I still don't understand how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?
- Longer battery life
- easy on the eyes for long sessions reading/writing
- Allows me to actually work outside!!!
There is a huge market of people out there (Thinking about the typical ThinkPad users) that don't give 2 craps about color accuracy. We literally just want to read and write.
Anyone envolved in Product Management that can give some insights?
Is it too expensive?
Are there not enough users?
Are vendors scared of the lackluster of the device when compared with shinny reflective displays?
A little slow? I was pretty amazed by how fast it is in that video. I haven't kept up with E-Ink technology, but I own an old Kindle and it takes it 0.5-1s to refresh, but that 13.3" display is keeping up with finger gestures when scrolling.
Yes it would suck for watching movies, but it seems to be really useful for anything involving text, e.g. i.e. a secondary monitor to read documentation on, or even program on. I suppose the lag in text input being updated might be more distracting than when using it purely for reading.
Bought it when I was looking for a large screen eReader for the technical epubs and pdfs I’ve amassed over the years that require a big screen (big pages on the pdfs)
pros and cons of this company are pretty clear
Pros are that they have large eReaders and support any file format
They also run android so if you use an app like Pocket or an RSS feed to read articles, they work well enough
Cons:
The company’s documentation is more or less broken. Google how to fix something and their docs are missing, outdated, and often in broken english.
The screen itself is big but slow to refresh and in most modes leaves traces of the previous pages. They have a manual button to full refresh the page, but a user shouldn’t have to do that.
It’s not a certified android device so you have to jump through a bunch of somewhat insecure hoops to get the play store installed and log in.
Privacy: There privacy statement basically says “lol we promise to be private k?” So I want to run this thing through wireshark to see how true that is. My only skepticism is that it’s a Chinese company, and that might not be fair, but given the information I have on my device it would be good to confirm.
All that said, they have a color eInk screen that’s coming out soon that looks wonderful.
>it has potential but won't "arrive" until after the patents all expire
This is somewhat of a misconception. The high cost today has nothing to do with patents anymore, for the most part, though that' still a speedbump. It getting good yields in the fabs for the e-ink films that's the problem, and that's where e-ink has the secret sauce and why others can't compete even though they know how it works.
It's like saying TSMC's 3nm won't get any traction until it's patents expire, while the true vale comes form the fact that only they can get that process to scale profitably and their competition can't, even though they have access to the same tech and materials and $$$ funds.
So, I'm sure there are competitors who can replicate the e-ink tech. But to fab it profitably at that scale? Nope.
Rumor I heard from someone in the industry is that the patents have expired, but now the original holder pressures the few fabs to refuse work from competitors or get black balled.
As a results it’s extremely hard for new people to enter the industry and the original e-ink people have zero interest in actually building stuff vs. just leveraging this kind of power to screw others and keep margins high.
Seems bonkers to me. If they'd been more permissive with licensing the tech, they'd have made a lot more money, advanced the tech, and they could have exploited spin off. The way it was handled seems petty and small minded in a stupid and greedy way.
Is it expensive because of the parents or because it's not cheap to create a big sized e-ink display? I mean small e-ink displays for ebook readers or e-ink tablets are quite affordable these days.
Put the transparent OLED layer on top of the E-ink.
Now you can use E-ink for your static content or the OLED when you need dynamic content.
E-ink saves a lot of the OLED burn-in (which is at it's worst with white background) while OLED gives the ability to do more/better colors and fast response times.
I couldn't (easily) find information about refresh rates and such, what I want is to know if this is usable for coding. Frankly I'm down to go with lower stats for this, because I so want to be able to use a computer with just natural light.
If anybody has been doing this I'd love to read about your experience!
I enjoyed using my OLPC XO-1 for writing, programming, terminal usage, web browsing, etc. whilst sat outside on a sunny day. Was certainly a contrast to 'phone screens, which were barely visible, even with a backlight and shielded under a hand!
(The XO-1 uses a different display technology to these e-ink monitors, but the result is similar: a high-resolution greyscale display, lit externally)
While not coding per se, I write fiction on my Boox Note 2 in Wordgrinder through Termux and it’s pretty great (especially if I increase the refresh rate). And that’s an older slower device!
I can't wait until this reaches maturity to get a 11" or so sub-notebook which is quiet, low energy, with a good keyboard for reading and writing (text/code editing, emails, PDF reading of scientific papers).
Looked into this a couple of years ago and it was too early, now one could almost design & build that.
The Boox tablets are full android devices and support USB-C connectivity and Bluetooth for keyboards. They even have a clamshell keyboard case/attachment for sale that I have and use with my Note 2
Termux + Termux.Styling set to Black on White is surprisingly powerful, and works better than I expected. Adjusting the refresh rate helps too.
Unless you have perfect eyesight, at 11" those types of documents won't be a pleasant reading experience. I'm in the market for a good e-ink tablet to fulfill that role, but I don't consider current offerings quite there yet (maybe I have too many criteria in mind, like price, specs, supporting software, hackable if company goes bust, etc).
>Onyx Boox is a brand of e-book reader produced by Onyx International Inc, based in China
China is the only country innovating right now. The rest of the world really needs to start building combined manufacturing and innovation hubs like Shenzhen.
What is the lifespan of high refresh e-ink devices such as this monitor? Is it measured in a billion refreshes for example? E-ink displays have been slow to update but like this monitor there are a bunch of e-ink tablets which even allow you to watch videos and play games. In my head it feels like it detoriate the device faster.
It will deteriorate relatively quickly if you're using it primarily to watch video. Of the three vendors of e-ink monitors (Boox, Dasung, Waveshare), I believe only Waveshare is clear about this in their support documents ("The e-Paper display cannot work as common LCD displays, the lifetime of the e-Paper display is short and it is related to the update times. You cannot use e-Paper to display video for a long time, which will shorten the lifetime of the e-Paper display.").
With e-ink, the dots do not fail right away; the contrast deteriorates around the 10 million update mark.
My dad has bought the 25.3'' E ink monitor from Dasung. From what he tells, it does not have a backlight and is itself to dark for his taste outside of middle of the day. Maybe it will be better during summer or in bright condition but sitting further away from these devices may require more than just reflectiveness for some users.
Huh, weird. I got the small Dasung with a backlight, but I almost never use the backlight since avoiding that is one of the reasons I did get an E-Ink screen in the first place. You do need the room to be somewhat well lit, so in the mornings and evenings I'll turn on the overhead lights. Probably slightly harder to read than a book since the background isn't bleached white, but it's close-ish.
Here are my problems with such devices. I own an Onyx Boox 3 for a year now, I guess I qualify.
1) these screens still have bad contrast compared to a printed page at the same DPI. They mostly compare to yellowed dog-eared 50-year-old books. The dots are also rather fuzzy, so not really comparable to what you get in a decent LCD at the same density.
2) if it comes to desktop use, no OS/environment except classic MacOS up to version 8 and maybe GEM gives a shit about monochrome displays, especially those where only 1-bit colors look decent (so Windows 3.11 would likely count too). On DEs which you can still theme, themes that look like printed pages (two colors for UI, no gradients, no exceptions to this rule) don't exist at all. There's GTK's "High Contrast" theme, but it renders everything also BIG and FAT, which is cumbersome to look at unless you need it because of eyesight problems.
Also, there should be a way to disable all UI animations and most hover effects, but it either doesn't exist or keeps getting reinvented in any new major version so you're chasing it every once in a while.
3) Have you ever seen how Android renders colors on displays with no colors? God damn it to hell. I tried a terminal emulator. Some text was black, some white, some nigh-invisible, and some was white with a black (fuzzy) outline. I thought a monochrome display couldn't be ever described as garish, but now I've learned the errors of my ways. The only way it can work is if you export TERM=vt100 so it doesn't try to draw you rainbows where there can be none.
4) While the refresh speed got better compared to most Kindles I owned, when you're typing, it's still more annoying than a CRT with big afterburn.
Maybe it's kind of acquired taste, I dunno, but not for me. Yet. I hope.
I wouldn't mind a strictly 2-colored theme on a regular laptop screen as well, mind you.
I wonder how well one can modify the framework laptop to use the 13 inch e-ink monitor. Even if a small hdmi cable needs to run outside the case, as long as the lid can close (no need auto sleep) I'd be happy. I don't know anything about 3D printing, but it will likely be necessary (perhaps not sufficient though).
Looks pretty nice, especially the USB-C input. I might have gotten that one if it had been available when I was shopping for an e-Ink screen.
I got a Dasung 13" one a while ago, the larger Dasung wasn't launched yet (and I was struggling a bit to justify the price tag of the 13", now I'd probably go for the larger one). It's very limited, basically only works for black and white text, but for that it's great. I use it pretty much daily, just keeping a shell open there. I've changed my terminal to be black on white and all colors map to light/dark gray (for light/dark versions of the basic terminal colors), which works decently. I did change themes for things like tmux and vim to work better on a grayscale screen.
Reading text on it is great, but compared to a Kindle Oasis (whatever the newest model was last summer) its DPI is quite low, so you can't have text as small without it getting blurry. I mostly got it because I noticed that I was getting some eye strain staring at a regular screen all day and as best as I can tell it really has helped with that. It's also powered off of USB, which makes it usable on the go as a second screen.
My main gripe is using a Mini-HDMI-Port with a custom cable to inject power from USB (I think HDMI->Mini-HDMI plus a separate USB cable for Micro-USB input also work, never tried), but it's also a bit annoying that the inputs are on the sides and not the back. I also use it with a monitor arm at home, the included pole for standing it up is ok for on the go, but I really wouldn't use it permanently.
TL;DR: expensive, but if you want to reduce eye strain while reading a lot of text it really helps. Main driver for shell / coding tasks and I sometimes read longer websites/Google Docs/etc on it, though less frequently.
> *Please confirm your ports (USB Type-C and HDMI) support secondary monitors by connecting your devices to another monitor first. AMD GPUs are not supported for now.
I have no mental model of what this device is. Apparently it's not a display in the normal sense. Perhaps what's sent via HDMI/USB-C are effectively control signals rather than the colors/shades you want that get you the shades you want accounting for the response characteristics of the eInk display. What I'd like is for any of this extra logic to be in the device itself and not in software that requires installation and updates to keep working with OS updates, or other OSes altogether.
Man, I can't wait for something like e-ink to become usable as an actual 120Hz monitor. I've been sitting in front of shitty screens my entire life. Give display that do not shine and you could play games on.
[+] [-] zwirbl|4 years ago|reply
seems a little slow and the screen refreshes sometimes excessive, but much better than I expected
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|4 years ago|reply
- Longer battery life
- easy on the eyes for long sessions reading/writing
- Allows me to actually work outside!!!
There is a huge market of people out there (Thinking about the typical ThinkPad users) that don't give 2 craps about color accuracy. We literally just want to read and write.
Anyone envolved in Product Management that can give some insights?
Is it too expensive?
Are there not enough users?
Are vendors scared of the lackluster of the device when compared with shinny reflective displays?
[+] [-] avar|4 years ago|reply
Yes it would suck for watching movies, but it seems to be really useful for anything involving text, e.g. i.e. a secondary monitor to read documentation on, or even program on. I suppose the lag in text input being updated might be more distracting than when using it purely for reading.
[+] [-] pcurve|4 years ago|reply
Image quality goes down, but I was very very very impressed...
[+] [-] cgb223|4 years ago|reply
Bought it when I was looking for a large screen eReader for the technical epubs and pdfs I’ve amassed over the years that require a big screen (big pages on the pdfs)
pros and cons of this company are pretty clear
Pros are that they have large eReaders and support any file format
They also run android so if you use an app like Pocket or an RSS feed to read articles, they work well enough
Cons:
The company’s documentation is more or less broken. Google how to fix something and their docs are missing, outdated, and often in broken english.
The screen itself is big but slow to refresh and in most modes leaves traces of the previous pages. They have a manual button to full refresh the page, but a user shouldn’t have to do that.
It’s not a certified android device so you have to jump through a bunch of somewhat insecure hoops to get the play store installed and log in.
Privacy: There privacy statement basically says “lol we promise to be private k?” So I want to run this thing through wireshark to see how true that is. My only skepticism is that it’s a Chinese company, and that might not be fair, but given the information I have on my device it would be good to confirm.
All that said, they have a color eInk screen that’s coming out soon that looks wonderful.
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
E-ink is one of those great technologies that seems like it has potential but won't "arrive" until after the patents all expire.
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|4 years ago|reply
This is somewhat of a misconception. The high cost today has nothing to do with patents anymore, for the most part, though that' still a speedbump. It getting good yields in the fabs for the e-ink films that's the problem, and that's where e-ink has the secret sauce and why others can't compete even though they know how it works.
It's like saying TSMC's 3nm won't get any traction until it's patents expire, while the true vale comes form the fact that only they can get that process to scale profitably and their competition can't, even though they have access to the same tech and materials and $$$ funds.
So, I'm sure there are competitors who can replicate the e-ink tech. But to fab it profitably at that scale? Nope.
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
As a results it’s extremely hard for new people to enter the industry and the original e-ink people have zero interest in actually building stuff vs. just leveraging this kind of power to screw others and keep margins high.
[+] [-] robbedpeter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779
Some of the early parents have expired but there are a lot of them…
[+] [-] dabeledo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hutrdvnj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotdi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axegon_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dash2|4 years ago|reply
https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink...
I'd love to hear from anyone who's worked with a monitor like this.
[+] [-] patagonicus|4 years ago|reply
Let me know if you have any specific questions.
[+] [-] hajile|4 years ago|reply
Put the transparent OLED layer on top of the E-ink.
Now you can use E-ink for your static content or the OLED when you need dynamic content.
E-ink saves a lot of the OLED burn-in (which is at it's worst with white background) while OLED gives the ability to do more/better colors and fast response times.
[+] [-] lambdaba|4 years ago|reply
If anybody has been doing this I'd love to read about your experience!
[+] [-] deanc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriswarbo|4 years ago|reply
(The XO-1 uses a different display technology to these e-ink monitors, but the result is similar: a high-resolution greyscale display, lit externally)
[+] [-] girvo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jll29|4 years ago|reply
Looked into this a couple of years ago and it was too early, now one could almost design & build that.
[+] [-] girvo|4 years ago|reply
Termux + Termux.Styling set to Black on White is surprisingly powerful, and works better than I expected. Adjusting the refresh rate helps too.
[+] [-] salamandersauce|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhitza|4 years ago|reply
Unless you have perfect eyesight, at 11" those types of documents won't be a pleasant reading experience. I'm in the market for a good e-ink tablet to fulfill that role, but I don't consider current offerings quite there yet (maybe I have too many criteria in mind, like price, specs, supporting software, hackable if company goes bust, etc).
[+] [-] keewee7|4 years ago|reply
China is the only country innovating right now. The rest of the world really needs to start building combined manufacturing and innovation hubs like Shenzhen.
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smusamashah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlanYx|4 years ago|reply
With e-ink, the dots do not fail right away; the contrast deteriorates around the 10 million update mark.
[+] [-] mdp2021|4 years ago|reply
The declared generic (update frequency agnostic) lifespan for E-Ink displays a few years ago was:
10 million switches per dot
[+] [-] gawin|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGblzUc_Z1I
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-253-the-first-2...
[+] [-] moritonal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BBC-vs-neolibs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|4 years ago|reply
I’ve ordered a Mira, the 13.3” one, which I think is a more useful size for the type of documents and uses e-ink has.
This is super cool though!
[+] [-] BostonEnginerd|4 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/fz4yka/max3_revi...
[+] [-] patall|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabellito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patagonicus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fbn79|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WesolyKubeczek|4 years ago|reply
1) these screens still have bad contrast compared to a printed page at the same DPI. They mostly compare to yellowed dog-eared 50-year-old books. The dots are also rather fuzzy, so not really comparable to what you get in a decent LCD at the same density.
2) if it comes to desktop use, no OS/environment except classic MacOS up to version 8 and maybe GEM gives a shit about monochrome displays, especially those where only 1-bit colors look decent (so Windows 3.11 would likely count too). On DEs which you can still theme, themes that look like printed pages (two colors for UI, no gradients, no exceptions to this rule) don't exist at all. There's GTK's "High Contrast" theme, but it renders everything also BIG and FAT, which is cumbersome to look at unless you need it because of eyesight problems.
Also, there should be a way to disable all UI animations and most hover effects, but it either doesn't exist or keeps getting reinvented in any new major version so you're chasing it every once in a while.
3) Have you ever seen how Android renders colors on displays with no colors? God damn it to hell. I tried a terminal emulator. Some text was black, some white, some nigh-invisible, and some was white with a black (fuzzy) outline. I thought a monochrome display couldn't be ever described as garish, but now I've learned the errors of my ways. The only way it can work is if you export TERM=vt100 so it doesn't try to draw you rainbows where there can be none.
4) While the refresh speed got better compared to most Kindles I owned, when you're typing, it's still more annoying than a CRT with big afterburn.
Maybe it's kind of acquired taste, I dunno, but not for me. Yet. I hope.
I wouldn't mind a strictly 2-colored theme on a regular laptop screen as well, mind you.
[+] [-] codethief|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efferifick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdp2021|4 years ago|reply
If you just want to use an HDMI connection, a piece of plastic is sufficient, see:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmenti...
But do not think the solution is without issues (I mentioned elsewhere: touchscreen, battery...)
[+] [-] dkdbejwi383|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derekpankaew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patagonicus|4 years ago|reply
I got a Dasung 13" one a while ago, the larger Dasung wasn't launched yet (and I was struggling a bit to justify the price tag of the 13", now I'd probably go for the larger one). It's very limited, basically only works for black and white text, but for that it's great. I use it pretty much daily, just keeping a shell open there. I've changed my terminal to be black on white and all colors map to light/dark gray (for light/dark versions of the basic terminal colors), which works decently. I did change themes for things like tmux and vim to work better on a grayscale screen.
Reading text on it is great, but compared to a Kindle Oasis (whatever the newest model was last summer) its DPI is quite low, so you can't have text as small without it getting blurry. I mostly got it because I noticed that I was getting some eye strain staring at a regular screen all day and as best as I can tell it really has helped with that. It's also powered off of USB, which makes it usable on the go as a second screen.
My main gripe is using a Mini-HDMI-Port with a custom cable to inject power from USB (I think HDMI->Mini-HDMI plus a separate USB cable for Micro-USB input also work, never tried), but it's also a bit annoying that the inputs are on the sides and not the back. I also use it with a monitor arm at home, the included pole for standing it up is ok for on the go, but I really wouldn't use it permanently.
TL;DR: expensive, but if you want to reduce eye strain while reading a lot of text it really helps. Main driver for shell / coding tasks and I sometimes read longer websites/Google Docs/etc on it, though less frequently.
[+] [-] OliverJones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmakaze|4 years ago|reply
I have no mental model of what this device is. Apparently it's not a display in the normal sense. Perhaps what's sent via HDMI/USB-C are effectively control signals rather than the colors/shades you want that get you the shades you want accounting for the response characteristics of the eInk display. What I'd like is for any of this extra logic to be in the device itself and not in software that requires installation and updates to keep working with OS updates, or other OSes altogether.
[+] [-] oblak|4 years ago|reply
Won't happen in my life though