4 ms·

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 bl

by 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
  Yep, good point on the highlighter! I forgot that one. When you overlap grays and layers of highlighter (as it gets darker with each layer... maybe in 1/8ths?), I suspect it's just doing a gray/black checkerboard - I can't tell for sure with one or two layers of highlighter, but it's pretty clear to me on the third layer that there are gray pixels between the black pixels. And yeah, the highlighter's ghosting can get pretty extreme :) Since it clears up with a back/forward page turn I think it's a reasonable tradeoff... but it does serve as an interactive example of how much eink struggles with gray<->grey transition accuracy, which is why anti-aliased text is so much of a problem after a couple pages on literally every device.

by Groxx 5y ago

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
Yep, good point on the highlighter! I forgot that one. When you overlap grays and layers of highlighter (as it gets darker with each layer... maybe in 1/8ths?), I suspect it's just doing a gray/black checkerboard - I can't tell for sure with one or two layers of highlighter, but it's pretty clear to me on the third layer that there are gray pixels between the black pixels. And yeah, the highlighter's ghosting can get pretty extreme :) Since it clears up with a back/forward page turn I think it's a reasonable tradeoff... but it does serve as an interactive example of how much eink struggles with gray<->grey transition accuracy, which is why anti-aliased text is so much of a problem after a couple pages on literally every device.