5 ms·

Oh, this is exciting. The performance and latency is a huge variable though. For a lot of these experimental hacker-friendly devices, I'm willing to tolerate a

Oh, this is exciting. The performance and latency is a huge variable though. For a lot of these experimental hacker-friendly devices, I'm willing to tolerate a lot of compromises. Even here, the software, the out-of-the-box experience isn't really that important to me. Arguably, you can get away with even more compromise on a device like this than on something like the Pinephone. But it has to have amazing pen performance, or it's just not worth working with. Everything else except that is either fixable or something that probably isn't getting in the way of the core point of the device. IMO Remarkable got this right -- their software support is by many metrics quite bad (although I guess it's slowly started to improve). Their device handles PDFs kind of poorly from what I can tell. It's expensive. The interface seems slower and more laggy than many other EReaders. But none of that really matters, what matters is they have arguably the best pen latency and physical texturing on the E-ink market, and that writing on the device feels good. So the same thing applies here: the price seems completely reasonable to me, I have no issues with a $400 price tag. I'd pay $600, the price isn't the issue. But I need to see videos and testimonial that the pen latency isn't just "acceptable", but that it's really good. Otherwise it's not even worth $100. Writing experience is one of those things where once you get used to a lack of latency/offset, and used to a more accurate feel, it gets progressively harder and harder to go back to anything that's worse.

tadfisher 5y ago
The thing is, the ReMarkable isn't doing anything special hardware-wise to achieve that latency, as they're based on NXP reference designs with the same integrated EPD every other E-ink device is using (besides the Android-based devices, of course). The magic is essentially that they have nothing running on the device except a Qt app which writes directly to the framebuffer, and they have an extremely simplified framebuffer driver that allows the Qt app to implement the complex parts of updating an E-ink screen in userspace. The Wacom input is standard, the other kernel bits are standard, and they're even running systemd.
- danShumway 5y ago
  That's really positive if that's the case -- I was under the impression that some of this had to do with the hardware itself. At the very least though, aren't they are doing some special stuff with how they mount the screen and where they're sourcing their plastic texture cover from? I thought that offset was one of the big reasons they didn't have a backlight -- which the Pinenote will have I think. But this makes me feel a lot more confident about the PineNote if most of the latency at least comes down to framebuffer access.
- Groxx 5y ago
  Yeah - the big advantage they have is that they're not running Android. A greatly simplified and optimized stack is really all you need to get stupidly fast black<->white updates to small eink regions, and that fits absolutely perfectly with all their tools[1] and for writing purposes. It takes a fairly impressive effort and attention to detail to get to the "whole package" they have, but it's nothing that can't be replicated on other standard hardware. [1]: They're all pure black and white and don't change once drawn (no smoothing a frame later), e.g. the pencil has varying fine texture but notably it does not use any actual grays for lighter shading - just pure-black texture density. Even the "gray" mode for tools is just a 50% black/white checkerboard regardless of zoom level, and tbh it looks sorta weird and shimmery because of it. Everything is relentlessly optimized for rendering speed. When you get into true grays like with text in ebooks, the page-turns are normal for e-ink, though it has a respectably quick "gesture -> start transition" time... especially if you compare to cheaper devices. Some of those can lag for a second or more before they respond. That has nothing to do with eink (and everything to do with bad optimization) and it contributes a ton to the slow feel of eink devices.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    I’ve definitely come to appreciate the way in which straight black and white can achieve better results on an e-paper display than greys. Actually it does use real grey in one place: the highlighter. While you draw, it renders in chequered black and white like tools in grey, except that where it overlaps existing black-and-white chequering it turns it into solid black so you can see what you’re doing, and then it redraws the full highlighted area afterwards, with highlighting-on-white being true grey, and highlighting-on-faux-grey becoming, I think (don’t have a microscope or sufficiently capable macro lens handy, and ghosting makes it hard to be sure anyway) darker-faux-grey, chequered black and light grey. If you go using the highlighter extensively as part of drawing, you rapidly discover just how awful the ghosting is until you can trigger a full redraw, which admittedly happens more often once actual greys are in use. reMarkable also uses true greys in antialiasing of its own UI icons and text.
    - Groxx 5y ago
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  It absolutely goes beyond just having the right hardware for pen optimization. I have an old rockchip based eink tablet from onyx here. Yes it's Android based but there are a few interesting things to observe here: 1. Onyx provides a few libraries that give access to a special surfaceview for pen input. 2. The pen drawing latency is completely different between this special input view and and any other native Android drawing app. 3. When sharing the screen from the tablet the surfaceview drawn lines have a delay from when they were drawn to when they should up on the shared screen (this is different from the network latency, it seems like the lines on an optimized surfaceview are drawn on screen before the OS sees it) 4. Remarkable has had its fair share of straight line aliasing problems as well. 5. Even more interesting is that there is a preliminary update to android 9 for the old onyx device and the same surfaceview has a lot of issues with initiating the drawing. That said this device looks fantastic. I've been happily using the onyx devices but I'm glad I finally get a chance to improve the parts that bother me or collaborate with others that do. EDIT: two things I am a bit unclear about is: 1. I wish the SoC was better. This is comparable to an snapdragon 450. It doesn't really matter for an SBC but for a tablet it would be nice to have something better. I'd gladly pay more. 2. At some point there were extra chips used for the display refresh. Is that nowadays part of the display assembly?
  - tadfisher 5y ago
    > At some point there were extra chips used for the display refresh. Is that nowadays part of the display assembly? Yep, E-Ink has moved to an in-display EPD that accepts a more traditional framebuffer and leaves it up to the driver/userspace to perform the temperature/waveform/partial-update logic. This is partially why it's been so difficult to reverse-engineer the ReMarkable 2 display, because the closed-source ReMarkable app now owns the framebuffer device and handles absolutely everything related to refresh.
vultour 5y ago
> once you get used to a lack of latency How _do_ you get used to latency? Writing with a pen has no latency, so anything worse than that automatically throws me off.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Short answer, you don't, you kind of force your brain to accept it. The writing experience on a tablet will (as far as I can tell) always be an inferior experience to writing on paper. It's not just latency, there are a thousand things that are almost impossible to replicate: jitter, texture, ink flow, pen nib texture/shape, offset, etc, etc. But the other benefits -- instant digitizing, easier referencing, the ability to fully erase (I use a pen when I take physical notes, I refuse to take notes in pencil), layers/resizing/cropping, quick document transfers, the ability to quickly mark up PDFs or digital content, the ability to merge into my other notetaking/bookmarking systems -- are often high enough that it's worthwhile (at least in some situations). So imagine that there are a series of thresholds for digital note-taking: A) Take notes physically, print and re-scan PDFs/images that need to be annotated B) Take notes physically, digitally mark up stuff that would otherwise need to be printed/scanned C) take a mixture of physical/digital notes depending on context/mood, do any markup digitally D) most notetaking is digital Hitting each threshold of usage requires the writing experience to progressively stink less. This is different for everyone, it comes down to how much you can tolerate. With the older tablets I grew up with, I couldn't have forced myself to hit something like threshold C. IMO it's not really that you get used to the higher latency, it's more that you learn to force your brain to deal with it to get at the other benefits, and the better the experience the more that it becomes possible to do that. That's for comparing digital notes to paper though. The different problem with comparing digital notetaking devices directly to each other is that once you're at a threshold where you expect a certain kind of experience, it's hard to go backwards. Every time the experience gets better, it's like a breath of fresh air, it makes it easier to actually use the device. If my notetaking is at threshold C, and you give me a device that's only good enough for threshold B, then I'm going back to threshold B -- I can't force myself to pretend it's good enough for threshold C, no matter what your other platform features are. More likely, I won't even use the device at all, because I know threshold C exists, and the only reason I tolerate the current problems with texture/latency/offset/jitter/etc at all is because it's physically impossible for me to get a device that has lower latency. In the digital vs physical debate, a digital medium with worse texture, offset, latency, and "flow" still has upsides over a physical medium. But if you compare two digital mediums, it's hard to tell what upside would would ever be big enough to justify using one with a worse experience. Tolerating any latency at all needs to come with some kind of wild benefit like "you can go get your printer recycled and never print another document ever again." There are some exceptions, but most platform-distinguishing features aren't big enough or important enough to overcome an inferior writing experience.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> Otherwise it's not even worth $100. Waveshare's 10.3" E-Ink raw display alone costs ~200 USD, For extra input, compute and most of all open Linux platform extra 100 USD seems very reasonable as with all other Pine64 products.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  Correction: +200 USD; Still reasonable.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > alone costs ~200 USD Right, but I'm not really buying a Pinenote machine to strip it for parts. It's possible to build something that's worth less than its component parts. The extra input, compute, etc... don't really matter if they don't work well together. My point was that optimizing for those things working well together is more important than trying to minimize the price tag. If it can be turned into a good notetaking device, and it's running an Open Linux distro, then $400 is completely reasonable, it's honestly pretty cheap. They could go higher. ---- That being said, on reflection I probably could get some use out of a Linux-enabled remote e-ink monitor on its own. Maybe just as a wall mounted display for reminders/notes? People have retrofitted other tablets to support that, but being based on Linux and supporting wifi/bluetooth is a real selling point. But I'm just not certain I could get $200 (or even $100) worth of use out of that. Maybe $100? Another way of looking at this is that even by itself, a 10.3" E-Ink raw display may not actually be worth $200 to most users, and it really only justifies its cost when it's combined with other hardware and drivers to make a compelling reader/notetaker. Obviously other people will have different uses in mind and prices they would be willing to pay, but I'm thinking about "what functionality does this enable that would be worth $100/200 to get." If I can't come up with an answer to that question, then the raw hardware cost is kind of irrelevant to me, since I'm not buying a device in order to scalp parts, I want to actually use it. ---- I guess also to be fair, there's a component to this of just paying Pine64 as much money as possible and buying all of their products to encourage them to keep working on the Linux ecosystem, and to encourage hackers to build on top of the devices. And that is also completely reasonable, and just the general attention from the Linux community towards E-ink displays and notetaking might be worth $100 regardless of anything else. But I think that's a separate thing from "what is the device itself worth on its own?"

tadfisher 5y ago

The thing is, the ReMarkable isn't doing anything special hardware-wise to achieve that latency, as they're based on NXP reference designs with the same integrated EPD every other E-ink device is using (besides the Android-based devices, of course). The magic is essentially that they have nothing running on the device except a Qt app which writes directly to the framebuffer, and they have an extremely simplified framebuffer driver that allows the Qt app to implement the complex parts of updating an E-ink screen in userspace. The Wacom input is standard, the other kernel bits are standard, and they're even running systemd.

danShumway 5y ago
That's really positive if that's the case -- I was under the impression that some of this had to do with the hardware itself. At the very least though, aren't they are doing some special stuff with how they mount the screen and where they're sourcing their plastic texture cover from? I thought that offset was one of the big reasons they didn't have a backlight -- which the Pinenote will have I think. But this makes me feel a lot more confident about the PineNote if most of the latency at least comes down to framebuffer access.
Groxx 5y ago
Yeah - the big advantage they have is that they're not running Android. A greatly simplified and optimized stack is really all you need to get stupidly fast black<->white updates to small eink regions, and that fits absolutely perfectly with all their tools[1] and for writing purposes. It takes a fairly impressive effort and attention to detail to get to the "whole package" they have, but it's nothing that can't be replicated on other standard hardware. [1]: They're all pure black and white and don't change once drawn (no smoothing a frame later), e.g. the pencil has varying fine texture but notably it does not use any actual grays for lighter shading - just pure-black texture density. Even the "gray" mode for tools is just a 50% black/white checkerboard regardless of zoom level, and tbh it looks sorta weird and shimmery because of it. Everything is relentlessly optimized for rendering speed. When you get into true grays like with text in ebooks, the page-turns are normal for e-ink, though it has a respectably quick "gesture -> start transition" time... especially if you compare to cheaper devices. Some of those can lag for a second or more before they respond. That has nothing to do with eink (and everything to do with bad optimization) and it contributes a ton to the slow feel of eink devices.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  I’ve definitely come to appreciate the way in which straight black and white can achieve better results on an e-paper display than greys. Actually it does use real grey in one place: the highlighter. While you draw, it renders in chequered black and white like tools in grey, except that where it overlaps existing black-and-white chequering it turns it into solid black so you can see what you’re doing, and then it redraws the full highlighted area afterwards, with highlighting-on-white being true grey, and highlighting-on-faux-grey becoming, I think (don’t have a microscope or sufficiently capable macro lens handy, and ghosting makes it hard to be sure anyway) darker-faux-grey, chequered black and light grey. If you go using the highlighter extensively as part of drawing, you rapidly discover just how awful the ghosting is until you can trigger a full redraw, which admittedly happens more often once actual greys are in use. reMarkable also uses true greys in antialiasing of its own UI icons and text.
  - Groxx 5y ago
rjzzleep 5y ago
It absolutely goes beyond just having the right hardware for pen optimization. I have an old rockchip based eink tablet from onyx here. Yes it's Android based but there are a few interesting things to observe here: 1. Onyx provides a few libraries that give access to a special surfaceview for pen input. 2. The pen drawing latency is completely different between this special input view and and any other native Android drawing app. 3. When sharing the screen from the tablet the surfaceview drawn lines have a delay from when they were drawn to when they should up on the shared screen (this is different from the network latency, it seems like the lines on an optimized surfaceview are drawn on screen before the OS sees it) 4. Remarkable has had its fair share of straight line aliasing problems as well. 5. Even more interesting is that there is a preliminary update to android 9 for the old onyx device and the same surfaceview has a lot of issues with initiating the drawing. That said this device looks fantastic. I've been happily using the onyx devices but I'm glad I finally get a chance to improve the parts that bother me or collaborate with others that do. EDIT: two things I am a bit unclear about is: 1. I wish the SoC was better. This is comparable to an snapdragon 450. It doesn't really matter for an SBC but for a tablet it would be nice to have something better. I'd gladly pay more. 2. At some point there were extra chips used for the display refresh. Is that nowadays part of the display assembly?
- tadfisher 5y ago
  > At some point there were extra chips used for the display refresh. Is that nowadays part of the display assembly? Yep, E-Ink has moved to an in-display EPD that accepts a more traditional framebuffer and leaves it up to the driver/userspace to perform the temperature/waveform/partial-update logic. This is partially why it's been so difficult to reverse-engineer the ReMarkable 2 display, because the closed-source ReMarkable app now owns the framebuffer device and handles absolutely everything related to refresh.

vultour 5y ago

> once you get used to a lack of latency How _do_ you get used to latency? Writing with a pen has no latency, so anything worse than that automatically throws me off.

danShumway 5y ago
Short answer, you don't, you kind of force your brain to accept it. The writing experience on a tablet will (as far as I can tell) always be an inferior experience to writing on paper. It's not just latency, there are a thousand things that are almost impossible to replicate: jitter, texture, ink flow, pen nib texture/shape, offset, etc, etc. But the other benefits -- instant digitizing, easier referencing, the ability to fully erase (I use a pen when I take physical notes, I refuse to take notes in pencil), layers/resizing/cropping, quick document transfers, the ability to quickly mark up PDFs or digital content, the ability to merge into my other notetaking/bookmarking systems -- are often high enough that it's worthwhile (at least in some situations). So imagine that there are a series of thresholds for digital note-taking: A) Take notes physically, print and re-scan PDFs/images that need to be annotated B) Take notes physically, digitally mark up stuff that would otherwise need to be printed/scanned C) take a mixture of physical/digital notes depending on context/mood, do any markup digitally D) most notetaking is digital Hitting each threshold of usage requires the writing experience to progressively stink less. This is different for everyone, it comes down to how much you can tolerate. With the older tablets I grew up with, I couldn't have forced myself to hit something like threshold C. IMO it's not really that you get used to the higher latency, it's more that you learn to force your brain to deal with it to get at the other benefits, and the better the experience the more that it becomes possible to do that. That's for comparing digital notes to paper though. The different problem with comparing digital notetaking devices directly to each other is that once you're at a threshold where you expect a certain kind of experience, it's hard to go backwards. Every time the experience gets better, it's like a breath of fresh air, it makes it easier to actually use the device. If my notetaking is at threshold C, and you give me a device that's only good enough for threshold B, then I'm going back to threshold B -- I can't force myself to pretend it's good enough for threshold C, no matter what your other platform features are. More likely, I won't even use the device at all, because I know threshold C exists, and the only reason I tolerate the current problems with texture/latency/offset/jitter/etc at all is because it's physically impossible for me to get a device that has lower latency. In the digital vs physical debate, a digital medium with worse texture, offset, latency, and "flow" still has upsides over a physical medium. But if you compare two digital mediums, it's hard to tell what upside would would ever be big enough to justify using one with a worse experience. Tolerating any latency at all needs to come with some kind of wild benefit like "you can go get your printer recycled and never print another document ever again." There are some exceptions, but most platform-distinguishing features aren't big enough or important enough to overcome an inferior writing experience.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> Otherwise it's not even worth $100. Waveshare's 10.3" E-Ink raw display alone costs ~200 USD, For extra input, compute and most of all open Linux platform extra 100 USD seems very reasonable as with all other Pine64 products.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Correction: +200 USD; Still reasonable.
danShumway 5y ago
> alone costs ~200 USD Right, but I'm not really buying a Pinenote machine to strip it for parts. It's possible to build something that's worth less than its component parts. The extra input, compute, etc... don't really matter if they don't work well together. My point was that optimizing for those things working well together is more important than trying to minimize the price tag. If it can be turned into a good notetaking device, and it's running an Open Linux distro, then $400 is completely reasonable, it's honestly pretty cheap. They could go higher. ---- That being said, on reflection I probably could get some use out of a Linux-enabled remote e-ink monitor on its own. Maybe just as a wall mounted display for reminders/notes? People have retrofitted other tablets to support that, but being based on Linux and supporting wifi/bluetooth is a real selling point. But I'm just not certain I could get $200 (or even $100) worth of use out of that. Maybe $100? Another way of looking at this is that even by itself, a 10.3" E-Ink raw display may not actually be worth $200 to most users, and it really only justifies its cost when it's combined with other hardware and drivers to make a compelling reader/notetaker. Obviously other people will have different uses in mind and prices they would be willing to pay, but I'm thinking about "what functionality does this enable that would be worth $100/200 to get." If I can't come up with an answer to that question, then the raw hardware cost is kind of irrelevant to me, since I'm not buying a device in order to scalp parts, I want to actually use it. ---- I guess also to be fair, there's a component to this of just paying Pine64 as much money as possible and buying all of their products to encourage them to keep working on the Linux ecosystem, and to encourage hackers to build on top of the devices. And that is also completely reasonable, and just the general attention from the Linux community towards E-ink displays and notetaking might be worth $100 regardless of anything else. But I think that's a separate thing from "what is the device itself worth on its own?"