell their games in those stores. Like, those games also have basically zilch by way of memory or computational requirements, and I bet that the same kind of person who'd buy a dedicated e-reader to read books would probably be more-interested in a text-heavy game.
Please note that even at 30hz eink displays still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency
Aw yeah! I imagine it's like 2 fps. Great for gaming.
Its not meant for gaming. People who display a lot of text (eg. coders) could use less strain in their eyes if they're doing it for a long time. Definitely not at that price though
Pretty sure it's good for anything that requires text. I've already seen several people talk about it's use in coding, which makes sense since staring at a conventional LCD for hours on end can be a real eyestrain sometimes.
The US takes tariffs on the good stuff? Looks like there will be more stuff for us in the future.
Ah yes just in time for the trade war! Better get yours now
Waaaaaaaaay too expensive, but I'd love it if big eink displays became a thing, even with shit refresh rates, mostly because I want some for displaying Home Assistant dashboards.
I bought a trmnl and it's pricey but works pretty good. I've mostly been using a few out-of-the-box plugins for it.
There is a selfhosted/offline version of the server you can run for it, so it can be 'offline' in theory. I keep meaning to mess with it more but haven't put the time aside.
Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.
Feel like we've been waiting a long time for it :(