5 ms·

So what's the over-under on E-ink replacing our current computer monitors much like we've come to replace cathode ray tubes.

bloopernova 5y ago
I'd like a dual-layer tablet screen. One layer is e-ink for reading, the other is a standard OLED screen. Since I'm wishing, I'd like it to be 16k and something like 1200dpi :)
- TranquilMarmot 5y ago
  While we're at it, make it so that you can designate specific parts of the screen to be e-ink or OLED haha
saxonww 5y ago
https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-paperlike-253 https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink... Monochrome. It has "turbo refresh tech" but unclear what that really means; with e-readers, similar verbiage just means it's less bad. The resolution and pixel density is very nice. The prices would have to come down by at least a factor of 3 though, IMO. I'd take the under.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  E-inks screens don't have to be monochrome. I have one with black, white, and yellow. The hard part is fitting a range of color pigments in the pixel units, so the first e-inks so far have had 2-3. At only three colors, black, white, and one shade makes most sense for information contrast. But nothing says it can't be red, green, and blue... and as the technology miniaturizes, we can fit three in the space of one, maybe achieve sub-rotation, and thus achieve full color range. Actually if they're pigments... we're looking forward for CMYK. That's 4 separate pigments stuffed thrice into a pixel, that need to rotate separately! Possible? Difficult.
  - saxonww 5y ago
    The article details where they're at now. They do have a product using a CMYW scheme, but the refresh and saturation are not good enough. The consumer-acceptable product is a standard monochrome with color filters and a front light, which is better, but has lower resolution. I suppose with intensive R&D they might figure out how to have acceptable refresh and saturation at competitive resolution, but absent a really big shift in how people view emissive displays, I think they will always be niche. By acceptable, I mean: can I watch a movie on it and it not feel like a flipbook or slideshow; can I game on it. The article talks about how (at least initially) the pigment transition typically took less than half a second. Is this similar to the response time on an LCD? Those are typically 5ms or less now, roughly 100x faster.
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      1 ms = 1/1000 of a second. 500ms = half a second. "Less than half a second" is probably something like 450 ms, based on my assumption that if it was closer to 1/3 or 1/4s they would have said that instead. Film is traditionally 24 frames/second, or about 41.6ms/frame. A lot of animation is "on twos", which means one drawing is exposed twice for an effective frame rate of 12 fps, 83.3ms/frame. Which is very close to the minimum frame rate; my experience as a former animator is that things start to break down into fast slideshow instead of a moving image around 10 fps. (Video is faster, about 50 or 60 fields a second for PAL and NTSC; your computer may have a higher refresh rate. I'm mostly concerned with the minimum viable speeds for "this is a moving image" here.) If you chase the links near the end there is a review of one of the devices using the first version of their technology; full-screen refreshes are the usual very visible flash of white-black-new page to reset every pixel.
      - saxonww 5y ago
        This is a tangent but I wonder if 24fps is what you should consider acceptable today. Yes, movies are 24fps, but I've always felt like that was a byproduct of economics which we're stuck with now because of tradition. No one wants a 24Hz desktop monitor, that's for sure; when the first 4k displays became generally available and the connection standards of the time could only push them at 30Hz, people absolutely noticed and disliked it. Another thing I pulled from the article that I forgot earlier - they talked about their current-gen color E-Ink being able to represent 50k colors. Not quite a 16 bit color palette. We're getting to where LCDs commonly advertise support for a billion colors (10 bit panels). They have a long way to go before people will consider the color reproduction acceptable for general use. If and when E-Ink gets to the point where color LCDs are today, we're probably going to be able to make "8K" high-refresh microled or self-emissive quantum dot displays. The reflective low-power nature of E-Ink will always have a place IMO but it's just hard to see people in volume valuing that over the speed, resolution, and color reproduction of a contemporary emissive display.
- int_19h 5y ago
  I have a different Dasung product with fast refresh, and it is fast enough to play videos. However, the power consumption in this mode is substantial - much more than the equivalent-sized LCD would use.
kadoban 5y ago
Basically impossible. They could be great niche monitors, for reading text or viewing mostly static content. At best maybe for kind of general web browsing, but even that is asking a _lot_ of the tech.
- sroussey 5y ago
  Or eInk body for your car
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Talk to BMW “BMW’s color-changing concept vehicle” https://news.yahoo.com/bmw-color-changing-concept-vehicle-162257630.html https://news.yahoo.com/bmw-color-changing-concept-vehicle-16...
    - sroussey 5y ago
      Needs color, but yes!
dredmorbius 5y ago
This depends on your use-case. I've described e-ink this way: - Persistence is free. Once set, the display will show that content indefinitely without power. - Pixels are cheap. Display resolutions are in the 200--300 DPI range (effectively competitive with laserprint), and could be pushed higher at a cost. Line-art and halftone images render beautifully. Gradient-shaded images are limited by greyscale ranges (1--16), and require dithering for best effect. - Paints are expensive. Both in terms of energy, it's changing the display which costs. These costs are fairly modest, though for mobile devices that's a concern. - Refreshes are slow. And dependent on display quality: higher quality -> slower refresh. Rates tend to be 1--16Hz for most present devices. Screen animations and even video are possible, though generally strongly discouraged. - Colour is limited, often nonexistent. Most devices are monochrome with limited greyscale ranges (as noted above). Where colour does exist, it is low-saturation and low-fidelity --- useful for distinguishing elements, but not a faithful high-saturation reproduction. Any graphic design dependent on colour will tend to fail badly on e-ink. Foreground/background contrast is also somewhat limited --- constrained more in the dark "white" value than the by a lighter "black". - Pagination is strongly preferred to scroll for navigation. Changing the entire screen at once is both faster and much less confusing than scrolling with many repeat updates. - Display is reflective rather than emissive. On-device lighting is possible, but best effects are with external illumination. Devices perform far better under bright and full sunlight than emissive technology. This is in fact their preferred use mode. This affects both where devices are used and usable (generally increasing options), and the specific qualities of typographic and graphic designs. These are ultimately properites of the medium, and both designers and users should work with them. For text and data use, with limited animations, and limited lo-fidelity use of colour, e-ink is very well suited. Large-ish displays (up to 13" and larger) can be hand-held, or fit to a stand rather than permanently mounted on a desk. They're available as external displays for desktop and laptop computers. Power draw is quite low. Outdoor use is excellent. Use as incidental informational displays is also well-suited, e.g., news and weather wall-mount, information, messages, or notifications. As tools for image, video, or video-based gaming, e-ink is far less suitable. Back in the day, a frequent refrain of Linux enthusiasts was "Linux is not Windows" --- the two operating systems have different capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. In the same vein, e-ink is not emissive. There are strengths and weaknesses. Attempting to use e-ink for tasks to which it is poorly suited will end badly. On the other hand, it has capabilities which emissive displays cannot hope to match. Play to its strengths.
theshrike79 5y ago
People have slowly become accustomed to high refresh rate displays. So that's a big no on e-ink displays unless they manage get them to 60Hz+ somehow
- thomassmith65 5y ago
  The devices I've seen with color e-ink need to intermittently flash the screen. I could live with a slow refresh rate, but having my screen flicker black once or twice a minute is a deal-breaker.
  - amelius 5y ago
    It would be a shame if this e-ink display that is advertised as "natural" induces more epileptic events than "artificial" light-emitting panels.
    - mmastrac 5y ago
      I don't think there's a worry about epileptic events with the short flash sequences of e-ink. I'm not a neurologist, but I think you need a reasonably long sequence of continued flashing to trigger an event.
      - andrewshadura 5y ago
        In fact, photosensitivity is relatively rare even among people with diagnosed epilepsy.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    In theory, they could do the “flicker black” as a black band that moves across the screen every so often.
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    There is no ongoing flicker on e-ink displays. The display is absolutely stable with no flicker while you’re reading as there is no refresh. If you trigger a page change the page redraws the new image in a fraction of a second. It looks a bit like a fast cross-fade. If you are updating smaller regions of the screen it is fast enough not to notice. Scrolling would still be a problem as that requires a much faster refresh rate. Such fast refresh would eliminate one of the major benefits of e-ink which is the low power. If you were to refresh e-ink at 30-60Hz it would likely use as much or more power than an LCD.

bloopernova 5y ago

I'd like a dual-layer tablet screen. One layer is e-ink for reading, the other is a standard OLED screen. Since I'm wishing, I'd like it to be 16k and something like 1200dpi :)

TranquilMarmot 5y ago
While we're at it, make it so that you can designate specific parts of the screen to be e-ink or OLED haha

saxonww 5y ago

https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-paperlike-253 https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink... Monochrome. It has "turbo refresh tech" but unclear what that really means; with e-readers, similar verbiage just means it's less bad. The resolution and pixel density is very nice. The prices would have to come down by at least a factor of 3 though, IMO. I'd take the under.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
E-inks screens don't have to be monochrome. I have one with black, white, and yellow. The hard part is fitting a range of color pigments in the pixel units, so the first e-inks so far have had 2-3. At only three colors, black, white, and one shade makes most sense for information contrast. But nothing says it can't be red, green, and blue... and as the technology miniaturizes, we can fit three in the space of one, maybe achieve sub-rotation, and thus achieve full color range. Actually if they're pigments... we're looking forward for CMYK. That's 4 separate pigments stuffed thrice into a pixel, that need to rotate separately! Possible? Difficult.
- saxonww 5y ago
  The article details where they're at now. They do have a product using a CMYW scheme, but the refresh and saturation are not good enough. The consumer-acceptable product is a standard monochrome with color filters and a front light, which is better, but has lower resolution. I suppose with intensive R&D they might figure out how to have acceptable refresh and saturation at competitive resolution, but absent a really big shift in how people view emissive displays, I think they will always be niche. By acceptable, I mean: can I watch a movie on it and it not feel like a flipbook or slideshow; can I game on it. The article talks about how (at least initially) the pigment transition typically took less than half a second. Is this similar to the response time on an LCD? Those are typically 5ms or less now, roughly 100x faster.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    1 ms = 1/1000 of a second. 500ms = half a second. "Less than half a second" is probably something like 450 ms, based on my assumption that if it was closer to 1/3 or 1/4s they would have said that instead. Film is traditionally 24 frames/second, or about 41.6ms/frame. A lot of animation is "on twos", which means one drawing is exposed twice for an effective frame rate of 12 fps, 83.3ms/frame. Which is very close to the minimum frame rate; my experience as a former animator is that things start to break down into fast slideshow instead of a moving image around 10 fps. (Video is faster, about 50 or 60 fields a second for PAL and NTSC; your computer may have a higher refresh rate. I'm mostly concerned with the minimum viable speeds for "this is a moving image" here.) If you chase the links near the end there is a review of one of the devices using the first version of their technology; full-screen refreshes are the usual very visible flash of white-black-new page to reset every pixel.
    - saxonww 5y ago
      This is a tangent but I wonder if 24fps is what you should consider acceptable today. Yes, movies are 24fps, but I've always felt like that was a byproduct of economics which we're stuck with now because of tradition. No one wants a 24Hz desktop monitor, that's for sure; when the first 4k displays became generally available and the connection standards of the time could only push them at 30Hz, people absolutely noticed and disliked it. Another thing I pulled from the article that I forgot earlier - they talked about their current-gen color E-Ink being able to represent 50k colors. Not quite a 16 bit color palette. We're getting to where LCDs commonly advertise support for a billion colors (10 bit panels). They have a long way to go before people will consider the color reproduction acceptable for general use. If and when E-Ink gets to the point where color LCDs are today, we're probably going to be able to make "8K" high-refresh microled or self-emissive quantum dot displays. The reflective low-power nature of E-Ink will always have a place IMO but it's just hard to see people in volume valuing that over the speed, resolution, and color reproduction of a contemporary emissive display.
int_19h 5y ago
I have a different Dasung product with fast refresh, and it is fast enough to play videos. However, the power consumption in this mode is substantial - much more than the equivalent-sized LCD would use.

kadoban 5y ago

Basically impossible. They could be great niche monitors, for reading text or viewing mostly static content. At best maybe for kind of general web browsing, but even that is asking a _lot_ of the tech.

sroussey 5y ago
Or eInk body for your car
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Talk to BMW “BMW’s color-changing concept vehicle” https://news.yahoo.com/bmw-color-changing-concept-vehicle-162257630.html https://news.yahoo.com/bmw-color-changing-concept-vehicle-16...
  - sroussey 5y ago
    Needs color, but yes!

dredmorbius 5y ago

This depends on your use-case. I've described e-ink this way: - Persistence is free. Once set, the display will show that content indefinitely without power. - Pixels are cheap. Display resolutions are in the 200--300 DPI range (effectively competitive with laserprint), and could be pushed higher at a cost. Line-art and halftone images render beautifully. Gradient-shaded images are limited by greyscale ranges (1--16), and require dithering for best effect. - Paints are expensive. Both in terms of energy, it's changing the display which costs. These costs are fairly modest, though for mobile devices that's a concern. - Refreshes are slow. And dependent on display quality: higher quality -> slower refresh. Rates tend to be 1--16Hz for most present devices. Screen animations and even video are possible, though generally strongly discouraged. - Colour is limited, often nonexistent. Most devices are monochrome with limited greyscale ranges (as noted above). Where colour does exist, it is low-saturation and low-fidelity --- useful for distinguishing elements, but not a faithful high-saturation reproduction. Any graphic design dependent on colour will tend to fail badly on e-ink. Foreground/background contrast is also somewhat limited --- constrained more in the dark "white" value than the by a lighter "black". - Pagination is strongly preferred to scroll for navigation. Changing the entire screen at once is both faster and much less confusing than scrolling with many repeat updates. - Display is reflective rather than emissive. On-device lighting is possible, but best effects are with external illumination. Devices perform far better under bright and full sunlight than emissive technology. This is in fact their preferred use mode. This affects both where devices are used and usable (generally increasing options), and the specific qualities of typographic and graphic designs. These are ultimately properites of the medium, and both designers and users should work with them. For text and data use, with limited animations, and limited lo-fidelity use of colour, e-ink is very well suited. Large-ish displays (up to 13" and larger) can be hand-held, or fit to a stand rather than permanently mounted on a desk. They're available as external displays for desktop and laptop computers. Power draw is quite low. Outdoor use is excellent. Use as incidental informational displays is also well-suited, e.g., news and weather wall-mount, information, messages, or notifications. As tools for image, video, or video-based gaming, e-ink is far less suitable. Back in the day, a frequent refrain of Linux enthusiasts was "Linux is not Windows" --- the two operating systems have different capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. In the same vein, e-ink is not emissive. There are strengths and weaknesses. Attempting to use e-ink for tasks to which it is poorly suited will end badly. On the other hand, it has capabilities which emissive displays cannot hope to match. Play to its strengths.

theshrike79 5y ago

People have slowly become accustomed to high refresh rate displays. So that's a big no on e-ink displays unless they manage get them to 60Hz+ somehow

thomassmith65 5y ago
The devices I've seen with color e-ink need to intermittently flash the screen. I could live with a slow refresh rate, but having my screen flicker black once or twice a minute is a deal-breaker.
- amelius 5y ago
  It would be a shame if this e-ink display that is advertised as "natural" induces more epileptic events than "artificial" light-emitting panels.
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    I don't think there's a worry about epileptic events with the short flash sequences of e-ink. I'm not a neurologist, but I think you need a reasonably long sequence of continued flashing to trigger an event.
    - andrewshadura 5y ago
      In fact, photosensitivity is relatively rare even among people with diagnosed epilepsy.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  In theory, they could do the “flicker black” as a black band that moves across the screen every so often.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  There is no ongoing flicker on e-ink displays. The display is absolutely stable with no flicker while you’re reading as there is no refresh. If you trigger a page change the page redraws the new image in a fraction of a second. It looks a bit like a fast cross-fade. If you are updating smaller regions of the screen it is fast enough not to notice. Scrolling would still be a problem as that requires a much faster refresh rate. Such fast refresh would eliminate one of the major benefits of e-ink which is the low power. If you were to refresh e-ink at 30-60Hz it would likely use as much or more power than an LCD.