8 ms·

Monochrome terminal setup for an E-ink monitor (2022)

175 points by hggh 4y ago

fmajid 4y ago
I'd love an e-ink side monitor to browse documentation while I'm coding in the main screen or whatever, but certainly not for $750. $250, tops. It's a shame the technology hasn't reached economies of scale yet despite the Kindle, it has so much potential for signage and other mostly static applications.
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  Damn it, I can’t justify $750 when I have heaps on perfectly fine monitors. That would also be a very interesting post-apocalyptic computer monitor ( for the low consumption of it only, maybe it has drawback like being brittle, heavy, not durable ? )
  - rollcat 4y ago
    I think in a post-apocalyptic world, you would be scraping the bottom of every bin to find any working electronic equipment at all. Check out http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/
    - dopidopHN 4y ago
      Ah nice. I remember seeing it a few month ( years ? ) back here. Neat. More seriously, I think in post apocalyptic world “computer skills” would be utter garbage. Ham radio maybe. Or being able to bring Wikipedia / encyclopedic knowledge of some specific subject like plant granfting technic, maps, and so on. But I envision “camping & fishing & gardening” as far far more important. Collapse OS is neat, but what would be a real use case? ( it’s a real question, I want to be convince otherwise )
      - rollcat 4y ago
        > Collapse OS is neat, but what would be a real use case? It's all explained in the FAQ / motivation document: http://collapseos.org/why.html http://collapseos.org/why.html > Q: Is computing worth saving? > Some people doubt that computers will stay relevant after a civilizational collapse. I mostly agree. The drastic simplification of our society will mean that we have a lot less information to manage. We'll be a lot more busy with more pressing activities than processing data. > However, the goal of Collapse OS is not to save computing, but electronics. Managing electricity will stay immensely useful. > Q: Aren't there more important things to do than an operating system? > Yes! Yes! Yes! A metric ton of projects are more important than Collapse OS with regards to civilizational collapse. This doesn't make Collapse OS useless. > [...] > However, when you look at it from a communal perspective, Collapse OS starts to make sense. Once a particular community already took care of its immediate survival and is looking at going from "surviving" to "thriving", if it has Collapse OS and someone who can make sense of it, then that community will have a great asset.
        dopidopHN 4y ago
        Cool. Thanks. I swear I spend 15min looking around the website and various linked thread for this answer. Managing electricity. Ok. Hm. I’ve seen shoddy grid. And … yeah. They all use some type of contrôler. Ok. Anyway thanks for pointing out the obvious page I missed.
      - wkat4242 4y ago
        Ham radio for sure. The whole idea of ham radio is knowing how to make a radio out of nothing and experiment. In a collapse this would be extremely useful too.
- bmsleight_ 4y ago
  How about this project I put together ? https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-eventually/ https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-...
  - dspillett 4y ago
    I keep looking at projects to turn old kindle units into extra screens or just using them as more generic devices, but I'd like something in the 10-to-14 inch range, preferably closer to the top end of that than the bottom. There are screens if that sort of size available, but there are issues there (expense of the screen itself, needing to make a case, the projects being pi based (those being silly expensive ATM) or requiring more electronics jiggery-pokery than I'd have time for (but would enjoy tinkering with & leaning if I could find the time!).
- xwolfi 4y ago
  I dunno if you have one, I have 2 A4-sized reader, a Sony and a Boox, and it's insane. I paid both around 700$ and I dont regret (the boox has backlight). You cant always whip enough factory workers in vietnam to transform resources mined in Myanmar for 250$, and sometimes you have to pay a bit more. I suppose most of the money goes to R&D to finally find a way to get high refresh rates, anyway. I think nobody's sleeping on high margin for these things, collecting massive mountain of cash to buy sport cars. It's a difficult concept to bring up, this doubly stable state display that require electricity only on change. It's really worth paying for it to evolve.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    As much as I agree with the general sentiment that we don't pay enough attention to the amount of exploitation going on during the production of electronics, doesn't the high price of eInk displays have more to do with one company hoarding all the relevant patents and scaring off the competition?
    - throw_away1525 4y ago
      I've got a HiSense android phone with e-ink (the a5) which I had to order directly from China. It has great performance, I can watch YouTube videos on it. I mean it isn't a pleasant experience but I can. I wonder if it is using the forbidden algorithms? I should compare it to an e-ink reader that's sold in the US and presumably is following the relevant patent laws.
- mythhouse 4y ago
  I will drop $750 in a heartbeat if there is enough reviewed proof that eink can limit vision damage longterm. Its one of my main health concerns.
  - huijzer 4y ago
    Isn’t vision damage mostly due to not looking in the distance enough?
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      If you're thinking of focusing issues, IIRC there is evidence that not getting exposed to enough UV light (read: sun light) during years our eyes develops may play a big part in that. No idea if that would imply this is needed as an adult though. And that is assuming I don't misremember in the first place.
    - mythhouse 4y ago
      Yes focusing eyes close all day is the real culprit. But there is something about bright light of monitors that seems to impact my vision too, i am not quite sure what its callled though. I don't feel the same fatigue reading a book. Its just my personal experience.
rollcat 4y ago
This looks wonderful, and I can't wait for these kinds of e-ink displays to get more affordable. Looks like a perfect display for outdoors, very long trips (battery time?), long writing sessions, etc. I'd love to build a "DIY laptop" like that, but at these prices I'm likely better off with a Macbook Air... I'm already experimenting with using a heavily desaturated/monochromatic color scheme for coding (it's working surprisingly well - e.g. using bold text to differentiate keywords). I think most CLI apps are abusing color for little gain. Reading the output of some programs feels like wading through a room filled with fruit salad - the JS ecosystem is particularly bad in this regard. I'm using red in my prompt to indicate a root shell and/or an SSH session, and I think that's as far as it should go.
- dainiusse 4y ago
  Any theme you can share for editors?
  - rollcat 4y ago
    In my dotfiles: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/0d44759/.emacs.d/themes/rollcat-mono-light-theme.el https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/0d44759/.emacs.d/th... There's also a dark variant, and a "base" variant to convince Emacs not to touch colors when running in a terminal. There's also support for matching the system theme in Emacs & Terminal.app on macOS: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/commit/b3e49ad https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/commit/b3e49ad
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sofixa 4y ago
  There are off the shelf laptops with e-ink now: https://goodereader.com/blog/product/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-13-inch-dual-screen-laptop-with-e-ink https://goodereader.com/blog/product/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-1... It's technically dual screen, e-ink and OLED that rotate, but even better, you can choose the best one for the job.
  - 4y ago
zokier 4y ago
Would have loved to see a video of the display in action to better gauge the impact of framerate/latency
- timthelion 4y ago
  Try part 3 here: https://gradesta.com/blog/007-ci/ https://gradesta.com/blog/007-ci/
  - bloopernova 4y ago
    oh wow that is really responsive! Arrrgh, maybe if I win the lottery one day I can create an e-ink coding and documentation setup. Would have to be Linux because newer Macs don't support more than 2 external displays unless you get the most powerful CPU.
    - bullen 4y ago
      I think we need something more like ePaper or the tech. found in pebble watches. LCD but persistent (if nothing changes very low power) and with colors (limited is ok, pebble time had 64) and higher frame-rates. Contrast was suffering on those displays compared to the pebble 2 ones, but maybe there is something better now?
orlandohill 4y ago
I've been using a Dasung Paperlike HD-FT since early 2020, and I'm still very happy with it. I have a similar setup, but only need to switch monitor to see details in videos or colored images. The refresh rate isn't normally an issue with GUIs, and most of the websites that I visit are usable in 4 bit monochrome.
TT-392 4y ago
I really want to try vim on an e-ink some day. If I find the experience to be alright, I'd totally buy one of those pinenotes for programming (assuming I'd be able to connect a normal keynoard to it). Too bad big e-ink displays are so rare and expensive.
- ozzydave 4y ago
  I occasionally use my remarkable as a screen for vim, it works quite nicely.
amelius 4y ago
Nice setup, except I guess if you're programming UIs and webpages and such (because how would you test).
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  Use that second monitor on the right I would guess?
quxbar 4y ago
Yes, yes, yes. I have bought a screen and plan on integrating exactly this sort of setup into my routine, mainly for the focus benefits the author notes.
modzu 4y ago
what keyboard is that?
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Mistel barocco
csdvrx 4y ago
One of these days, I want to make a terminal "optimized" for eink - as in, compute which parts of the screen receive the new characters, to invalidate them and do a quick refresh (leaving eink ghosting) on these leaving the rest of the screen pristine, then later do at an opportunistic time a better refresh (leaving no ghosting) on these to have no ghosting at all instead of leaving the selection of that time to the eink driver. Eink refresh is slow-ish, but only because if say scrolling a bunch of pixels, you need to invalidate and redraw the whole screen. The advantage of terminals is that you can easily keep a matrix of squares, and by looking at the flux of information, you can pick the opportunistic times for refreshes. With characters, there should be more recouping. (a B and a P overlap except in the bottom right) With line editing, the problem should be limited to the line All these small gains should add up to provide an excellent terminal experience.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I am fairly certain that I have read that these types of optimizations (only change dirty characters) already exist in certain terminals. I wonder if the issue would be more how to get such an optimization to the display. Although perhaps it automatically does a comparison between current and previous frame to do its own dirty-pixel optimization.
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    > I wonder if the issue would be more how to get such an optimization to the display This > Although perhaps it automatically does a comparison between current and previous frame to do its own dirty-pixel optimization. Some do, like the Boox regal mode, but it stills feels a bit slow and leaves some ghosting. Baking that into the terminal would limit the comparison to the invalidated area, which in a terminal would be a smaller square that the full screen frame, so I'd expect some speed gains.
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      Thank you, I understand your intent better now. I wonder if maintaining a buffer in software that counts for each pixel how many times it has been dirty, combined with, say, the kind of quadtree one would normally use for hit detection, would let one do "local" refreshes and make this a generic solution. It sounds like the kind of thing that someone already must have thought of (let's hope it's not one of the software patents holding e-ink back)
troupe 4y ago
Years ago Dell had a laptop with an e-ink display. Lenovo has a laptop with an e-ink display on the cover so you use it like a tablet, but the "normal" screen is LCD. I think a company called Modus is working on making a laptop with an e-ink for the regular screen.
- coder543 4y ago
  Lenovo has a new version coming where you can twist it around and use the new (larger, color) e-ink screen as the primary screen, and the other side has an OLED panel, which is an awesome combination: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-twist-e-ink-oled-laptop https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-...
okasaki 4y ago
I guess I'll have to disagree with everyone's enthusiasm about eink here. I haven't tried any recent ones, but the Kindle and Kobo ones I used were awful. Low contrast, inconsistent lighting and soul-crushing lag. I'd rather use the crappiest LCD tablet than an eink reader for reading ebooks, and I read a lot. I can't imagine using one as a general monitor. Maybe if you live in a sunny place they have some merit? I can't remember the last time I couldn't read a regular screen living in England.
deleted 4y ago
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dbttdft 4y ago
One of the main parts of computer usage that causes eye strain is blur. CRTs only started solving this problem around the early 2000s and got discontinued shortly after. LCDs solve it for static images but not moving. E-ink will naturally have the same problem. Any moving image will appear blurry and your eye will try to focus on it and repeatedly fail, causing muscle fatigue. Digression - This is of course less of an issue if you use the terminal in a style where you just move one page at a time, but you're just restricting yourself to a subset of possible use cases. I scroll in the terminal with the mouse wheel for skimming. To solve motion blur, you either need strobing (along with a refresh rate above the flicker fusion threshold: ~80Hz), which E-ink will never have, or a high refresh rate, something like 240Hz. Still, if E-ink could even reach 50Hz it would be a massive improvement over LCD for use cases that don't require color. E-ink does solve the pixel density problem and viewing angle problem (reducing eye strain and bad posture). Overall I'm still using high end CRTs for all use cases, and will switch to OLED once they get proper strobed offerings without all kind of bugs (and I'm still not sure if OLED fixes viewing angle shift. IPS-type LCD certainly didn't). The self-luminescence problem that E-ink solves is also nice, but I'm not sure it matters much (it used to be my biggest pet peeve); you can just take an OLED which supports nice low luminescence levels at or below 120cd/m^2 (unlike most LCDs) and roughly match your room lights to it. Low framerate and input lag will also cause eye strain and bad posture, respectively. That last image: https://bsandro.tech/epaper/dasung_photo_3.jpg https://bsandro.tech/epaper/dasung_photo_3.jpg gives me nostalgia of the late 90s when some of my friends had those new experimental LCDs, the same aspect ratio, the same slow pixel response, interesting frame, and brands I've never heard of.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > I'm still using high end CRTs for all use case Buried the key sentence. That's pretty wild. Isn't any CRT now 20+ years old and consequently a small fraction of its design brightness? Or do you have old stock and you open a fresh box every 5 years? I know there wasn't a lot of old stock of CRTs are the end of the CRT era because when I needed a warranty fix on a Sony 21" Trinitron FD in the final year of its 5-year warranty they said they could not repair or replace it and they send me a 24" model instead. When that one broke they could not fix or replace and paid me out for the warranty.
1MachineElf 4y ago
An e-ink display for terminal use would be wonderful. I wish e-ink technology would take off and make setups like this viable for more of us.
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Sunspark 4y ago
I have a suggestion. Reflective LCD colour displays with no backlight. You can get them in 8" tablet form as found in the TCL Nxtpaper S8 and in 32" monitor form as found in the Sun Vision Display.
- kurthr 4y ago
  It's very hard to achieve even 2:1 real contrast ratios with color LCDs, because "white" light passing through color filters loses 80-90% of visible luminance (eg each green filter only covers ~30% of the area and passes <50% of lambertian daylight). This means the reflections off the front of the screen need to be less than 5-10% of ambient light. It's even worse for anything other than white or for specular light. Almost all LCDs are made trans-flective for this reason. If you went with B/W LCDs you can improve this by ~3x and might achieve 5:1 contrast with good antireflective surfaces. That's what you see in car LCDs.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    Sun Vision's tech specs states "Contrast Ratio 25:1 (typical)".

175 points by hggh 4y ago

I'd love an e-ink side monitor to browse documentation while I'm coding in the main screen or whatever, but certainly not for $750. $250, tops. It's a shame the technology hasn't reached economies of scale yet despite the Kindle, it has so much potential for signage and other mostly static applications.

dopidopHN 4y ago
Damn it, I can’t justify $750 when I have heaps on perfectly fine monitors. That would also be a very interesting post-apocalyptic computer monitor ( for the low consumption of it only, maybe it has drawback like being brittle, heavy, not durable ? )
- rollcat 4y ago
  I think in a post-apocalyptic world, you would be scraping the bottom of every bin to find any working electronic equipment at all. Check out http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    Ah nice. I remember seeing it a few month ( years ? ) back here. Neat. More seriously, I think in post apocalyptic world “computer skills” would be utter garbage. Ham radio maybe. Or being able to bring Wikipedia / encyclopedic knowledge of some specific subject like plant granfting technic, maps, and so on. But I envision “camping & fishing & gardening” as far far more important. Collapse OS is neat, but what would be a real use case? ( it’s a real question, I want to be convince otherwise )
    - rollcat 4y ago
      > Collapse OS is neat, but what would be a real use case? It's all explained in the FAQ / motivation document: http://collapseos.org/why.html http://collapseos.org/why.html > Q: Is computing worth saving? > Some people doubt that computers will stay relevant after a civilizational collapse. I mostly agree. The drastic simplification of our society will mean that we have a lot less information to manage. We'll be a lot more busy with more pressing activities than processing data. > However, the goal of Collapse OS is not to save computing, but electronics. Managing electricity will stay immensely useful. > Q: Aren't there more important things to do than an operating system? > Yes! Yes! Yes! A metric ton of projects are more important than Collapse OS with regards to civilizational collapse. This doesn't make Collapse OS useless. > [...] > However, when you look at it from a communal perspective, Collapse OS starts to make sense. Once a particular community already took care of its immediate survival and is looking at going from "surviving" to "thriving", if it has Collapse OS and someone who can make sense of it, then that community will have a great asset.
      - dopidopHN 4y ago
        Cool. Thanks. I swear I spend 15min looking around the website and various linked thread for this answer. Managing electricity. Ok. Hm. I’ve seen shoddy grid. And … yeah. They all use some type of contrôler. Ok. Anyway thanks for pointing out the obvious page I missed.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      Ham radio for sure. The whole idea of ham radio is knowing how to make a radio out of nothing and experiment. In a collapse this would be extremely useful too.
bmsleight_ 4y ago
How about this project I put together ? https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-eventually/ https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-...
- dspillett 4y ago
  I keep looking at projects to turn old kindle units into extra screens or just using them as more generic devices, but I'd like something in the 10-to-14 inch range, preferably closer to the top end of that than the bottom. There are screens if that sort of size available, but there are issues there (expense of the screen itself, needing to make a case, the projects being pi based (those being silly expensive ATM) or requiring more electronics jiggery-pokery than I'd have time for (but would enjoy tinkering with & leaning if I could find the time!).
xwolfi 4y ago
I dunno if you have one, I have 2 A4-sized reader, a Sony and a Boox, and it's insane. I paid both around 700$ and I dont regret (the boox has backlight). You cant always whip enough factory workers in vietnam to transform resources mined in Myanmar for 250$, and sometimes you have to pay a bit more. I suppose most of the money goes to R&D to finally find a way to get high refresh rates, anyway. I think nobody's sleeping on high margin for these things, collecting massive mountain of cash to buy sport cars. It's a difficult concept to bring up, this doubly stable state display that require electricity only on change. It's really worth paying for it to evolve.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  As much as I agree with the general sentiment that we don't pay enough attention to the amount of exploitation going on during the production of electronics, doesn't the high price of eInk displays have more to do with one company hoarding all the relevant patents and scaring off the competition?
  - throw_away1525 4y ago
    I've got a HiSense android phone with e-ink (the a5) which I had to order directly from China. It has great performance, I can watch YouTube videos on it. I mean it isn't a pleasant experience but I can. I wonder if it is using the forbidden algorithms? I should compare it to an e-ink reader that's sold in the US and presumably is following the relevant patent laws.
mythhouse 4y ago
I will drop $750 in a heartbeat if there is enough reviewed proof that eink can limit vision damage longterm. Its one of my main health concerns.
- huijzer 4y ago
  Isn’t vision damage mostly due to not looking in the distance enough?
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    If you're thinking of focusing issues, IIRC there is evidence that not getting exposed to enough UV light (read: sun light) during years our eyes develops may play a big part in that. No idea if that would imply this is needed as an adult though. And that is assuming I don't misremember in the first place.
  - mythhouse 4y ago
    Yes focusing eyes close all day is the real culprit. But there is something about bright light of monitors that seems to impact my vision too, i am not quite sure what its callled though. I don't feel the same fatigue reading a book. Its just my personal experience.

rollcat 4y ago

This looks wonderful, and I can't wait for these kinds of e-ink displays to get more affordable. Looks like a perfect display for outdoors, very long trips (battery time?), long writing sessions, etc. I'd love to build a "DIY laptop" like that, but at these prices I'm likely better off with a Macbook Air... I'm already experimenting with using a heavily desaturated/monochromatic color scheme for coding (it's working surprisingly well - e.g. using bold text to differentiate keywords). I think most CLI apps are abusing color for little gain. Reading the output of some programs feels like wading through a room filled with fruit salad - the JS ecosystem is particularly bad in this regard. I'm using red in my prompt to indicate a root shell and/or an SSH session, and I think that's as far as it should go.

dainiusse 4y ago
Any theme you can share for editors?
- rollcat 4y ago
  In my dotfiles: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/0d44759/.emacs.d/themes/rollcat-mono-light-theme.el https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/0d44759/.emacs.d/th... There's also a dark variant, and a "base" variant to convince Emacs not to touch colors when running in a terminal. There's also support for matching the system theme in Emacs & Terminal.app on macOS: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/commit/b3e49ad https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/commit/b3e49ad
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sofixa 4y ago
There are off the shelf laptops with e-ink now: https://goodereader.com/blog/product/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-13-inch-dual-screen-laptop-with-e-ink https://goodereader.com/blog/product/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-1... It's technically dual screen, e-ink and OLED that rotate, but even better, you can choose the best one for the job.
- 4y ago

zokier 4y ago

Would have loved to see a video of the display in action to better gauge the impact of framerate/latency

timthelion 4y ago
Try part 3 here: https://gradesta.com/blog/007-ci/ https://gradesta.com/blog/007-ci/
- bloopernova 4y ago
  oh wow that is really responsive! Arrrgh, maybe if I win the lottery one day I can create an e-ink coding and documentation setup. Would have to be Linux because newer Macs don't support more than 2 external displays unless you get the most powerful CPU.
  - bullen 4y ago
    I think we need something more like ePaper or the tech. found in pebble watches. LCD but persistent (if nothing changes very low power) and with colors (limited is ok, pebble time had 64) and higher frame-rates. Contrast was suffering on those displays compared to the pebble 2 ones, but maybe there is something better now?

orlandohill 4y ago

I've been using a Dasung Paperlike HD-FT since early 2020, and I'm still very happy with it. I have a similar setup, but only need to switch monitor to see details in videos or colored images. The refresh rate isn't normally an issue with GUIs, and most of the websites that I visit are usable in 4 bit monochrome.

TT-392 4y ago

I really want to try vim on an e-ink some day. If I find the experience to be alright, I'd totally buy one of those pinenotes for programming (assuming I'd be able to connect a normal keynoard to it). Too bad big e-ink displays are so rare and expensive.

ozzydave 4y ago
I occasionally use my remarkable as a screen for vim, it works quite nicely.

amelius 4y ago

Nice setup, except I guess if you're programming UIs and webpages and such (because how would you test).

vanderZwan 4y ago
Use that second monitor on the right I would guess?

quxbar 4y ago

Yes, yes, yes. I have bought a screen and plan on integrating exactly this sort of setup into my routine, mainly for the focus benefits the author notes.

modzu 4y ago

what keyboard is that?

ithkuil 4y ago
Mistel barocco

csdvrx 4y ago

One of these days, I want to make a terminal "optimized" for eink - as in, compute which parts of the screen receive the new characters, to invalidate them and do a quick refresh (leaving eink ghosting) on these leaving the rest of the screen pristine, then later do at an opportunistic time a better refresh (leaving no ghosting) on these to have no ghosting at all instead of leaving the selection of that time to the eink driver. Eink refresh is slow-ish, but only because if say scrolling a bunch of pixels, you need to invalidate and redraw the whole screen. The advantage of terminals is that you can easily keep a matrix of squares, and by looking at the flux of information, you can pick the opportunistic times for refreshes. With characters, there should be more recouping. (a B and a P overlap except in the bottom right) With line editing, the problem should be limited to the line All these small gains should add up to provide an excellent terminal experience.

vanderZwan 4y ago
I am fairly certain that I have read that these types of optimizations (only change dirty characters) already exist in certain terminals. I wonder if the issue would be more how to get such an optimization to the display. Although perhaps it automatically does a comparison between current and previous frame to do its own dirty-pixel optimization.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > I wonder if the issue would be more how to get such an optimization to the display This > Although perhaps it automatically does a comparison between current and previous frame to do its own dirty-pixel optimization. Some do, like the Boox regal mode, but it stills feels a bit slow and leaves some ghosting. Baking that into the terminal would limit the comparison to the invalidated area, which in a terminal would be a smaller square that the full screen frame, so I'd expect some speed gains.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    Thank you, I understand your intent better now. I wonder if maintaining a buffer in software that counts for each pixel how many times it has been dirty, combined with, say, the kind of quadtree one would normally use for hit detection, would let one do "local" refreshes and make this a generic solution. It sounds like the kind of thing that someone already must have thought of (let's hope it's not one of the software patents holding e-ink back)

troupe 4y ago

Years ago Dell had a laptop with an e-ink display. Lenovo has a laptop with an e-ink display on the cover so you use it like a tablet, but the "normal" screen is LCD. I think a company called Modus is working on making a laptop with an e-ink for the regular screen.

coder543 4y ago
Lenovo has a new version coming where you can twist it around and use the new (larger, color) e-ink screen as the primary screen, and the other side has an OLED panel, which is an awesome combination: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-twist-e-ink-oled-laptop https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-...

okasaki 4y ago

I guess I'll have to disagree with everyone's enthusiasm about eink here. I haven't tried any recent ones, but the Kindle and Kobo ones I used were awful. Low contrast, inconsistent lighting and soul-crushing lag. I'd rather use the crappiest LCD tablet than an eink reader for reading ebooks, and I read a lot. I can't imagine using one as a general monitor. Maybe if you live in a sunny place they have some merit? I can't remember the last time I couldn't read a regular screen living in England.

deleted 4y ago

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dbttdft 4y ago

One of the main parts of computer usage that causes eye strain is blur. CRTs only started solving this problem around the early 2000s and got discontinued shortly after. LCDs solve it for static images but not moving. E-ink will naturally have the same problem. Any moving image will appear blurry and your eye will try to focus on it and repeatedly fail, causing muscle fatigue. Digression - This is of course less of an issue if you use the terminal in a style where you just move one page at a time, but you're just restricting yourself to a subset of possible use cases. I scroll in the terminal with the mouse wheel for skimming. To solve motion blur, you either need strobing (along with a refresh rate above the flicker fusion threshold: ~80Hz), which E-ink will never have, or a high refresh rate, something like 240Hz. Still, if E-ink could even reach 50Hz it would be a massive improvement over LCD for use cases that don't require color. E-ink does solve the pixel density problem and viewing angle problem (reducing eye strain and bad posture). Overall I'm still using high end CRTs for all use cases, and will switch to OLED once they get proper strobed offerings without all kind of bugs (and I'm still not sure if OLED fixes viewing angle shift. IPS-type LCD certainly didn't). The self-luminescence problem that E-ink solves is also nice, but I'm not sure it matters much (it used to be my biggest pet peeve); you can just take an OLED which supports nice low luminescence levels at or below 120cd/m^2 (unlike most LCDs) and roughly match your room lights to it. Low framerate and input lag will also cause eye strain and bad posture, respectively. That last image: https://bsandro.tech/epaper/dasung_photo_3.jpg https://bsandro.tech/epaper/dasung_photo_3.jpg gives me nostalgia of the late 90s when some of my friends had those new experimental LCDs, the same aspect ratio, the same slow pixel response, interesting frame, and brands I've never heard of.

jeffbee 4y ago
> I'm still using high end CRTs for all use case Buried the key sentence. That's pretty wild. Isn't any CRT now 20+ years old and consequently a small fraction of its design brightness? Or do you have old stock and you open a fresh box every 5 years? I know there wasn't a lot of old stock of CRTs are the end of the CRT era because when I needed a warranty fix on a Sony 21" Trinitron FD in the final year of its 5-year warranty they said they could not repair or replace it and they send me a 24" model instead. When that one broke they could not fix or replace and paid me out for the warranty.

1MachineElf 4y ago

An e-ink display for terminal use would be wonderful. I wish e-ink technology would take off and make setups like this viable for more of us.

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Sunspark 4y ago

I have a suggestion. Reflective LCD colour displays with no backlight. You can get them in 8" tablet form as found in the TCL Nxtpaper S8 and in 32" monitor form as found in the Sun Vision Display.

kurthr 4y ago
It's very hard to achieve even 2:1 real contrast ratios with color LCDs, because "white" light passing through color filters loses 80-90% of visible luminance (eg each green filter only covers ~30% of the area and passes <50% of lambertian daylight). This means the reflections off the front of the screen need to be less than 5-10% of ambient light. It's even worse for anything other than white or for specular light. Almost all LCDs are made trans-flective for this reason. If you went with B/W LCDs you can improve this by ~3x and might achieve 5:1 contrast with good antireflective surfaces. That's what you see in car LCDs.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  Sun Vision's tech specs states "Contrast Ratio 25:1 (typical)".