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
The video has some brief glimpses of scrolling. You’re not gonna want to watch video on this thing.
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.
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.
my HP version won’t let me read a book without replacing the Cyan e-ink
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.
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?
I think this would result in some pretty intense ghosting and other undesirable artifacts.
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.
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?
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.
I was just thinking the other day about using e-ink for a smart watch display.
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
- 8 colors is pretty limited, especially when it’s a specific 8 colors (not just 8 max).
- Refresh times are slow
- The pico memory and storage are limited
- Due to the above, mine ran in two cycles with a reboot between to clear memory. One to pull images from my website and another to cycle through existing pictures until it needs to grab more
- Images needed to be converted to the appropriate size+ 8-color palette and dithered etc beforehand into a format the pico can read (hence then being on my website where they were reduced to an uncompressed palletized BMP)
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
I’ve thought of doing something similar, the other fun part is that you could stash a big battery behind the display and run the E-ink on a super slow refresh rate since they only use power to refresh. I wish E-ink wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. This monitor would be perfect if it weren’t $1200.
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.
It’s the display that is prohibitively and arbitrarily expensive. None of the other variables matter since all of the low power / retain image advantage is solely because of that display.
And large e-ink displays will remain niche, simply because of the company’s pricing.
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
Phones kind of suck for the ‘at a glance’ function.
- Widgets take up too much room on the home screen, so you have to swipe over to it to see it.
- once you’re there, you’re tempted to dive in to look at emails or tweets or whatever else. There’s a whole smartphone detox market that’s out there, focusing on dumb phones and escaping attention traps.
- Not everyone in the house (e.g., kids) should be looking at a phone regularly.
- I don’t have my phone with me when I’m walking back and forth getting ready. A quick glance is faster than a grab, unlock, swipe, read pattern.
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 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.
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.
