Though personally, I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments. Just setting the brightness at a decent value gives a good enough contrast; after all an e-ink display just reflects light so if the ambient lighting is constant you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness. I think the scrolling issues of e-ink would be a much greater source of eye strain and discomfort.
You can also use an off-white color as a background. Like HN does! It gives a similar feel as paper.
I'd love to see what this thing can do with a mobile processor and a laptop battery. I bet you could get days of battery life.
Yes, but that is a huge deal. I consider it one of the biggest life changers that will come for a large part of the population. We've built our lives around the limitations of emissive displays. What if you didn't need to shield out the sun to be able to do office type jobs? What if the boss in the field on a work site could just sit down where they are when he needs to do some computer stuff and be able to show designs to his workers without having to bring all inside a room or go make prints?
I think it also depends greatly on where you are. For Europeans, e-ink might not be so interesting, since it's dark and cold there. And when the sun actually shines, they are on holiday anyway. But for places with a lot of sunshine, e-ink will change a lot of things. That might mean we'll have to let go of scrolling as a paradigm. But let's face it: scrolling only became the default because of bad UI choices and lazy designers. Paper moved from scrolls to pages eons ago.
Or you could use the front camera, and you could even have 3D effects, so a real world light could be reflected in shiny stuff on screen, and cast shadows for non-flat content, etc.
This is the kind of thing I would expect my monitor to do for me (unless I manually override it). Brightness AND color (so, cooler during day, when the sun is shining through the windows, warmer at night, when the lightbulbs try to approximate incandescent lighting).
That works for high-contrast content, but tends to fall apart where more subtle shading differences matter. Either greater pixel depth (16 greyscale shades are common), halftoning (surprisingly effective given ~300 dpi resolution) or dithering (somewhat higher quality, avoides Moire effects) would be able to tackle considerably more content well.
(Based on my experience with an Onyx MAX Lumi, similarly-sized screen, multiple display options, and a wide range of content.)
The article mentions that there is greyscale rendering possible, but that text is first rendered 1-bit, with 1-bit greyscale applied after a few seconds for antialiasing. My experience with high DPI (dots per inch) displays is that antialiasing is far less an issue, both because the individual pixel size is so small and because with a monochrome screen, the reduced resolution of colour displays (where three pixels are required to provide colour for any given region) isn't a factor. Effectively the pixel density of a monochrome display is about 3x greater than an equivalent colour display, based on the same nominal DPI / dot pitch.
While they are neat, I'm left wondering what are some real world use cases, personal or business, where e-ink would be superior?
My perspective has changed recently, and I see it more as a question of accessibility and having control over our devices, user interfaces, and the medium.
I have an e-ink notebook and it's fantastic to take notes with, and I rarely think about charging it.
I'm planning to make a passive display showing things for the day near the front door with an inky frame, I messed with kindles for too long and realised I should just buy the right hardware and make the thing. I think the lack of a backlight makes them very nice for passive, low-attention displays. Glowing things are big "LOOK AT ME" visual distractors. The display should be battery powered for a significant time between charging. Weeks/maybe months?
With e-ink, persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better.
Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well.
Display power consumption is minimised so long as paints are small and/or infrequent, and it's possible for a small device to go days or even weeks between charges, though that implies reading-based use only, lights, radios (WiFi, Bluetooth), and speakers off. I find that Web browsing drains battery at roughly 10x the rate of ebook reading.
Text is beautifully crisp, approaching laserprinter quality (~200--300 dpi).
It works well for reasonably static content, whether that's a single image that remains in place for hours, days, weeks, months, years (possible with no further power), or something that tends to paint the whole screen at a time, possibly modifying a small region (e.g., a page of text whilst typing).
It's possible to do shaded images, animation, and videos, but you've got to work carefully around contrast for colour-differentiated graphics ("grey goop" isn't an existential threat, but it is a visual menace), and the trade-offs between display quality and refresh speed are fairly significant. E-ink can drive 15 Hz refresh, but that comes with ghosting and display artefacts on my Onyx BOOX (X-Mode).
At the highest quality modes, scrolling is a hot mess, and the screen dissolves into what I call "pixel soup". The worst part of this is that it's then hard to tell how far you've scrolled and to reacquire your reading or focus point when you stop. The compromise is to use high-quality when the display is static and Speed Mode (these refer to specific E-Ink display modes) as the image is updating, there's a hybrid mode which offers this. (In practice, you'll set apps that require scroll to this mode and the issue largely goes away.)
Effects which are acceptable on emissive colour displays, such as shadings, gradients, background colours, and lower-contrast or colour-differentiated text and background often fail spectacularly on e-ink. A constant frustration is graphics or visuals which use colours to differentiate data. Um, "this grey means A and this identical shade of grey means B" ... doesn't really work. If your graphics don't work when printed B&W on paper, they probably won't work on e-ink.
My Onyx offers 16 shades of greyscale, and there may be some slight differentiation, but an alternative means of differentiating data would be better. All those early Lotus 123 and Excel chart value shadings and datapoint characters suddenly make a lot of sense again.
What e-ink excels at is of course reading static, formatted, B&W / greyscale-focused documents with an emphasis on line-art or well-rendered halftone / dithered images. Those are crisp, clear, readable under any lighting conditions, and can be read even with the display or device powered off. Text-based generative tools (e.g., editors, Linux shell) work quite well.
Quite good: Notetaking, B&W/greyscale painting or drawing, audio playback (podcasts, music), voice comms (generally w/ third-party apps such as Jitsi Meet or other conferencing / voice / audio chat apps), Web browsing (so long as colour and animation aren't key).
Not so much: gaming, photography, video, high-fidelity / colour images.
I've enjoyed my Onyx Boox tablet; it's a little bigger than a A4 sheet of paper, which is perfect for sheet music, which is my primary use case
I do the set management on my phone, and then sync it over to the tablet. Phone's faster UX makes it less cumbersome, but this is mostly for convenience. The sync features are built in, and can be useful for more than just library management; when I'm playing with other horn players who have the app on an iPad or another e-ink display, we can sync it together and have page turns and other features occur automatically across all of us.
When performing or practicing, I often have the phone set next to the bigger screen, showing the upcoming page. They are synchronized using the same means as across different players.
For page turning, I use either an AirTurn Duo or an AirTurn Quad. The Quad mostly stays at home, with the extra pedals used to control midi playback. MobileSheets has built-in support for the AirTurn, so setup is a breeze.
Finally, a decent chunk of the music I get is old sheet music from sheet music libraries; I simply scan them to PDFs. For more modern pieces, or pieces where more work needs to be done (i.e. transposing, rearranging, etc), I use LilyPond.
MobileSheets: https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/
AirTurn: https://www.airturn.com/collections/bluetooth-pedals
I found the Caster Verilog on your github repo. Are you planning on shipping with all the controller logic on an FPGA?
Interesting and cool approach. Is this something that is already commonplace in the display industry? I have seen VGA controllers on (bigger) Xilinxes years ago as demos but I haven't read about it on shipped display-related products.
I would LOVE an eink display to help my tired eyes while I'm emacsing. But the patent BS and the high costs make it impractical for me to spend that much scratch at this time.
The demo is impressive. I bought a Mira Pro yesterday so I'm excited to see more options in the space.
I see why people gravitate to a laptop, a portable form factor, or a secondary 'focus' machine; in the end, each option has certain advantages and drawbacks.
Yes, we are accounting for abuse and the daily wear and tear in our design.
Onyx BOOX + Bluetooth keyboard + Termux ... gets me some of the way there, but it's not quite the same, and it's cumbersome to set up. I'd avoid Android if I could.
Thing is that a freestanding (and lightweight) display is also quite useful on its own, for reading, and any hybrid design is going to bump weight up a lot, which starts negating comfort of holding that in your hands and reading.
Which is to say I'm validating your design and thinking here. Watching with interest.
I'd expect something comparable to the 13.3" Onyx products as displays seem to dominate the BOM costs.
As for greyscale, with enough pixels, you can do dithering quite well. We used to do that with laser and ink-jet printers (by playing with reticule in PostScript, because the default was not definitely NOT designed for 300 dpi) with decent results.
In fact, a step back into monochrome could be a huge opportunity to explore new ideas in UI.
The Modos Paper Monitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899012 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Modos Paper Monitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31858659 - June 2022 (82 comments)
The Modos Paper Monitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837548 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Would You Buy the First Laptop with an E-Paper Screen? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750028 - June 2022 (15 comments)
The Modos Paper Laptop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31394226 - May 2022 (224 comments)
Modos: The World’s First E-ink Laptop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29929446 - Jan 2022 (13 comments)
Maybe it's finally a time for x86 e-ink laptop to strive. Can't wait to take note on that.
I've often thought that an e ink monitor would be a nice forcing function for productivity. Similar to how a Kindle forces me to read rather than get distracted by other apps.
