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[–] 113 points 3 years ago (4 children)

my HP version won't let me read a book without replacing the Cyan e-ink

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 97 points 3 years ago (31 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 44 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago* (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago

    Just to be clear, the costs are in licensing the eink tech from the company that owns the patents. The processors in the eink tablets available today are not expensive processors.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    I'm not so sure, I think it would go the way of smart speakers - a solution without much of a problem to solve

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    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

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 88 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    I spend my days in emacs and terminal emulators and I want this very badly in a laptop form factor so I can comfortably work outside.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 48 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    The title really grinds my gears... "New eInk display is basically like a bigger version of another eInk display"...

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 32 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    So LED screens are basically just 25 inc lamps?

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  • [–] 31 points 3 years ago (3 children)
  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Slap a battery in it a call it an e-newspaper

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    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

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Second on if affordable, I’d buy it… and I don’t even code much anymore. For anything that doesn’t need to be rapidly refreshed (I.E just about anything that’s not watching/editing videos or playing games), this will be so much more comfortable for extended use!

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    [–] 19 points 3 years ago

    This is the tech I've been waiting for

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    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.

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    [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    I have been wanting one of these things for so fucking long. I can't wait!

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Does it have a frame rate of like 5? I can’t see any info in the article abt it

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