5 ms·
The quality of (any) mutable e-paper tablet will boil down to: 1. writing movement-to-pixel latency (should be around 5ms) 2. writing experience (tilting supp
by sharpercoder 8y ago
The quality of (any) mutable e-paper tablet will boil down to:
1. writing movement-to-pixel latency (should be around 5ms)
2. writing experience (tilting support, pressure levels, anti-aliasing, ...)
3. speed of apps on the device
4. shareability of annotations
5. "stroke-recognition" of diagrams, text, math formula's, etc
6. mashing of touch & pencil gestures
7. apps on the platform
I'd argue that only the Surface 4 solves (1) & (2) completely, with the competition between 75% and 90%. Speed (3) is a solved problem for mobile CPU/GPU/LED/OLED hardware, but e-paper is not close to 50%. (4) is also still quite young, since the "write on digital paper" thing is not even being used by enthusiasts (only some rarae niches show consistent use). (5) is mostly solved for handwriting recognition, and good progress is made on diagrams and math formula's. But it's young, and certainly not yet a commodity. (6) seems quite solved, as most algorithms to distinct between pencils and hand/finger touches work quite well. (7) is not yet solved, there are no good apps. Some exist, but they have "handwriting" as a feature, but not as a core feature.
Color may come in as 8th, but is for most digital authoring not that important. It would certainly increase the potential market for a good e-paper device, but would come last on above list.
In the past 15 years, progress on e-paper display technology has been slow but steady. Is the latency problem solved yet? Or are we still around 100ms?
- threeseed 8y agoLatency on the DPT-RP1 is exactly the same as those third party pens with an old iPad. Very noticeable. Apple's iPad Pro has excellent latency IMHO.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoThe iPad pro has much better (1) than the Surface 4 does.
- singhrac 8y agoFor 5., see this in early stages: https://github.com/harvardnlp/im2markup https://github.com/harvardnlp/im2markup
- icefo 8y agoI don't know if you count the Samsung tab s3 in the competition but the latency seems to be a bit above 100ms. You get used to it but it's annoying and I've tried all the apps to take notes I found and they are all not great. Squid beeing the best one so far but it feels like they tried to make a great app but couldn't for some reason. For example it only renders what's currently on the screen instead of rendering something that has 1.5x the size of the screen, so when you want to move up/down you don't see anything until you release your finger. That and the selection tool is broken: you can only select rectangular portion of text. It's infuriating