The world's first colour e-ink monitor is essentially a 25-inch Kindle

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

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.

“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.

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.

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

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.

That meme takes me back

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.

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

I would seriously kill for an e-newspaper ngl

Its not on their website either

It must be ... bad.

Its also 1750 bucks.. lol

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.

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.

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.

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?

Eventually, there will something like a 1000 Hz monitor. At some point, it will refresh too fast for the brain to register any difference.

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?

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.

Lots of people. This is great for office workers, because e-ink doesn't cause eye strain like monitors do. And if all you're doing is working with documents, this is a fantastic way to go.

I'd personally kill for a monitor like this because I work with text all day, every day.

I'm a graphic designer, and it could be interesting for working on CMYK files and actually see them as they would look on paper.

If it were more reasonably priced, I'd be excited to buy one. I sit in front of a screenful of code all day and it's tiring on the eyes. Black-and-white e-ink is not as desirable because it's helpful to have colourful syntax highlighting.

If the resolution is high enough, readers of comics, newspaper, magazines, textbooks, children's books, maps, etc.

Anybody who cares about their eyes?