my HP version won't let me read a book without replacing the Cyan e-ink
Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
No, it's fine. The text is black. Can it display just the black?
HP being like: ... and I took that very personally
Hahahaha! Wait till hp makes these, and charges you a subscription to display anything.
"No fuck you, low on cyan"
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
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 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.
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.
Framework should offer an e-ink display as a component you can drop in to their laptops.
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
The title really grinds my gears... "New eInk display is basically like a bigger version of another eInk display"...
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.
Wait... Is this... Like that kindle thong mayhaps? Me am the smartyballs thinkerpersen!
So LED screens are basically just 25 inc lamps?
All I know is that if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike.
Which is a... Good thing?
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.
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
It might be more of a proof of concept... It's the first of it's kind, so I'd check back where this tech is a few years down the line
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.
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!
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.
Slap a battery in it a call it an e-newspaper
I would seriously kill for an e-newspaper ngl
I've been waiting for a flexible, two page, tabloid sized e-newspaper for, like, 20 years now.
This is the tech I've been waiting for
Does it have a frame rate of like 5? I can’t see any info in the article abt it
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.
The issue I had with using it for code is that the scrolling in the video seemed pretty bad, which is pretty essential for it. Would love an e ink monitor dedicated to code/terminals, so I'll be waiting to grab one when the frame rate's a bit better. Also, in some of the footage of them writing in Word looks like there's a decent amount of burn-in. I'd do it for $2k today if it had better frame rate for scrolling/typing and much less burn-in.