4 ms·

You can get refresh on a Kindle screen down to under 100ms if you want plain black and white. You only get the ludicrous refresh times if you want greyscale ---

You can get refresh on a Kindle screen down to under 100ms if you want plain black and white. You only get the ludicrous refresh times if you want greyscale --- I believe they do some kind of dithering over time to achieve that. Back in the old days I had a Hercules monitor with slow phosphor. I've tried to find some figures on the response rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar speed to the eink screen. It was really comfortable on the eyes and I slightly miss it (of course, it was the size of a postcard compared to a modern monitor). So I think an eink monitor could be quite usable for certain purposes. The thing I'd be concerned about is scrolling. We've got very used to monitors which will scroll smoothly. I've seen monitors which just turned into hash when scrolling; there's a reason why vi and emacs have modes for page-at-a-time scrolling.

david-given 10y ago
Update: here's a 32" epaper monitor! https://www.visionect.com/development_kits https://www.visionect.com/development_kits Greyscale: $3600. Colour: $4700. There's a 13" model at a mere $999, but who wants that? Slightly more realistically, there's the Dasung Paperlike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9DbdaPQyLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9DbdaPQyLY
- elevensies 10y ago
  Interesting thanks. 13.3" is just under the size of US Letter or A4 paper.
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
Paging is honestly easier for me than smooth scrolling when reading text. When smooth scrolling, you lose a lot of time following the animation and waiting for motion to stop. For some use cases, this would be ideal. For others, not so much. Can you speedily grayscale into black-and-white? That is, type a letter, putting black/gray into a previously white space (or vice versa, if using a dark color scheme), clearing a single-pixel-wide cursor and installing a new one to the right of the added letter. I don't need the letter to be fully black instantly, I just need to see that I have typed something.

david-given 10y ago

Update: here's a 32" epaper monitor! https://www.visionect.com/development_kits https://www.visionect.com/development_kits Greyscale: $3600. Colour: $4700. There's a 13" model at a mere $999, but who wants that? Slightly more realistically, there's the Dasung Paperlike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9DbdaPQyLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9DbdaPQyLY

elevensies 10y ago
Interesting thanks. 13.3" is just under the size of US Letter or A4 paper.

LeifCarrotson 10y ago

Paging is honestly easier for me than smooth scrolling when reading text. When smooth scrolling, you lose a lot of time following the animation and waiting for motion to stop. For some use cases, this would be ideal. For others, not so much. Can you speedily grayscale into black-and-white? That is, type a letter, putting black/gray into a previously white space (or vice versa, if using a dark color scheme), clearing a single-pixel-wide cursor and installing a new one to the right of the added letter. I don't need the letter to be fully black instantly, I just need to see that I have typed something.