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Thinkpad X230 with “e-Ink” display at 30fps [video]
- devn0ll 6y agoAbsolutely fantastic! I saw the post on Reddit and I immediately thought "WANT IT". Black and white in direct sunlight? And color in the shade, development dream this thing. (At least for me that is) Shame the company behind it does not really exist anymore.
- amiga-workbench 6y agoThe PixelQI IP was acquired by someone else, but I'm pretty sure they've just sat on it. I would kill for a 12.1" 1440x900 QI panel for my X201.
- voxadam 6y agoThe Pixel Qi IP is apparently now owned by Tripuso Display Solutions.[1] [1] https://www.tripuso.com/ https://www.tripuso.com/
- techdragon 6y agoAre they even in business? I mean that site looks like they don’t even want customers...
- einpoklum 6y ago> I'm pretty sure they've just sat on it. Ah, the magic of intellectual property ownership, supposedly helping to promote technological progress. Is this US-registered IP?
- me_me_me 6y agoYou don't want that! You want a thinner lighter laptop with tiny battery and shitty keyboard. Trust us on this, we are professionals.
- blagie 6y agoThe problem is lack of standardization. My desktop is decked out the way I like. That's different from how you'd like. I'd obviously buy a high-quality high-res reflective display for my laptop. I wouldn't swap out the rest of my laptop for a random laptop with a high-quality high-res reflective display. But you can't just swap laptop components, except for sometimes SSD, RAM, and wifi card. If there were an industry-standard 13" and 15" laptop form factor with swapable components like a desktop, there would be a market for eInk displays and other oddballs. You could stick them in your HP, and Ivanka could stick it in her Lenovo. I'd buy a: * Keyboard with eraser dongle * Overbuild, rugged case (think ToughBook). I don't mind the weight. * Motherboard with two M.2 slots (for RAID), ECC memory, and lots of ports * High-res outdoor readable display * High-quality microphone and camera (I don't care about speakers) And stick it all together. I'd never buy a Toughbook as-is, since the display doesn't have enough resolution. I don't like a lot of the workstation/gaming style laptops either, mostly since they use a ton of power, which leads to fan noise, heat, and other annoyances. At the end of the day, without being able to customize, the thinner laptop with shitty keyboard seems to be what I want.
- me_me_me 6y ago> At the end of the day, without being able to customize, the thinner laptop with shitty keyboard seems to be what I want. See, I told you :) You can have any laptop you'd like "so long as it is black".
- craftinator 6y agoI just spit toothpaste everywhere while reading your comment, thanks for that.
- black_puppydog 6y agoThe fact that this type of device is virtually inaccessible, short of DIY, is for me a prime example of market failure ever since I learned about transflectives. Btw I'd opt to replace the "E-INK" in the title with "transflective" assuming HN folks know to tell the two apart.
- mtgx 6y agoQualcomm has had this tech for about a decade, but failed to commercialize/improve on it: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178117/qualcomm-mirasol-screen-licensing-commercialization https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178117/qualcomm-mirasol-...
- fractallyte 6y agoIt belongs to Apple now... (https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-over-qualcomms-imod-mirasol-display-lab-in-taiwan https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-o...) And Mirasol is a different technology than Pixel Qi.
- chrisjc 6y agoWow, I had no idea about this even though I was somewhat following the 'e-ink' technologies quite closely. An ipad with a colored 'e-ink'/LED hybrid screen would be such a perfect tablet in my opinion (even though I've never owned an ipad).
- bigfudge 6y agoIt would require a major iOS re-write though. Designing for e-ink is a really different paradigm, both statically and in relation to UX interactions. I just returned an onyx boox note because although the hardware was quite nice, the UI was just garbage. I'm sure Apple could do it, but it does't seem very on-brand for them. I'm waiting of a delivery of an RM2, but I'm still not that hopeful that they have solved the problem of reading an A4 academic PDF. Yet another reason to kill off the commercial academic publishing industry — we can get proper epubs of papers!
- potiuper 6y agoDoes it work with Linux?
- pcdoodle 6y agoYes and it works better than Windows because you can turn the backlight completely off for maximum battery life.
- shrimp_emoji 6y agoOh, you can't turn the backlight completely off in Windows? (I had no idea; I only use Linux on ancient ThinkPads, since... well, that's what they're for! :P)
- pcdoodle 6y agoYes, it seems to be a driver issue under windows, however it's less that 0.1w at min brightness
- rhim 6y agoAre there major differences in battery life?
- pcdoodle 6y agoSame as running the laptop with the brightness all the way down (Windows) and backlight completely off (Linux). This is specific to the X230.
- foobar33333 6y agoOne thing to note, this is _not_ an e-ink display. The quotes around e-ink should be replaced with "diaplay that looks like e-ink" There are no colored capsules in this screen which float around to create a picture. These are usually just regular LCDs with no or little backlight and a reflective backing.
- floatboth 6y agoTransflective displays do seem to result in decent battery life, the Pebble Time watch is a good example. Though we do now have long lasting OLED watches – looks like running Android on a beefy CPU vs a tiny RTOS on a microcontroller is the bigger difference… buuuut still the Pebble gets away with a smaller battery than these OLED ones I think?
- throwaway81523 6y agoAnyone else here old enough to remember the Mac Portable? It had a monochrome reflective (no backlight) display fast enough to display video (a rarity at the time) and worked great in sunlight. Apparently it wasn't so great in low light. There was a backlit version sometime later, per wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
- photojosh 6y agoYes, my parents had one and it was our only computer from 1991-1995. Sadly teenaged me thought it would be good to pull the then-obsoleted machine to bits. It was a good learning experience but I'd rather still have it intact. :(
- Causality1 6y agoTransflective screens are a vastly underappreciated technology these days. Back in the 00's basically every PDA came with one as standard. I don't know why we just decided we didn't need them in the smartphone era.
- foobar33333 6y agoThis video is an example of why. It looks crap and has no color. I have no problems seeing my phone in the sun and it looks stunning. The HN crowd hypes up tech that real users don't want and exaggerates problems that real users don't have or don't care about.
- vbezhenar 6y agoI just tried to use my iPhone on direct sunlight. It does not look stunning. It is barely usable.
- _jstreet 6y agoI agree, I'd rather not have to turn the brightness up to 100% so that my battery life drains faster to be able to view my phone in direct sunlight.
- floatboth 6y agoMy OnePlus phone in direct sunlight not only pushes the physical OLED brightness to the max, but seems to also apply some filter to the image that makes dark colors brighter, e.g. a dark gray keyboard almost turns into lighter gray. Does help with visibility.
- gsich 6y agoTurn 180° and the problem is solved.
- techrat 6y agoIt's in color. It just appears more black and white when in direct sunlight.
- andai 6y agoSuper cool, I love these! Is this an old Pixel Qi display? Or is anyone still making them?
- Snoozus 6y agoLooks like transflective screens were available in some Panasonic Toghbooks, the internet says CF-19 MK5-8
- mettamage 6y agoLet's create some market demand here (and hope it goes anywhere). I want a transflective display. If any tech company reads this and wants to change the world: getting this in the hands of people means that many more people have the capability of sitting outside. This means more vitamin D intake. More vitamin D means improved mood (a lack of vitamin D could lead to depression [1]). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908269/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908269/
- Tade0 6y agoI was surprised to note that my Asus G14 has a somewhat similar thing going on: https://wringing.it/transrefl.png https://wringing.it/transrefl.png Low res image to not show too much of my data, but this is the screen at minimum brightness with the sun shining on it. Text is a little blurred, but legible. My previous laptops definitely didn't have this, but then again I switched to this one here in 2020 after almost seven years.
- wffurr 6y agoI think the G14 just has a matte display with fairly high brightness. It’s not actually reflective; nowhere near as crisp as the laptop in the video.
- mleonhard 6y agoBlurring doesn't protect information. Next time, just open a wikipedia page full-screen and take your photo.
- devindotcom 6y agoYou can see this in other LCDs as well. It's not deliberate AFAIK, the direct sunlight bounces off the back layers and causes the active RGB filters to be visible at certain angles.
- codezero 6y agoThinking of market demand - this guy hasn't even sold the three he built for $666, which seems really decent for a full system already ready to go. I'm tempted myself but wouldn't get much use out of it because I am deeply embedded into Apple and I'm Ok with that, I use my reMarkable tablets to scratch my e-Ink itches.
- einpoklum 6y agoYou had me at Thinkpad X230. Although the 220 keyboard is better IIRC.
- rvense 6y agoI think someone managed to stick a 220 keyboard onto a 230
- icey 6y agoThere are quite a few people who have done this (myself included). The process is pretty straightforward since they have nearly identical chassis. r/Thinkpad has a lot of details on how to do it. The toughest part is covering the right connections on the ribbon cable for the 220 keyboard since the pinouts are slightly different. It is a fun little project and the keyboards can be found pretty cheaply on eBay.
- rasz 6y agodont you need a bios(smc) modded firmware flash to make all the keys work?
- icey 6y agoYes, you're right. I forgot about this step because I also corebooted my Thinkpad and replaced the NIC at the same time as keyboard. For the keyboard, I used these instructions: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_xx30_Series_ThinkPads https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_x... (Corebooting was not needed to flash the bios, it just seemed fun at the time)
- pinusc 6y agoYes, however the process is very easy today and can be done entirely software-side, thanks to 1vyrain [1]. So you don't need to flash the BIOS using an external programmer, just run what amounts to an exploited/modified update. I recently did this on my T430, and could not be happier about the keyboard. [1]: https://github.com/n4ru/1vyrain https://github.com/n4ru/1vyrain
- bananicorn 6y agoThis is the same type of screen used as in the pebble smartwatches[0], right? Honestly, I wonder why that technology hasn't been used for anything like the Thinkpad in the video - I'd love to have such a device! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Hardware
- Woung1938 6y agoThe most plausible explanation is that the tech is patented to such a degree that producing this kind of solutions is just not economically viable.
- mbar84 6y agoConsidering how long ago the OLPC project was, hopefully the patents are running out soon.
- Qwertious 6y agoPatents aren't the main problem here; the lower refresh rate and resolution mean not many people want it. Fewer people wanting it means lower economy of scale and higher prices, which means even fewer still.
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoAlways with this excuse, but I really doubt it. There's just a million manufacturers of this or technology similar to this. Many of them have failed and people usually would only notice and care _after_ they failed.
- Qwertious 6y agoThe most plausible explanation is that it's expensive because there's no economy economy of scale, and that there's no economy of scale because people don't want to pay extra for a worse quality screen even if it has a slightly better battery life.
- pareidolia 6y ago
- cycomanic 6y agoI had a notion ink tablet 8 years ago or so. Being able to use the tablet outside in the sunlight was definitely cool, however the display quality (uniformity, dead-pixels ...) was quite poor. I wish there were more tablets or even laptops of this type later.
- tyler109 6y agoYou should join our eink community: we are working on an open source eink laptop. Join our Discord server: https://forum.ei2030.org/t/welcome-to-the-ei2030-forum/7 https://forum.ei2030.org/t/welcome-to-the-ei2030-forum/7
- TekMol 6y agoWhy a laptop and not just a mobile monitor?
- yoz-y 6y agoWhat would be an advantage of that?
- hollander 6y agoIf you have some kind of overlay screen you can have both worlds. But I was still under the impression that E-ink was the only option. Today I learnt about transflective screens. I hope they catch on. I would buy it.
- selfhoster11 6y agoIt can be used as a PC display, which I'd kill for (figuratively) as long as it's affordable. If it's $200 or more, that's not what I consider affordable.
- TekMol 6y agoTo develop a laptop is a much bigger goal than developing a monitor. And everyone has different taste/priorities when it comes to laptops. I would like to put the monitor on a stand behind the laptop so it is on eye height.
- Qwertious 6y agoE-ink monitors already exist. Look up the Dasung e-ink monitor.
- IshKebab 6y agoThis isn't e-ink. He even says "it's kind of like e-ink" in the video.
- Qwertious 6y agoOn top of that, while there are e-ink screens that can refresh at 30Hz, they aren't bi-stable. In other words, you have to give up the main benefit of e-ink in order to get half the refresh rate of a normal LCD. The fundamental problem behind e-ink refresh rates is that there's an inherent physical limit to how quickly you can shake your ink particles up and down without damaging things.
- vcdimension 6y agoAre there any instructions online about how to fit a pixel qi screen to a thinkpad x230?
- rasz 6y agoIts not plug and play, You will need a displayport LVDS controller.
- lmilcin 6y agoPerfect machine for working on a beach.
- hobo_mark 6y agoWonder who'd want to do mentally demanding work under hot sun.
- lmilcin 6y agoMe? It would be stupid to keep my wife and kids home during summer just because I need to work. So they sometimes travel without me. I have actually been working remotely for many years. It is sometimes possible to move stuff around so that I have mostly reading for a week or two and then I could do it anywhere I want. I have experimented with traveling while working remotely with some mixed results.
- bluedino 6y agoIf the X220/230 had came with an IPS screen, preferably 1440x900, I would have never switched to MacBooks (I am aware the tablet version came with an IPS screen but that is a different model)
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoAnd the Lenovo IPS screens on the X220(t) were notoriously bad anyway. The ghosting being so extreme I used to think my xterm had transparent backgrounds enabled (imagine my horror when I realized I didn't).
- rasz 6y agox230 non Tablets also came with IPS https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=127949 https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=127949 I know because I have a few, all have blemishes on panels at this point.
- TekMol 6y agoAre these types of displays available as external monitors which are powered by USB? Would love to work outside and put the monitor on a stand so I don't have to look down.
- cfjgvjh 6y agoI know Dasung makes the Paperlike, which is an E-ink external monitor. It's terribly expensive though, at about a grand for a 13 inch one.
- Twirrim 6y agoThe slower FPS and slight blurring is making me nostalgic for the old "luggable" portable computers from the 90s, and early LCD display laptops, though it's no where near as bad as they used to be.
- anthk 6y agoInstead of Windows I´d setup a black and white environment under OpenBSD/Slackware with the System4 GTK3/2 theme and some monospaced icon set. Also, CWM with a black/white setup it's dumb easy, and xterm has an XTERMM termcap setting for the TERM variable, so that's a solved issue. Also lots of old X11 games will work fine, among text adventures/games and Game Boy titles. Finally, X11 has a monochrome switch, really useful for these cases (I think it adds dithering to a b/w display): Xserver -render mono Under OpenBSD, edit /etc/X11/xenodm/Xservers and add to the last line: -render mono
- yc-kraln 6y agoI have often thought that a device purpose-built for music with one of these transflexive screens would be absolutely fantastic. Even the 10" screens are big enough; Two screens for a folio would make a fantastic device for any musician to travel with. Now I sort of want to build one. Adafruit doesn't stock them anymore ( https://www.adafruit.com/product/1303 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1303 ) Anyone know where I could get two?
- guffaw5 6y agoI just bought one on ebay[0]. I've been having trouble tracking down a compatible driver board though. Edit: Apparently this[1] is the matching driver board. [0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Pixel-Qi-10-1-PQ3QI-01-LCD-Display-Panel/201605875956 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Pixel-Qi-10-1-PQ3QI-01-LCD-Display-... [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Kit-For-PQ3QI-01-HDMI-DVI-VGA-LCD-LED-LVDS-Controller-Board-Driver/184451512949 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Kit-For-PQ3QI-01-HDMI-DVI-VGA-LCD-L...
- dreamlayers 6y agoThe first video iPod has a colour transflective LCD. Why aren't there more colour displays like that?
- awiesenhofer 6y agoRelated, I really hope someone will make a laptop with TCLs Nxtpaper* - or alternatively Apple starts offering their Nanotexture option on Macbooks. * https://m.gsmarena.com/tcl_nxtpaper_brings_new_display_technology_for_zero_eye_damage_and_no_blue_light-news-47141.php https://m.gsmarena.com/tcl_nxtpaper_brings_new_display_techn...
- xwdv 6y agoMy demands for an e-ink display aren’t even that high. I just want some kind of e-ink that can be used with vim and terminals that will be easier on the eyes, I can use a separate monitor for graphical applications. What are my options in 2021?