4 ms·

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-acceptabl

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.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    I wouldn't want a 24fps display either. I would be pretty happy with an e-ink display that's about as reflective as nice ink on glossy paper even if it's not 300dpi, I've been waiting to be able to sit out in the sun and work without my screen's light having to try to overpower the sun for a long time.

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.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  I wouldn't want a 24fps display either. I would be pretty happy with an e-ink display that's about as reflective as nice ink on glossy paper even if it's not 300dpi, I've been waiting to be able to sit out in the sun and work without my screen's light having to try to overpower the sun for a long time.