Technology

No, it's fine. The text is black. Can it display just the black?

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.

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

“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

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

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.

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…

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.

All I know is that if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike.

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.

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.

I would seriously kill for an e-newspaper ngl

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.

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.