Unfortunately vendors are somehow constitutionally incapable of providing useful technical information for eInk displays. It's so frustrating that there's a huge graphic extolling it's FPGA based refresh technology but actual technical information is almost completely absent. Why can't I just get a datasheet?
I'll summarize here so other people don't have to grep through this mess.
HDMI input
1872×1404
5V/3A
~5Hz refresh in mode A2
There are 3 modes, GC16, A2 and A2+, no technical information is provided but there are some tiny (simulated?) screenshots. It appears that mode A2, the "high refresh rate" one is purely black and white with no gray.
I don't think they are incapable, they are actively hiding information. Ben Krasnow had to reverse engineer a screen to figure out how to better refresh it.
That screen is terribly slow, even by e-ink standars. "Canvas" displays, developed by reMarkable and commercialized by Onyx, have a minimum lag of about 25ms (for writing) and a rendering mode call "A2" that makes it user interaction quite fast for e-ink,[1] serviceable even for watching video [2].
IIRC Canvas displays were not developed by reMarkable, it just uses one. But one of the key selling points was that the reMarkable didn't use the vendor display driver for that Canvas display, but instead they wrote a faster one. I have some Canvas-based devices and the screen lag varies quite a bit (the reMarkable screen is faster).
As I understand it, reMarkable claims[1] to have developed CANVAS from the ground-up on top of Carta technology, in close collaboration with E Ink. It may be as you say and they developed just the drivers, but I believe from their press releases that they are responsible for some breakthrough detail to accelerate refresh, that E Ink didn't think was possible (something to do with a waveform transmission signal to transfer pixels to the screen).
They were the first to build the technology to bring refresh times for writing near the 50ms mark, and hold the patent about it (AFAIK they license this patent to other builders who use Canvas).
I own a reMarkable and a Boox Nova Pro with CANVAS, writing speed is the same but reMarkable's software and feel is definitely better (though I suspect a matte screen protector on the Boox would make the drag feel almost the same).
A popular amount of power for USB type device chargers, so economy of scale applies.
Economy of scale makes weird pricing happen.
Right now on digikey you can buy a "SWI25-12-E-P5" 25 watt PSU for $11.95, or a "KTPS12-12010WA-VI-P1" 12 watt PSU for $12.21. Both are wall mount class 2 supplies, level 2 efficiency standards, even the same connector. The cheaper one has a longer cord, LOL, as yet another weird example of economies of scale.
If your application requires 10 watts, a 25 watt supply will quite happily provide 10 watts and run extremely cool for a long time compared to a 12 watt supply being asked to provide 10 watts.
I will admit that one mfgr chased safety approvals for euro countries and the other chased safety approvals for USA/Asian countries, but for hobbyist one off purposes, something that passes TUV/CE is approximately as good as something that passed UL, and if you want to sell commercially in the US its usually a paperwork transaction to cross approve something. A bigger problem is X% where X is pretty large, of chinese mgfr equipment has fake safety marks. So for hobbyist purposes you're far safer using a genuine TUV approved supply in the US than graymarket gear with a fake UL mark. So there are minor differences. It would be non-trivial to design something that could pass TUV but fail UL, although someone out there has probably succeeded in the past.
The real world market is not magically 100% efficient, so you can absolutely pay 26 cents more for a supply with a shorter cable and lower power output.
Most e-ink displays only refresh sections. So if you type a letter, it really only draws the letter. If you scroll however, the whole screen needs to be updated.
Whatever happened to those non-backlit LCD displays like in the game boy color and game boy advance?
Seems like with no backlight, you could make a 1080p matte version of those that could push 60 somewhat streaky frames per second for like 0.5 Watts or less.
I would instantly buy a display that is intended to be put on top of my MBP display, and that is suitable for use outdoor on a sunny day. Perhaps e ink isn't even the most suitable technology for that task, but rather the old-school transflective LCD's.
IMHO e-ink is much better technology for reading in the sun. Old-school LCDs get a shadow under each pixel, creating a double image that makes everything blurry.
Let me express my love for the Dasung not-eReader again as I did here a week ago but this is an even more appropriate thread. To avoid reposting all that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21999254
Is grayscale achieved by dithering algorithms inside the FPGA controller or is this some other E-Ink wizardry that actually can handle grayscale pixels?
I mean there was a HN post about a full RGB-E-Ink display last week or something. Any spec or pricing is behind a NDA, though.
EDIT: Nevermind, they explicitly state it's 16 level grayscale.
The video, if it's actually representative of the real product (not sped up/contrast adjusted too obscenely) looks like it could be useful for semi-static displays.
Yes, information billboards on railway station, bus, train. Though 10" is perhaps too small for such. Bonus (IMO) it not being distracting with colors.
I suppose it won't lag the way a low-bandwidth serial port would lag (letters and edits coming visibly late) but much like mosh "lags" shell output (i.e. network lags are just swallowed and the newer packets will update everything once they arrive, and you can keep on typing).
So you could type as fast as you can, the computer would update its front buffer without delay, and all keyboard commands to move around in the editor would be executed instantly just like normal but the screen would only get full updates five times a second.
Well I'm so smart only a Trinitron running at 85 Hz or higher can keep up with me. (And, of course, without the correct mouse, Model M keyboard, Emacs configuration, and thermostat setting, my productivity gets shot to hell.)
I regularly VPN into work from my home and experience 200ms+ delays quite frequently. In my experience, that delay in updating the screen to reflect my typing is not particularly problematic.
I imagine using it simultaneously with a traditional screen would be a constant reminder of its deficiencies. Probably need to use it alone to experience the zen of eInk.
Definitely tempting, but I'm honestly more interested in an ebook reader suited for larger formats and don't think I'd be a interested in a tablet as a pad of paper replacement. My concern about the Boox devices in the past was the already - EOL OS, but the newer one appears to have Android 9 instead of the 6 of earlier ones.
In the promotion video they end on it saying that the display is «great for coding». I have really never thought about using an E Ink display for programming tasks, but given low enough latency and a well lit office wouldn’t it be the ideal solution compared to normal LED/LCD backlight type displays?
From my experience using an Kindle it is way less eye strain, and reducing the amount of strain, in this case hours every day, would have to have a positive effect over time.
Maybe in the future it will be normal to have dedicated E Ink programming displays.
My understanding is that Eink is sitting on a lot of patents describing these displays. When the first will expire in a few years we will hopefully see competition with new formats.
thats a vastly different usecase. Just like eink is still currently the best screen for ereader, it still gonna be relevant for programming once it came out with better refresh rate suitable for programming screen.
You underestimate the value of not having your eyes strained. And battery life as extra. Pretty sure "holo lens" and other alternative gonna fail those aspects, at the very least
Models based on the Canvas technology with A2 refresh mode are quite up to the task for programming, if you can stand a little ghosting here and there. The problem is, they're small (13'' max), and obviously more expensive, but not more than a decent gaming monitor.
It is almost as if for some reason they don’t want programmers outdoors ;) But on a serious note this could be THE e-ink killer feature to propel it in the market.
I'm waiting for a passable enough display shy of £1k so that I can work outside. It sounds like there might already be one but its quite hard to find and test them!
For indoor use it has to achieve a lot more. But I would use one as a primary display to rest my eyes more.
I used an Kobo Aura HD (~2013 E-ink tech), with linux and is was almost fast enough to keep up with aafire. Using vim on a arm mx507 wasn't that fast anyway, so that the screen wasn't really a problem. It would have been a useful system for when you only stay in the console, switching over to firefox was a full screen refresh that needed a sec, so I tended to avoid it. Sadly I didn't get the USB controller to accept my external keyboard in its OTG mode, which was a hack in of itself, so I dropped that project again, but I still look from some time to time for a way to do it again.
Greyscale works as syntax highlighting, you do can get used to it after time. But what greyscale does to you is that isn't that interesting to you anymore to look at the screen, so you do start get "bored" from it and the eye starts to wander around looking for something else perhaps pretty to look at. Nice if you want to look often enough out of the window, but annoying if you have work to do.
For at dark at night coding it isn't that bad. But having an AMOLED with the right colourscheme and low lightness setting is more pleasing I found.
Kobo is still the most open e-ink device ya? And yes, reading is so different from programming - for long hours reading, I still think e-ink is the best, but depends on ambient lighting.
I’ve always wished there was a baby monitor display that was made out of this. Seems like it would be a ton better than the light emission of the regular screens all night.
I've always found the value proposition of e-ink to be completely off. Is this an actual cost of production, or does e-ink have some sort of business model or patent problem that is getting in the way?
Yeah I've got a few projects that would make good use of an eInk screen (simplified UI, no colour or fast refresh needed, running off of batteries) but... I built the entire project with a backlit LCD touchscreen for $250. Over five hundred dollars kinda blows a big hole in the project budget.
I got the impression their fab subcontractor ditched them because of the low volume. Unreliable build quality should not be a huge issue as the process is very close to conventional LCD panels, although the pixel density is about 9 times higher than similarly specced LCD's. Maybe the diffractive layer it used instead of filters was the issue...
Unfortunately vendors are somehow constitutionally incapable of providing useful technical information for eInk displays. It's so frustrating that there's a huge graphic extolling it's FPGA based refresh technology but actual technical information is almost completely absent. Why can't I just get a datasheet?
I'll summarize here so other people don't have to grep through this mess.
There are 3 modes, GC16, A2 and A2+, no technical information is provided but there are some tiny (simulated?) screenshots. It appears that mode A2, the "high refresh rate" one is purely black and white with no gray.