The world's first colour e-ink monitor is essentially a 25-inch Kindle
Dasung's new release is fresh and easy on the eyes
Someone would make a killing of they created an easy to use home dashboard with an eink display. Low power, 8x11, customizable with Android apps. Refreshes once a minute. Has weather and traffic and calendar in the morning, and displays photos in the afternoon.
LCDs are terrible in terms of power consumption. But a big, slow eink would be great.
Android eink tablets already exist, have done for years. It's expensive and doesn't work as well as you want. The eink company owns patents that keeps everything expensive.
See, I don't want a tablet. Tablet implies fast refresh rates, minimal ghosting, fast processor, etc.
It's a different purpose than a screen I can stick on a wall and only look at a few times in the morning. That lower quality on the panel and hardware should bring costs on the tech lower.
Hell, I don't even really need 8 shades of color.
If someone can stick a low power processor on there and make it run on some rechargeable AAAs, even better.
“I own the only patent - I will license it for just $10/square inch.”
And that’s a short story about how eInk never got commercialized.
I'm not so sure, I think it would go the way of smart speakers - a solution without much of a problem to solve
You say that as though people aren't buying the shit out of them
I agree it's kind of a dumb product, but people buy the shit out of smart speakers. Their market size in 2022 was 10.8 billion USD and rising every year.
I could absolutely see a consumer driven home wall panel selling like crazy - I have a HA driven wall panel at my house and every guest thinks it's the coolest thing and asks where they can get one
This would be great for those of us with Home Assistant or other home automation setups. Still not a huge market, but a market none the less.
Phones kind of suck for the 'at a glance' function.
Smart home dashboards also seem like a perfect fit with this. A low power, regular refreshing, touch sensitive controlled? That could hang on a wall with a battery? Sounds great.
I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.
It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big
Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.
Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar
You're on the same wavelength as me. My ideal product is an e-ink display to stick in the kitchen or some other high traffic area to display relevant family information and with touch controls to do some fairly basic things like toggle digital switches/dials or just switch to alternative dashboards. If I could find a touch-enabled e-ink display that's a good size but not stupid expensive (keeping in mind this is absolutely a luxury item so I'm not looking to shell out any significant volume of monies on the thing), I could attach one to a Pi and make one myself.
I think a 27x40 inch movie poster size would be awesome to line the walls of a home theater. Have posters on rotation. Similarly have some posted for artwork. Basically digital picture frames but not lcd/led driven. I’m sure the quality is low now, but once color accuracy is fine tuned, would be some cool niche uses.
Sounds cool until you realize that you’d have to turn on the lights to read it at night.
If only there wAs soMe technOLogy out thEre already Doing that…
Can't you buy that from Boox?
I was just thinking the other day about using e-ink for a smart watch display.
You could dig around for a used pebble watch. Apparently they still work with modern phones
Amazfit and Fossil and othes have them, but I really miss the pebble
I spend my days in emacs and terminal emulators and I want this very badly in a laptop form factor so I can comfortably work outside.
Yeah I'm really surprised they didn't go with a laptop screen rather than a monitor designed to be left in a fixed place! Whoever's first to market with a good laptop e-ink display is going to rake it in.
I suspect that it’s simpler to make a standalone display as proof of concept. If it’s popular enough, laptops could follow. This monitor will be great for film sets & videos. No flicker!
Framework should offer an e-ink display as a component you can drop in to their laptops.
It's already possible, with a remarkable 2 and a special vnc client https://github.com/matteodelabre/vnsee. Though I have not tried it yet, it looks great, but the screen is way smaller than an usual pc monitor
The title really grinds my gears... "New eInk display is basically like a bigger version of another eInk display"...
E-ink technology uses some pretty fascinating chemistry to display more natural paper-like on-screen textures as opposed to regular digital Word documents and PDFs.
I have a feeling this author might just be fucking stupid.
Wait... Is this... Like that kindle thong mayhaps? Me am the smartyballs thinkerpersen!
That meme takes me back
Which is a... Good thing?
For anyone that does mostly office work/paperwork, yes.
For everyone else, not so much. The refresh on eink displays is often orders if magnitude longer than with traditional displays, so forget watching YouTube or something, on a display like this.
Almost every display in existence does 60+ Hz. This is required for light emitting displays, since humans generally see 60Hz flickers of light as solid light (consistently on), so they have to run at that frequency to produce an image that doesn't look like it's flickering on and off.
With eink, it's only reflecting light, not emitting it, so update times can be and are, a lot slower. Due to the mechanism that's bringing the relevant pigments to the surface, which isn't fast, you'll see these displays measured more in seconds per frame than frames per second. Partial updates of the screen can be done much faster, but full frame updates can take several seconds. Eg, adding one more character (while typing a document), is a quick update and can happen many times per second on most eink displays, changing the whole screen, which happens often in video content, takes 1+ second(s) to complete.
So for the office drones that deal with email and text files all day, this is great. For any media content including TV, movies and video games, this is utterly useless.
Thank you for the detailed response :)
If the refresh rate is not higher than the the Onyx Boox Max, then it's not even good for office work - for me at least, a visible delay between key press and sign showing up is a show stopper.
So LED screens are basically just 25 inc lamps?
All I know is that if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike.
Any mention of the refresh rate? I didn’t see that in this article and thats usually the downside. Completely fine for books, comics etc but maybe not the best for a computer monitor
Its not on their website either
It must be ... bad.
Its also 1750 bucks.. lol
It might be more of a proof of concept... It's the first of it's kind, so I'd check back where this tech is a few years down the line
We can see it refreshing in the video, the "refresh rate" doesn't look much better than an e-reader and the device is very expensive, but it's the first of its kind. Honestly if it was the price of a regular OLED screen of 25" I'd consider buying it to code.
Second on if affordable, I’d buy it… and I don’t even code much anymore. For anything that doesn’t need to be rapidly refreshed (I.E just about anything that’s not watching/editing videos or playing games), this will be so much more comfortable for extended use!
It can hit a smooth 30 SPF
Sadly, the technology stagnated for quite some time. This along with the physical nature of how the displays function (moving the pigment particles closer and further from the viewing plane) makes high refresh rates unlikely.
You can kinda cheat and get the refresh rate down to 300ms with partial refresh but that's still one hundred times slower than a 30hz conventional display.
There's a video in the article that made it look reasonable for office work.
The video has some brief glimpses of scrolling. You're not gonna want to watch video on this thing.
I love how she's watching YouTube in the thumbnail, doesn't make any sense on an e ink display?
This is the tech I've been waiting for
It's not the blue emitting light that causes eyestrain on OLEDs, it's the low frequency pwm used to control brightness. Basically all the pixels turn on and off a few hundred times a second, not slow enough for your brain to consciously notice it, but fast enough for your eyes to react to what is in effect a strobelight right in front of your face. That is how dimming works on an OLED.
You end up with devices that still cause headaches and dizziness because they flicker in this manner, but are "eyesafe certified" because they filter out the blue light right before bed.
Eventually, there will something like a 1000 Hz monitor. At some point, it will refresh too fast for the brain to register any difference.
OLED TVs and desktop monitors don't use pwm, though they do have very slight brightness dips every refresh.
Afaik laptop and phone OLEDs do use (low frequency) pwm.
That got me thinking: couldn't that be solved by adding a layer in fron akin to a phosphor screen which "buffers" the light a bit thus bridging the switching which should reduce flickering?
Not without losing brightness. White LEDs work that way and are less bright than an uncovered LED of the same power. Some of the light from the LED becomes waste heat instead of light when the phosphor absorbs it.
Also, not without losing response time. Part of the point of using LEDs for displays is that they can change brightness very quickly.
Fuck PWM, all my homies hate PWM
Why is the pulse width so large? LEDs can toggle millions of times per second, not merely hundreds.
It is possible, by the way, to dim an LED without PWM the old-fashioned way: by varying the voltage of the power supplied to it (“DC dimming”). You can see this in devices that have an indicator LED that stays on for a few moments after power is disconnected, then fade out. What's happening there is a capacitor in the device is (briefly) powering the LED. As its charge depletes, the voltage drops, and the LED dims. However, controlling LED brightness this way is a great deal less accurate than PWM, creating color distortion at low brightness. See related Android Police article.
I wonder if the problem with DC dimming could be solved by adjusting the voltage supplied to each LED based on measurements made in the factory of its brightness at different voltages?
I have been wanting one of these things for so fucking long. I can't wait!
Does it have a frame rate of like 5? I can’t see any info in the article abt it
The video makes it look reasonable. I could see this being good for coding work - soothing and still fast enough. But not for the $2000+ they'll be charging.
The issue I had with using it for code is that the scrolling in the video seemed pretty bad, which is pretty essential for it. Would love an e ink monitor dedicated to code/terminals, so I'll be waiting to grab one when the frame rate's a bit better. Also, in some of the footage of them writing in Word looks like there's a decent amount of burn-in. I'd do it for $2k today if it had better frame rate for scrolling/typing and much less burn-in.