6 ms·

I want to see an LCD with really good light sensors and a low brightness setting and see how it looks any different in uniform light.

tyler109 6y ago
you can't compare eink with lcd - one requires backlight one not at all - toally different technology
- anotheryou 6y ago
  Well firstly you can literally compare anything ;) But to be more precise: both "emit" light depending on the ambient light. Of course it's comparable. The only thing really throwing off the LCD would be the white balance, but with the right sensor that too could be fixed (e.g. a camera with fixed wight balance behind milk-glass).
  - tyler109 6y ago
    What about the the blue light emissons?
    - anotheryou 6y ago
      What about them? (E-)Paper reflects blue light, LCD backlight emits it. The only difference is that the color balance and brightness don't change with the sunset on your screen unless you install a tool like flux. Light is light. Looks the same = probably is the same. Bands are just a bit narrower with LEDs, but I wonder if that makes any difference biologically if it looks the same.
      - itronitron 6y ago
        With a backlit monitor (or projection screen) your visual system is doing extra work to reconcile two different lighting conditions. eink/epaper is reflecting ambient light just like every other object in the environment so your vision won't need to adjust when glancing back and forth
        anotheryou 6y ago
        Yes, e-paper auto-adjusts. But so do phones if they are set right (best done with a matte screen).
        Stratoscope 6y ago
        This sounds like your monitor is set too bright. (Or less likely, not bright enough.) If you set your monitor to the same brightness that paper or a non-backlit screen would have in your room, then your vision doesn't have to adjust to the different brightness levels. Same for TV. Don't watch TV in a dark room! When I had a modest home theater with a projection TV (the old bulky kind, not a separate projector and screen), one of the best things I did was to light the white wall behind it with a soft neutral gray light. The technique at the time was to use a small fluorescent desk lamp on a small table behind the TV, with the fluorescent tube wrapped in a specific color of lighting "gel" to make it a neutral gray. The lamp was aimed up at the wall behind the TV. This made everything much easier on the eyes.
- zeta0134 6y ago
  You can't compare eInk with backlit LCD, but front-lit LCD panels totally exist; see any pocket calculator. For a dot-matrix display, the original Gameboy Color is the best example I personally own, but I'm sure countless others exist. The main trouble I think is that very few (any?) manufacturers are making front-lit LCD panels at typical monitor sizes and resolutions. I guess there's not really a market for it? But if such a thing exists I'd compare the heck out of it and eInk.
  - anotheryou 6y ago
    I certainly meant backlit. Viewing angle would be another pain point with them, but that also came a long way and you could chose one with good angles if needed.
  - tyler109 6y ago
    There is also really interesting development happening in the frontlight tech sector. Check out FLEx Lighting, they raiselnd raised 9mln USD to Launch LCD 2.0: https://forum.ei2030.org/t/flex-lighting-raises-9m-in-funding-to-launch-lcd-2-0-display-technology/60 https://forum.ei2030.org/t/flex-lighting-raises-9m-in-fundin...
    - baybal2 6y ago
      Original EEE Note came with such display. People still chose Eink despite the price, and slow refresh.
  - tyler109 6y ago
    There is for an example an interesting market in medical radiology imaging. This is a profession like many other who is always looking for ways to reduce eye strain. they see it as an occupational hazard: http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5449879 http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5449879 This is relevant for pretty much any knowledge worker job as well.
- mojomark 6y ago
  Not all LCD screens require a backlight. Reflective and Transparent LCD's can operate without backlights (1, 2), and the hybrid transflective LCD's can use ambient light and/or backlight to illuminate the image. Transflective LCDs improve sunlight readability without the need for an intense backlight. All LCD's essentially use a similar liquid crystal pixel that serves as a variable light shutter for polarized light. It's the back- and front-planes (e.g. addition or omission of RGB color filters, different types of backlights, fully or partially reflective layers, etc.) that differentiate different types of LCDs. If you have an old LCD laying around, with many of them you can actually take the different layers apart to access the active or passive matrix LCD panel (you'll end up with a transparent LCD). I did it once with a tiny LCD, it's pretty cool. Then you can play around with adding your own layers/lighting effects. 1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal... 2.) https://www.winstar.com.tw/products/tft-lcd/transflective-tft.html https://www.winstar.com.tw/products/tft-lcd/transflective-tf...
  - floatboth 6y ago
    I really like the transflective screen of the Pebble Time watch. I wish I could get a transflective monitor :D
mortenjorck 6y ago
I would like to see the same comparison with a reflective LCD display, which is much closer in practice to an e-paper display. My guess is the main drawback would be viewing angles, but I’d also imagine the same screen size would be about a fifth of the price.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I agree with you. I have an old Seiko watch with something paper like behind the display. At some viewing angles, it looks great. Frankly, I could use either tech for similar reasons. E-ink would be superior for overall viewing and eye strain, however both have merit. The LCD would likely be faster, with a much narrower sweet spot for viewing. And I wonder about these Vanta Black type pigmemts too. E-ink I have seen is really good, but could potentially be crazy good. Maybe that cannot be used, or is too expensive. But yeah, I wonder.
fpgaminer 6y ago
You're right. People seem to have this misconception that the light from reflective displays like eInk is somehow different from that of emissive displays like LCD or OLED. Light is light. An LCD with _perfect_ calibration to the local lighting conditions would look indistinguishable from an eInk display, and thus we would expect it to have the same eye-strain reducing properties. Put a different way: when light falls on an eInk "pixel" it gets absorbed and then re-emitted, modulo intensity. That's how we see the vast majority of surfaces in the world: they absorb light and then re-emit it, possibly changing its intensity and color (frequency). Technologies like OLED directly emit light; not reacting significantly to the ambient light that falls on them. But if one we able to measure the light falling on each individual pixel of an OLED, one could adjust each pixel to mimic the behavior of a physical object. It could "simulate" eInk, so to speak. If the mimicry is close enough, then there's no fundamental difference between the two. They'd both be emitting the same frequency and intensity of light. In fact I recall a post, mostly likely here on HN: Someone took a high quality Apple display and rigged it with an array of ambient light sensors, put it in a decorative art frame and hung it on the wall. With some software and calibration they were able to get it to look convincingly like a real piece of art, fooling many of their guests. eInk has been around for decades now and has remained an obscure niche. It's possible we'll see a renaissance for it, with the patents hopefully expiring? But there's no reason we shouldn't also be pursuing better ambient light calibration for our existing displays. P.S. It's not accurate to say that eInk is a "reflective" display, as it does not primarily reflect light. Otherwise it would look like a mirror. But saying "emissive" versus "reflective" is common parlance for differentiating technologies like eInk from technologies like LCDs and OLEDs. Nitpicking the terminology is not particularly helpful though.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "An LCD with _perfect_ calibration to the local lighting conditions would look indistinguishable from an eInk display" Too bad nobody actually makes one. There's no way to buy a hypothetical, so e-ink it is.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Perfect isn't the goal, it's just a word used to make the proof more obvious. The relevant question is whether you can buy an LCD that calibrates well enough, and the answer is not "obviously no".

tyler109 6y ago

you can't compare eink with lcd - one requires backlight one not at all - toally different technology

anotheryou 6y ago
Well firstly you can literally compare anything ;) But to be more precise: both "emit" light depending on the ambient light. Of course it's comparable. The only thing really throwing off the LCD would be the white balance, but with the right sensor that too could be fixed (e.g. a camera with fixed wight balance behind milk-glass).
- tyler109 6y ago
  What about the the blue light emissons?
  - anotheryou 6y ago
    What about them? (E-)Paper reflects blue light, LCD backlight emits it. The only difference is that the color balance and brightness don't change with the sunset on your screen unless you install a tool like flux. Light is light. Looks the same = probably is the same. Bands are just a bit narrower with LEDs, but I wonder if that makes any difference biologically if it looks the same.
    - itronitron 6y ago
      With a backlit monitor (or projection screen) your visual system is doing extra work to reconcile two different lighting conditions. eink/epaper is reflecting ambient light just like every other object in the environment so your vision won't need to adjust when glancing back and forth
      - anotheryou 6y ago
        Yes, e-paper auto-adjusts. But so do phones if they are set right (best done with a matte screen).
      - Stratoscope 6y ago
        This sounds like your monitor is set too bright. (Or less likely, not bright enough.) If you set your monitor to the same brightness that paper or a non-backlit screen would have in your room, then your vision doesn't have to adjust to the different brightness levels. Same for TV. Don't watch TV in a dark room! When I had a modest home theater with a projection TV (the old bulky kind, not a separate projector and screen), one of the best things I did was to light the white wall behind it with a soft neutral gray light. The technique at the time was to use a small fluorescent desk lamp on a small table behind the TV, with the fluorescent tube wrapped in a specific color of lighting "gel" to make it a neutral gray. The lamp was aimed up at the wall behind the TV. This made everything much easier on the eyes.
zeta0134 6y ago
You can't compare eInk with backlit LCD, but front-lit LCD panels totally exist; see any pocket calculator. For a dot-matrix display, the original Gameboy Color is the best example I personally own, but I'm sure countless others exist. The main trouble I think is that very few (any?) manufacturers are making front-lit LCD panels at typical monitor sizes and resolutions. I guess there's not really a market for it? But if such a thing exists I'd compare the heck out of it and eInk.
- anotheryou 6y ago
  I certainly meant backlit. Viewing angle would be another pain point with them, but that also came a long way and you could chose one with good angles if needed.
- tyler109 6y ago
  There is also really interesting development happening in the frontlight tech sector. Check out FLEx Lighting, they raiselnd raised 9mln USD to Launch LCD 2.0: https://forum.ei2030.org/t/flex-lighting-raises-9m-in-funding-to-launch-lcd-2-0-display-technology/60 https://forum.ei2030.org/t/flex-lighting-raises-9m-in-fundin...
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Original EEE Note came with such display. People still chose Eink despite the price, and slow refresh.
- tyler109 6y ago
  There is for an example an interesting market in medical radiology imaging. This is a profession like many other who is always looking for ways to reduce eye strain. they see it as an occupational hazard: http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5449879 http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5449879 This is relevant for pretty much any knowledge worker job as well.
mojomark 6y ago
Not all LCD screens require a backlight. Reflective and Transparent LCD's can operate without backlights (1, 2), and the hybrid transflective LCD's can use ambient light and/or backlight to illuminate the image. Transflective LCDs improve sunlight readability without the need for an intense backlight. All LCD's essentially use a similar liquid crystal pixel that serves as a variable light shutter for polarized light. It's the back- and front-planes (e.g. addition or omission of RGB color filters, different types of backlights, fully or partially reflective layers, etc.) that differentiate different types of LCDs. If you have an old LCD laying around, with many of them you can actually take the different layers apart to access the active or passive matrix LCD panel (you'll end up with a transparent LCD). I did it once with a tiny LCD, it's pretty cool. Then you can play around with adding your own layers/lighting effects. 1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal... 2.) https://www.winstar.com.tw/products/tft-lcd/transflective-tft.html https://www.winstar.com.tw/products/tft-lcd/transflective-tf...
- floatboth 6y ago
  I really like the transflective screen of the Pebble Time watch. I wish I could get a transflective monitor :D

mortenjorck 6y ago

I would like to see the same comparison with a reflective LCD display, which is much closer in practice to an e-paper display. My guess is the main drawback would be viewing angles, but I’d also imagine the same screen size would be about a fifth of the price.

ddingus 6y ago
I agree with you. I have an old Seiko watch with something paper like behind the display. At some viewing angles, it looks great. Frankly, I could use either tech for similar reasons. E-ink would be superior for overall viewing and eye strain, however both have merit. The LCD would likely be faster, with a much narrower sweet spot for viewing. And I wonder about these Vanta Black type pigmemts too. E-ink I have seen is really good, but could potentially be crazy good. Maybe that cannot be used, or is too expensive. But yeah, I wonder.

fpgaminer 6y ago

You're right. People seem to have this misconception that the light from reflective displays like eInk is somehow different from that of emissive displays like LCD or OLED. Light is light. An LCD with _perfect_ calibration to the local lighting conditions would look indistinguishable from an eInk display, and thus we would expect it to have the same eye-strain reducing properties. Put a different way: when light falls on an eInk "pixel" it gets absorbed and then re-emitted, modulo intensity. That's how we see the vast majority of surfaces in the world: they absorb light and then re-emit it, possibly changing its intensity and color (frequency). Technologies like OLED directly emit light; not reacting significantly to the ambient light that falls on them. But if one we able to measure the light falling on each individual pixel of an OLED, one could adjust each pixel to mimic the behavior of a physical object. It could "simulate" eInk, so to speak. If the mimicry is close enough, then there's no fundamental difference between the two. They'd both be emitting the same frequency and intensity of light. In fact I recall a post, mostly likely here on HN: Someone took a high quality Apple display and rigged it with an array of ambient light sensors, put it in a decorative art frame and hung it on the wall. With some software and calibration they were able to get it to look convincingly like a real piece of art, fooling many of their guests. eInk has been around for decades now and has remained an obscure niche. It's possible we'll see a renaissance for it, with the patents hopefully expiring? But there's no reason we shouldn't also be pursuing better ambient light calibration for our existing displays. P.S. It's not accurate to say that eInk is a "reflective" display, as it does not primarily reflect light. Otherwise it would look like a mirror. But saying "emissive" versus "reflective" is common parlance for differentiating technologies like eInk from technologies like LCDs and OLEDs. Nitpicking the terminology is not particularly helpful though.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "An LCD with _perfect_ calibration to the local lighting conditions would look indistinguishable from an eInk display" Too bad nobody actually makes one. There's no way to buy a hypothetical, so e-ink it is.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Perfect isn't the goal, it's just a word used to make the proof more obvious. The relevant question is whether you can buy an LCD that calibrates well enough, and the answer is not "obviously no".