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There are many high-quality products at a competitive cost. That's a pathetic excuse. A lot of time was spent integrating social features that no one uses. T

There are many high-quality products at a competitive cost. That's a pathetic excuse. A lot of time was spent integrating social features that no one uses. That time could have been spent on quality & latency. I understand their business goals and objectives. It's still a low-quality product. A profitable product can also be terrible.

Tagbert 2y ago
from what I've read, responsive screen refresh is inversely related to battery life. A more responsive screen results in less battery life. Amazon, and pretty much all other eink readers have prioritized battery life over absolute responsiveness. They have made significant improvements in responsiveness over the years. Do you remember how slow screen refreshes were on the original Kindle? It's just that that is not a high priority for their main use case of linear reading. If you want to use it for reading PDF reference books, you probably should look to one of the eink Android tablets that are more general purpose devices and may have a faster refresh rate.
- jsheard 2y ago
  There's also an inverse relationship between response time and image quality with e-ink, speeding up the display comes at the cost of more smearing/ghosting. There's often a software option to tweak that balance one way or the other depending on your preference.
hex4def6 2y ago
As someone who worked on them a decade ago: To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon / Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc. From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared with LCD displays... With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of massive power consumption or terrible ghosting / artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out of a battery doing that. For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then white, followed by the update). It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD. The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display static text in any lighting condition with a similar quality to the printed page.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc. From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering Layman here, but what you describe sounds very much like innovation held back by patents: At the core, it’s really promising tech with actual major advantages over LCDs with applications already in many domains and possibly many more in the future; all you’d need really is incremental improvements, similar to the journey of LCD. Remember the shitty TFT(?) monitors from 20 years ago? Ghosting, low resolution, delay, low contrast, backlight bleeding, etc. If we hypothetically had 20 companies competing the traditional way, throwing international manufacturing and material science know-how on these bad boys, I’d bet $100 that we’d see massive gains in ability at a fraction of marginal cost – from incrementalism alone – way before you reach physical limitations. And with a bit of luck, there might be a breakthrough in the core tech as well. > It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD. I hear you. But brilliant people have been wrong about these statements in all kinds of areas before. Could you share more detailed what those hard limitations might be?
  - treflop 2y ago
    The core patents have already expired. AFAIK manufacturing e-ink displays is still difficult. I also have worked with e-ink displays for hobby projects and you’re flipping tiny balls of ink. Unfortunately e-ink displays are extremely slow and it only gets worse if you want colors or anything you might want in a display. E-ink displays look cool and sound cool but really suck to work with.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    There are high tech eInk devices that can refresh much faster than a Kindle and that you can buy right now, but any eInk discussion on Hacker News lives in a parallel universe where those devices should never be mentioned and we should pretend that the technology is where it was 10 years ago. With the rapid rate of development recently, I would expect eInk displays to break the "magic" 24 fps barrier in 2025 and hit the mainstream in a major way. Considering that offices worldwide have been constructed to block out sunlight to accommodate display use, this tech has the potential to change everything.
andrewmutz 2y ago
> A lot of time was spent integrating social features that no one uses. That time could have been spent on quality & latency. Goodreads integration is the best! I track books I want to read with it and then when I’m ready for a new book use the integration to download a sample on the spot
- tonymet 2y ago
  that's good maybe I should give it another review. It seemed like a neglected part of the OS

Tagbert 2y ago

from what I've read, responsive screen refresh is inversely related to battery life. A more responsive screen results in less battery life. Amazon, and pretty much all other eink readers have prioritized battery life over absolute responsiveness. They have made significant improvements in responsiveness over the years. Do you remember how slow screen refreshes were on the original Kindle? It's just that that is not a high priority for their main use case of linear reading. If you want to use it for reading PDF reference books, you probably should look to one of the eink Android tablets that are more general purpose devices and may have a faster refresh rate.

jsheard 2y ago
There's also an inverse relationship between response time and image quality with e-ink, speeding up the display comes at the cost of more smearing/ghosting. There's often a software option to tweak that balance one way or the other depending on your preference.

hex4def6 2y ago

As someone who worked on them a decade ago: To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon / Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc. From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared with LCD displays... With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of massive power consumption or terrible ghosting / artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out of a battery doing that. For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then white, followed by the update). It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD. The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display static text in any lighting condition with a similar quality to the printed page.

klabb3 2y ago
> Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc. From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering Layman here, but what you describe sounds very much like innovation held back by patents: At the core, it’s really promising tech with actual major advantages over LCDs with applications already in many domains and possibly many more in the future; all you’d need really is incremental improvements, similar to the journey of LCD. Remember the shitty TFT(?) monitors from 20 years ago? Ghosting, low resolution, delay, low contrast, backlight bleeding, etc. If we hypothetically had 20 companies competing the traditional way, throwing international manufacturing and material science know-how on these bad boys, I’d bet $100 that we’d see massive gains in ability at a fraction of marginal cost – from incrementalism alone – way before you reach physical limitations. And with a bit of luck, there might be a breakthrough in the core tech as well. > It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD. I hear you. But brilliant people have been wrong about these statements in all kinds of areas before. Could you share more detailed what those hard limitations might be?
- treflop 2y ago
  The core patents have already expired. AFAIK manufacturing e-ink displays is still difficult. I also have worked with e-ink displays for hobby projects and you’re flipping tiny balls of ink. Unfortunately e-ink displays are extremely slow and it only gets worse if you want colors or anything you might want in a display. E-ink displays look cool and sound cool but really suck to work with.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  There are high tech eInk devices that can refresh much faster than a Kindle and that you can buy right now, but any eInk discussion on Hacker News lives in a parallel universe where those devices should never be mentioned and we should pretend that the technology is where it was 10 years ago. With the rapid rate of development recently, I would expect eInk displays to break the "magic" 24 fps barrier in 2025 and hit the mainstream in a major way. Considering that offices worldwide have been constructed to block out sunlight to accommodate display use, this tech has the potential to change everything.

andrewmutz 2y ago

> A lot of time was spent integrating social features that no one uses. That time could have been spent on quality & latency. Goodreads integration is the best! I track books I want to read with it and then when I’m ready for a new book use the integration to download a sample on the spot

tonymet 2y ago
that's good maybe I should give it another review. It seemed like a neglected part of the OS