The article misses a significant device: Onyx Nova 3. The major difference between its prior color offering (poke 2) is the integration of a Wacom layer that makes this very good for note taking. The other hardware and software improvements appear to be incremental.
Of particular note with all Onyx readers is that they run Android, opening up the ecosystem of the Play store and particularly your note-taking app of choice.
Unfortunately, color eink are roughly 100 dpi compared to the 300 of b&w, although it's a layer over the b&w display so normal black and white content is still much crisper. The color layer does make it all appear darker though.
Also, ghosting can be a problem. Onyx has a few refresh settings that minimize it at the cost of refresh time. It looks like note taking is usually done on a faster refresh rate with occasional full screen refreshes to clean things up.
I'm not sure the tech is fully there yet, but it looks like it works well enough for things like color PDFs and comics. For heavy note taking color is probably not a requirement for most. I like the idea of the other larger b&w Onyx readers running android though. The Play store apps would add a lot of options over the Remarkable.
It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home (https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-...).
I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android tablet. The low refresh rate takes a bit of time to get used to, but I find that it causes you to interact with the device more slowly and carefully at points, which reduces the chance for distractions a bit (it's not that low though, you can actually watch the occasional video, the ghosting isn't actually even that bad).
I don't think the note capability is very good with the default app (I think it's unusable, in fact), but a new mode adds compatibility with OneNote (which I also don't like, but is probably less buggy). It's still a brilliant device for reading using Koreader, browsing the Web using Fennec/EinkBro and taking notes using a pen on GBoard's swipe input functionality. Just mind that the battery doesn't last as ridiculously long as you may be used to with this usage pattern. I get through about a day with fairly heavy usage.
A color display would be a welcome addition, but the gigantic oversight the Nova 3 Color's developers have made is not adding a warm light. It's what I exclusively use on my device.
Yes that looks like a strange choice. In videos it looks like that distorts the colors, shifting toward blue. It looks like battery is reasonable on all the Onyx devices if you're not on wifi though, despite the overhead of Android. Probably some heavy throttling if background app activity too. Otherwise, backlights on Kindle ereaders still allow for very long battery life-- how does the Nova 2 fare? A week of battery would still be pretty great for a tablet note taking tablet w/ Android if it can manage that with occasional wifi use to sync notes or check email.
It depends how you use it. I've gotten over 20 hours screen on time reading mainly comics with it set to refresh every page and WiFi on downloading issues along the way. I don't use the frontlight typically though. I don't charge mine more than once a week but I also don't really browse the web on my Nova 2.
I like the e-ink, but the iPad almost certainly comes with a much better software experience (huge selection of note apps, comfortable web browsing, fluid scrolling, video consumption, colors ...) at a similar price.
Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable? It works well in my experience, it can sync automatically to Dropbox and I can sync notebooks between my two Boox devices. The only thing that sucks is the text recognition IMO. But it's got templates, layers, different stroke types down.
Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use.
It glitches more than I can list within the comment length limit. The highlights are:
- Glitchy panning and zooming (they're extremely glitchy by themselves and can't be done together)
- Ineffective palm rejection. No matter whether with or without a sleeve between hand and display, it always wants to zoom or pan, which takes forever to settle down. I am aware of the touch lock, but find it too cumbersome to be acceptable. Well, maybe if that was the only issue.
- Slow eraser. You have to rub around forever for it to register all strokes you want to erase. I don't know what kind of galaxy brain shit they're doing to manage this because Squid, a different note app, registers it perfectly on the same device.
- Limited canvas. You can have the canvas be something like 2x the height of the device. Well great.
- All kinds of issues with rotation and zoom (kind of important on the smaller models, no?). The right half of the canvas not being usable, strokes being misaligned with strokes, rotation being wrong after switching apps ... I finally went all Bill O'Reilly ("Fuck it, fuckin' thing sucks") when it permanently misaligned my content from the template.
There have also been instances in which it just wouldn't register any strokes until after restarting the app. The app also can't be started without using the official Onyx Launcher, which I don't (there's not only no icon for it, as far as I found there's no Activity you could call).
What a disappointment. I have watched reviews and read opinions online and apparently nobody thought to mention how terrible that app is (thanks for the latency measurements, though). I've considered having a faulty device, but really, all the strokes register fine, all the other apps work perfectly.
> Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use
Hard to be worse than the Boox Note app :-)
I dislike OneNote enough that I'm probably not going to use it (notebooks metaphor, weird cloud stuff), but wow, what a difference. At least it doesn't have any of these show-stopper bugs. It's like they've actually started it and used it once.
The way Onyx implemented the scribble mode indeed looks a bit on the low-effort side regarding the stroke thickness and style, but for how much of a hack it is (I assume they can't actually properly hook into the app itself), how reliably it works is pretty impressive.
Fun fact about that scribble mode (what enables the low-latency pen input): It keeps working until the app that enabled it also disables it again, so if you exit an app using it in the right way, it stays on and you can draw anywhere. The downside is that the screen doesn't refresh by itself anymore, so you better have a manual refresh gesture set up or you'll probably have to reboot to fix it.
Apps can also enable and disable the mode from the background. This means that you can basically enable scribble mode for all apps without even needing any special privileges. The issue is, however, that the screen stops refreshing after a stroke after a few minutes (responsibility of the app controlling scribble mode. Presumably it eventually gets suspended ("allow running in background" is enabled). I would be happy about suggestions for how this could be solved (I haven't been able to transfer the logic to a background service presumably because of surface/context issues).
If you've read this far, you may be interested in joining a Discord community of (more technical) Boox users: https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd
I guess I never noticed his because I never zoom or pan notebooks or change the canvas size? I just treat it as a notebook with a page the size of screen. Panning and zooming is something to be avoided on eInk IMO. I didn't even notice the canvas size option. I haven't had any palm zooms or pans just the occasional taps of the back button and I think that has more to do with the fact I'm left handed.
Stroke eraser also works fine. Touch a stroke and the stroke erases. A stroke is 1 line drawn continously, if you lift the pen the stroke ends. Works exactly how I'd expect. It also has a regular eraser and an area eraser that also work fine? Trying Squid for the first time in years I'm not sure what the fuck they are calling a stroke eraser there. I even double checked and it's just as retarded on an LCD tablet. Why would I want a stroke eraser to erase more than the 1 stroke it touched?
I've taken a lot of class notes on the thing and my Note Air and really other than the occasional accidental back outs haven't had the problems you describe. I don't even turn off touch. Besides the bad text recognition I think the Boox Note app works well.
I mostly read books in the epub format, which is a great experience.
Things get a bit more complicated with PDFs on the 8" screen due to their fixed layout. KOReader has settings and accomodations to comfortably deal with many of them, but it usually requires a little tinkering. Typical A4 PDFs are just about readable with basic cropping in vertical mode and become quite easily readable in horizontally mode. There are some modes to navigate multi-column PDFs and reflow text blocks. But there can definitely be PDFs that are not comfortably readable. The situation is better the larger the screen is, so people tend to prefer 10" (Boox Note) or 13" (Boox Max) devices for heavy PDF consumption.
I would personally prefer it if people stopped publishing great looking but hard to consume PDFs as the only way to consume content.
It's worth noting that Onyx violates the Linux kernel license, and has a ton of telemetry that phones home to China. Major down sides for otherwise interesting tech.
Wow yes, that's a downside. I found a forum post [0] where someone monitored web traffic and it was analytics data, but still not great. And the GPL violation is an abuse of the FOSS community they rely on for free development.
Well, they come out with three new versions of their devices per month and you probably have no chance of servicing any type of warranty as they are based in China. You're not missing much if you wait for a company who can make decisions to release a better product, and you'll probably save yourself a headache.
Anyone who owns copyright on part of the infringed code should be able to. International seems like a pain, they're a Chinese company, I think? Should be able to at least block import if you try hard enough.
It was not clear which you claims you were referencing. Your goal of memorializing references was not clear. The request, in the form you posted, does not seem to be a productive way of achieving your ends. This may be especially true because in recent years I have noticed that "citation requested" types of comments are often used as a passive aggressive way of telling someone they're wrong, or the precursor to attacking the source once it's provided, especially on topics that have fast answers with a quick search. (including ddg in this case, which also returns appropriate results in the top 3 on both questions.)
I would respectfully suggest a different phrasing for such requests. I think I am not the only one who has noticed this unfortunate change in tone for a simple "citation requested", and so as I indicated they have have become much less productive to conversation. I have had to choose my own words more carefully in this respect as well.
Onyx makes the best ereader hardware and the worst software. I really wish they hadn't gone with android (they used to have a linux firmware and supplied SDK), since like most android IoT devices (though this isn't one) you get stuck with an abandoned android distro from day one. The actual reading app is buggy as well (can absolutely get stuck when flipping pages backwards, then suddenly flips like 20 for one button press).
The wacom stylus (I love that the touchscreen isn't sensitive to my palm) is the best feature of my boox n96ml though. It's got a nice big screen for scribbling notes on and appears to be pressure sensitive as well. That alone sold it to me and I still don't regret it because having a wacom-type stylus is just /that good of a feature/.
No eInk tablet has Android certification. As far as I understand, one of the issues is that the screen refresh rate is too low to get certified.
It is very easy to set up Google Play on the Onyx Boox tablets. You just press a button in settings, enter your login details, click another button and that's it.
I really enjoy my Onyx Nova 3. It's a fairly novel device. Your comment is a great summary.
Like most, I wanted an ereader for consuming books without an LCD/OLED screen. I liked the idea of a color reader for the syntactic highlighting of code snippets. I further leaned into color once I realized there was a market for Android based ereaders. This means I can more easily treat it as a second phone to browse books, manga, github, HN, Pocket, Medium etc.
As other commenters pointed out, you probably do want to lock down the device and enable Google play store. I have NetGuard installed since it's constantly phoning home to China.
If you are comfortable with the price and understand the limitations (DPI, ghosting, darker screen) then it's a pretty great device.
The pen is great and responsive but it doesn't replace pen/paper. I primarily use the pen to mark up books/PDFs. The native library app it ships with is pretty great and beats out Moon+ Reader and other apps I've tried.
OneNote is particularly great for note taking and worth calling out. However, I can't find myself integrating it into my work flow.
You can set different options to negate ghosting. It's nice to be able to save these options to a specific app.
My biggest wishes would be higher DPI, brighter screen, and a warmlight option.
I'm not optimistic we will see any drastic innovation in the next few years. Kaleido/Plus isn't anything groundbreaking. I do hope that I'm wrong. There's a clear demand for this technology to improve.
After I read your comment I don’t see how the article missed this device. The article is about color e-ink technology and it’s progression, not about note taking or Android with e-ink. Why would the Nova 3 be worth mentioning if the color display is not particularly better than what they are describing towards the end?
Every time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable. I’m curious if there are other techniques to implement reflective(?) displays being explored that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad as to stifle most hopes of accessible solutions and broader consumer/professional adoption.
Frankly, I’m quite sick of straining my eyes and circadian rhythm for 8hrs+ a day
Qualcomm are sitting on a reflective display technology "mirasol" that:
1. Doesn't hit E-ink's patents
2. Is colour
3. Has fast lcd-like refresh rates
The reviews of the few devices that were made were excellent. The main problem seemed to be the quality of other aspects of the devices that featured them. I find it incredibly frustrating that this hasn't made it into the mainstream.
I saw a device once at the Qualcomm office it really was very nice, bright colour in full sunlight. I don't think they ever made them cheaply or very large.
I realize you are mostly joking, but even having their lawyers go over the licensing contract would cost them far more than 1$. Actually transferring the knowledge of how to manufacture this stuff would probably require low 7 figures for them just to break even on the deal.
Sharp Memory LCDs are close. They are active, but so close to being zero power you could keep them running with a stern glare. They have absurd contrast, can be updated at tens of hertz or faster, and are high resolution. They’re never made in large sizes, but you will see them on things like the Play Date.
Yes there is. Sharp has their memory-in-pixel LCDs which are reflective and have less power consumption than traditional LCDs for some tasks. They've been used in stuff like the Pebble watches and the current Garmin Fenix line. I think a few of their denshi note devices have also used them. I don't think they make them in sizes big enough for stuff like monitors though.
The contrast on these screens is so low, I'd love to get little e-ink screens on the sports watches. Right now, especially in mixed-sunlight dappled forest kind of backgrounds, you really need to take a hard look at the screen to read anything, which isn't safe if you are trail running or mountain biking or something similar.
Please watch makers, put a little eink-style screen on a watch! Even if it looks like 1st Generation Kindle screens, and is only black/white, it will still be an upgrade!
Didn't at least Moderna and maybe others publicly state they would not litigate any patents related to covid vaccines for the duration of the pandemic? Or am I completely misremembering this?
Lots of things have been said - and I vaguely remember something too, but also a dispute that US pushing for relaxing of the patents and the EU not, because Moderna is german based .. in any case it is not so easy, as it is not just about the vaccines, but for the production of the vaccines to set up, you need to licence or buy a lot of other stuff ... which is why my joke was obviously a oversimplification.
Amazing, but does it stray into E Ink’s protective sphere?
No doubt there are manufacturers around the world who are exploring quality general-purpose reflective displays for consumer applications, the tech has been around for some time. I could be mistaken but it seems more a question of commercial viability rather than technical capability
> Every time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable
Here, we go again. I've only read that here (repeatedly!) on HN and blogs that then cited throwaway HN posts which never respond to my requests for at least some verifiable evidence. Have a look through my comment history.
> that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad
what moat? please tell me, I keep asking. To me, it looks like all of the people making these claims have no clue about the display industry. It would be the equivalent of me coming on a search engine forum and then alleging Microsoft of using a patent moat to prevent progress in operating systems, is that true? I have no clue but it sure sounds good even though I have 0 evidence. I hope my point is clear.
In the 70s, the oil companies were allegedly buying patents for 100mpg carburetors and locking them up so nobody could use them. I asked my dad (Air Force) about that, and he laughed. He said the military could desperately use such technology, as supplying fuel to the military machines was a terrible logistical problem. The military would never, ever let lil' ole' patent law get in the way of that.
History of full of example of patents slowing the deployment to technology, the latest clear example is 3d Printing which really only became affordable to the home user, and abel to be hackable by people doing novel things with it after the patents expired
I would assume the same thing would happen with eink
Normally, the person making a claim or allegation supplies some evidence. You know like if I accused Microsoft of using patents for holding back operating system development, then you as presumably a software expert would rightly ask me for evidence. Is my point somehow unclear? Commenters on HN repeatedly make this claim and if you look at my comment history, each time I ask for evidence I get exactly your kind of reply or the link to that throwaway post (also on HN) and a blog article (that refers to that same throwaway post! infinite loop!) or best of all patents.google.com/search?q=eink . That suggests to me that these comments have no basis in evidence and the authors of the comments aren't even involved at any level of the display industry to understand what they're talking about.
> I would assume the same thing would happen with eink
So you are looking for active suppression. Aka law suits?
You deny a general chilling effect that patents have on the market overall? That people will, companies, and insterors will simply avoid patent encumbered technology
You simply refuse to acknowledge that generally accepted reality
//Sidenote. Stop asking me and others to look through your comment history. I am not going to do that. Make your points here and now
> You deny a general chilling effect that patents have on the market overall? That people will, companies, and insterors will simply avoid patent encumbered technology
So I can just simply say Microsoft has patents and therefore operating systems are not progressing because of that? You realize that's what you're claiming.
> You simply refuse to acknowledge that generally accepted reality
Your reality doesn't match mine. I work in the display industry.
> Stop asking me and others to look through your comment history.
I'm not going to spend my time educating you repeatedly.
>>So I can just simply say Microsoft has patents and therefore operating systems are not progressing because of that? You realize that's what you're claiming.
In part yes... Look at the suppression of UNIX do to SCO.. I mean hell this is recorded history. I am honestly surprised I need to even debate this. SCO effectively killed Unix, and harmed Linux and BSD
Software patents have a long history of suppression innovation in software
>Your reality doesn't match mine. I work in the display industry.
This new age of dueling realities is a false. There is only one reality, and mine is based on recorded historical fact, your is based on personal experience and anecdote
Mine is actual reality, yours is a belief
>I'm not going to spend my time educating you repeatedly.
> This new age of dueling realities is a false. There is only one reality, and mine is based on recorded historical fact, your is based on personal experience and anecdote
I'm confused. What "recorded historical facts" were provided for this claim that E Ink is using patents to prevent progress in the display industry?
ten years. so just after the world collapses. it's so great that we are blocking the development of vital tech /s. i mean, imagine a world without today's level of production of laptop screens/OLED TVs/LCD TVs/phone/tablet screens. all those toxic chemicals. there's so many things we don't need a flashlight being shone in our faces for, and (as someone else in this thread already mentioned) our circadian rhythm being disrupted for.
of course e-ink tech and the health of our eyes and sleep is just the tip of the iceberg. in the larger perspective capitalist firms are suffocating the earth with their single-use, non-modular, non-upgradeable, black box e-waste. they're not even 'tools' to me because the living and breathing Silicon Valley AI is using and abusing us (the workers) through these 'products'.
i abhor the intellectual property system and monopolized vital technologies, it means capitalism makes the worst technological tools.
Skimming the uspto’s documentation, identifying the term does not appear to be a straightforward process [0]. Someone with more experience in the matter might be able to say.
This is like saying that, if you want to use a particular prohibited plant or compound, you need to first end drug prohibition and the worldwide system of cartel profiteering.
While it is most certainly a good idea to do that, you don't need to wait until the process is complete to include these items in your diet.
Then we're talking about different things, because I was thinking in terms of mass market adoption. A few instances of gray market or IP "theft" here and there isn't going to cause much of a stir. But if Samsung/Apple/other companies want to make a large scale retail offering then it won't work under the current global network of IP protection. As a result, these same companies with the biggest budgets to make progress in research won't devote those budgets to IP they don't own or can't license at a profitable fee.
For most reading and writing tasks I think I’d rather have a a monochrome display with much higher DPI with extremely crisp high contrast edges. I hope that keeps improving too. Colour is something I’m willing to go without for this type of device. Maybe a single highlight colour would be nice to have as long as the red or yellow pigment occupies the same cell as black, not an adjacent one.
A 600 dpi A4 sized tablet would be lovely. It would be a lot harder to get to that effective dot pitch with colour displays.
A few years back, I started a new theme that I call “bland”. I kept it at just pure black on pure white, keywords bold, comments italic for a week. After that, I agreed that some colour was useful, so I made strings red, numbers blue and comments green. All nice and high contrast. Since then I’ve added a little more from time to time, e.g. lifetimes in Rust are italic red, and attributes and macros in Rust code were orange for a few months but are now just italic black (though I still use orange for macro_rules $variables), but I’ve kept it all deliberately minimal and ultra-high contrast. I use the same styling (except for the background colour) on my website. I made a bland-dark somewhere along the way that I very occasionally use, also used on my website.
I should probably try something radically different again in another different direction soon. There are generally somewhat better options available for semantic highlighting now than there were five or ten years ago.
Back in the day™ Think’s Pascal used bold, italics and underlining to do syntax highlighting because the Mac’s screen was black-and-white. It would be a compromise: you can’t encode as much information into the text’s appearance without access to color, but it could be sufficient depending on your requirements.
(Although technically this was actually syntax, not just syntax highlighting, since that's how the reference language distinguished between keywords and identically spelled identifiers.)
I’m thinking of old Visual Studio syntax highlighting where it primarily uses green and blue. Maybe pick one of those like E-ink panels can already do.
That’s a good point. I think one or two colours mixed with font weights and italics could get us pretty far.
Response time is a pretty critical metric for me when it comes to coding. I don’t want to have to wait a couple hundred milliseconds to scroll or switch files, so I’m not convinced coding is a great fit for the existing tech. Code isn’t read top to bottom like a novel.
That said, hell yes I want less eye strain when coding. I’m sure we can all relate to that.
I've been wondering for a while whether syntax highlighting had a role in certain code style changes. Like the one where open curly brackets were placed at the start of a new line but nowadays are just appended to the end. Without syntax highlighting the older style seems to make more sense as it makes scope delimiters more visible without using colors.
IMHO it's just preference - at least the last 15 years - but now propagated as a sort of common default/standard with the advent of auto code formatting tools. C# still does what you say (and practically always did - but the Mono people formatted it differently) while Java and JavaScript do the other. Before Prettier, I formatted JS code like C# - I thought it's nicer. Now I use the other because that's what Prettier does and it's usefulness greatly outweighs my preference.
Putting braces on the same line is the K&R style, which predates Allman style with braces on separate lines.
(The original K&R style had the opening brace on a separate line for functions, but I believe this is due to the original syntax for declaring argument types - if you declare them on separate lines, like variables, a distinct { clearly ends the argument block and starts the function body.)
Most devices now are in the 200--300 dpi range, monochrome.
That's already as good as a mid-grade laserprinter output, and for text is pretty much entirely sufficient, especially in monochrome.
Other issues still remain: some ghosting (at higher refresh / lower quality), limited greyscale (4--16 shades in most cases), and generally far lower refresh rates than emissive displays (1--8 Hz seems fairly typical). Yes, you can watch monochrome video, if you want. It's in the "sufficient for a general overview", but not high quality.
The place this shows up most especially isn't in video, per se, but on web pages with animations, whether of icons, graphics/charts, or embedded videos. The result is exceedingly distracting at high display quality settings, with a slow, flashing refresh behaviour.
600dpi A4 means roughly 5000×7000 (35,000,000 pixels). Even 300dpi is 2500×3500 (8,750,000 pixels).
The current typical resolution for 10–13″ tablets (A4 is about 14.3″) is 1404×1872, which is 2,628,288 pixels. You’re asking for 13× as many pixels, and 3× as an entry level. However you arrange it, it’s going to use a lot more power and probably need more memory and a more powerful CPU/GPU.
Your math is correct, but the refresh rates are so low that I don’t see it being an issue. Not to mention that by the time said panel is available on the market CPUs and GPUs will be better.
Call it 400 dpi? 450, maybe? It doesn’t seem too farfetched to me.
Also, there's a huge difference in bandwidth requirements if the display is monochrome. Consider the framebuffer needed for a conventional 8-bit colour depth display at 5000 by 7000 versus a monochrome, two colour, or a grayscale 16 shade e-ink panel.
24 bit RGB: 105 MB
5 bit grayscale: 21.875 MB
2 bit: 8.75 MB
mono: 4.375 MB
Pair that with a low refresh rate and partial screen updates and it's suddenly not so crazy.
Pairing it with a low refresh rate is admitting defeat. There are already multiple products on the market with full-screen refresh beyond 30Hz; Dasung’s Paperlike is probably the best known, they don’t publish an actual figure but just say it’s almost as high as LCDs; I’ve found one place of no obvious credibility saying it’s about 40Hz. All this is with ghosting, of course. High quality rendering definitely takes longer, and I get the impression from my reading and observations of a real device that bandwidth may play a part in that speed limit.
Partial screen updates can go much faster than that; reMarkable 2’s total latency from marker to screen update is around 23ms if I recall correctly, and I suspect (without confirmation) that it’s updating the screen at 200Hz, the sample rate of the marker.
In theory, yes, you can go down to 1- or 4-bit colour (and at 600dpi I think going hard monochrome and depending on dithering would be quite acceptable), but in practice software stacks are rather attached to 24-bit and don’t tend to like going below 8-bit. Especially general-purpose stacks—if you build something yourself from the ground up (whatever that means), then sure, you can generally choose your own path. There are certainly paths that make better use of meagre resources, but experience says they’re seldom taken.
I think you’re probably underestimating how much power pushing that many pixels and that much screen bandwidth takes. Such a device is feasible (provided they can manufacture a large enough panel with a tiny enough dot pitch), but not straightforward, and will have some significant tradeoffs. I’m not surprised no one’s trying anything even close to it.
> All this is with ghosting, of course. High quality rendering definitely takes longer, and I get the impression from my reading and observations of a real device that bandwidth may play a part in that speed limit.
You’re talking about a general purpose monitor attached to a PC. How is bandwidth an issue there? The very same computer can push 120 Hz (or more) to higher res screens than the Dasung. It seems very clear to me that the problem is that the e-ink cells physically can’t react in time to show the next frame. The ghosting means they’re pushing it to the limit. If you’re talking about the controller within the display, well that argument doesn’t track. Controllers capable of pushing pixels that quickly work perfectly fine in conventional LCDs, even power constrained ones like an iPad Pro’s. Why not use those?
E-readers have been monochrome for over 20 years, not to mention every other limited-colour piece of hardware. Has that not been enough time for software to adapt and libraries to mature? To be clear, I’m not dreaming of a device to run X11, Firefox, and Doom (like the PineNote people seem to want). I want self-rewriting paper. Of course I want software tailored to that experience, not something off the shelf.
If I am making any ridiculous requests, it’s 600 dpi screens at that size. I’m sure there are a thousand reasons why that’s a hard engineering problem.
Even high-quality refresh is fast, though there is a prominent transition.
With e-ink, there's a distinct difference between paginated navigation and scroll-based, with pagination being strongly preferred.
For web browsing, I recommend EInkBro, which provides paginated navigation as a default. For any longer-form Web reading, that's my preference. It's superior even to Pocket's exceedingly poorly-considered pagination mode.
The other alternative is to print-to-PDF and display that within an e-book reader. Unfortunately, many websites format poorly in that mode, with text being cut at pagination breaks, or omitted entirely.
E-ink is the coolest tech with the worst business practices. The availability of affordable e-ink tech is just not there. I understand the research-intensive nature of these displays, but the company itself has been holding back the e-ink market by just operating poorly in so many ways.
My biggest worry is that they'll fold at some point, leaving all the e-ink patents in the hand of a troll that will hold tech back for 20 years.
The first generation of patents has already expired. The company has been issued additional patents for techniques that went into the more recent versions.
It means that someone probably could make screens now, but they would be lower resolution, slower refresh and have less contrast than your typical Kindle. Probably good for some uses but probably not enough of a volume to bring prices down.
> It means that someone probably could make screens now, but they would be lower resolution, slower refresh and have less contrast than your typical Kindle. Probably good for some uses but probably not enough of a volume to bring prices down.
It also means that someone could advance the basic tech in directions that haven't been patented.
E-Ink has the worst product management team of any company I have ever watched. There are so many applications out there begging for low-cost, low-power displays, and they are just not addressing that market.
They have an extremely limited selection of products, and the ones they do have are priced unreasonably high. They seem to be reluctant to enter into bulk OEM agreements with anyone, and they charge exorbitant license fees for anyone who wants to manufacture displays themselves.
In short, they are considered to be terrible stewards of the technology.
AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are all American companies that are innovating in the CPU and GPU market designed in the US. Except maybe Samsung with their Exynos chip, who has better innovation in this sphere?
Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector.
Right. Oculus Rift has been developed in the US, and seeing all the companies that have followed the trend of VR (Valve, Sony, HTC, HP), I guess this could be an example of a revolutionary tech. Tesla while not revolutionary (electric vehicles as an idea and some demo has been around for a long time) has been the first to democratized the vehicle to the masses. Now every car makers are making an electric model. That's revolutionary.
A lot of example from China I'm seeing are good looking and impressing demo (Xiaomi Alpha Mix) but are impractical for general consumers.
Did these ACeP readers [1] ever materialize? It sounded like they were a big step forward from existing devices in terms of fidelity and page turn speed.
I think I recall reading that they were delayed into 2022, but I haven't heard anything about them recently.
It's strange. Like you, I have gotten the impression (from articles such as your link) that ACeP is better than Kaleido. But in this article, they dismiss ACeP as a failure halfway through before moving on to talk about Kaleido.
I can't wait for a proper ACEP eInk device. I have a "colour" eInk with the RGB filter, but it's horrible. There is a very visible "screendoor" effect. Basically you can see each individual pixel of the filter layer. I wouldn't recommend it.
I've been using an Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color for about a year now, mostly to upload epubs and highlight in 4 colors using Google Play Books, which then sends all the highlights to a Google Doc per book. I'd say that device is "color" like the Gameboy Color was "color." It certainly isn't vivid, but the colors are distinguishable.
I wish I knew how to take that output (a really annoying table format) and process it into an outline, though. That would be a real game-changer for me!
You could use readwise.io (a paid service) to import your highlights from Google play books and many other services. Readwise offers an API which would help you process those annotations easier than parsing the google doc
This is second hand info, so sorry if it's totally wrong, I'll edit this:
E-ink tech is great, but patents and other paper-limitations are slowing down developments of cheap e-ink devices devices, and e-ink will become "great again", when patents expire.
I personally see many, many usecases of e-ink all around me, but the prices are way too high for anything that is not either really small or a repurposed old existing device (eg. jailbroken kindle)
Yeah, I'd love a mechanical keyboard where each individual keycap was its own E-ink display. This would let you change layouts on the fly and have it reflected on the keys.
Ha! I am the same with OLED. Ever since I saw a video recorded in an OLED lab, where one of the guys had a transparent foil, looking just like those for the overhead projectors in high-school in the 80's, connected to a HDMI cable. He switched it on and a movie was playing on that foil. He bent it, rolled it and said, this could be cut to any shape and size.
I would be in DIY heaven, if one could buy such foil by the meter, for a sensible price. Just imagine, what kind of displays for DIY devices one could accomplish!
I think Dasung and Mira has e-ink 25" monitors, but they are just getting released, so not sure how good they actually are. I also wonder how they worked around the e-ink patents.
I’ve never seen this before outside of medical devices : THE PRODUCTS ARE NOT CONSUMER PRODUCTS INTENDED FOR PERSONAL, FAMILY OR HOUSEHOLD PURPOSES; AND
(II) PURCHASER IS PURCHASING THE PRODUCTS FOR COMMERCIAL USE AND/OR IN A BUSINESS CAPACITY. ORDERS PLACED BY CONSUMERS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED
I want to hook up a small e ink screen to a pi and use it with my mechanical keyboard as a modern typewriter of sorts but the prices on eink are so prohibitive it doesn’t seem worth it.
I have an Inkplate 10. I like it, but it's not a regular monitor, it doesn't have any standard ports like HDMI. Displaying an image from the SD card takes multiple seconds.
Do you say that from experience? I have both a Dasung Paperwhite monitor and a fairly hacked reMarkable 1 that I use for that purpose. Both work well for typing, as long as you type in a way that full refreshes are the exception, not the norm.
There are areas where I am more skeptical of how patents are used (see: publicly funded medical research that creates privately owned patents), but I just don't see this as a problem in this case.
This isn't an essential technology - it's a nice addition to our display options. There's every reason to believe that new tech has actual new costs associated with it and that inventions might require elevated rates to make developing new tech economical. I don't like everything about patents - but they give companies a premium for new tech and the companies reveal how to make the tech in return.
It seems to me that if we eliminated patents w/o a new system, investing in technology would simply have a lower rate of return, and so it would happen less. I actually think that's ok - but I think people who bemoan the legal exclusivity that companies say enables them to invest in research should consider how much longer they would wait for the tech they like.
The issue is the length of time. It takes a year or 2 for most companies to make these sorts of breakthroughs. Yet they are grant 20 years of ownership over the idea. It isn't as if the e-ink investment was a billion dollars and years of arduous research.
By them owning the patents to e-ink, others that might contribute and advance the technology are blocked out all together.
To me, it's reasonable to simply cut the tech patent timeframe. Rather than 20 years, what if we moved it back to 15, 10, or 5 years?
Technology isn't essential until there is a breakthrough.
Eink allow ultra low power display.
If you make it extremely cheap it can be worldchanging:
Extremely cheap screen that draw no power when there is no change.
Do you think you'd buy an e-ink device that was hackable to explore some of these use cases? I'm thinking a battery powered, WiFi/BT, minimal linux OS with good power management, powerful enough to run chromium embedded for rendering.
I can imagine a few people on here interested in such a device for calendar, home automation, surf updates, whatever. Or does it already exist?
Not with E-ink specifically. But look at the 3D printing development. It basically exploded once certain patents expired. Now every company I have worked for has had 3D printer in use.
No. It's just become a mantra-meme that the thought-leaders on Hacker News repeat reflexively whenever there's an article (which they haven't read, of course) with e-ink or e-paper in the title.
They are very faded compared to a normal screen. With no backlight and in direct natural light, the Kaleido screens look similar to a color newspaper or many comics. (Some comics use paper and printing that produces much more vibrant color though)
In artificial light a lot depends on the specifics of the environment. Trying one out in warmer light, somewhat indirectly (light overhead, screen partly vertical for reading) it was a little dark, and needed the backlight. It was a cool backlight, so the warm overhead light combined with it to counteract a bit of the shift toward blue. In the dark w/o external light, the cool backlight very much shifted color towards blue.
This is just what these displays are capable of. I guess, that also might be the reason, they took book covers from the 1940's. Vintage look is quite attractive, this way, but it would be worse with modern high-def imagery.
I wish they had not used vintage magazine covers for their illustration. By using old covers, I wasn't sure how much of the drabness was caused by the device and how much was attributable to the original image being drab.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a periodic full refresh to clear any "ghosted" pixesl, often at a user-definable frequency. This occurs only during a display update, so yes, as long as you're looking at static text, there won't be a flash.
The trade-off is of pixel ghosting vs. flash. The more frequently the screen is fully refreshed, the less ghosting.
In practice, I tend to set this value to about 20 refreshes for reading texts, and will frequently manually refresh the display when reading Web content in a browser where scrolling is more prevalent.
For monospace (terminal) displays, the fact that each character tends to update in the same screen cell makes the ghosting issue less significant and noticeable. What happens is that the background gets somewhat greyer as text is read or scrolled, but there isn't the effect of strong imprints under the text as with graphic or typeset content. A refresh largely has the effect of brightening the background.
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.
- 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.
For anything networked, not having access to the latest and greatest ciphers, or CA certificates, eventually causes problems. It's possible that mobile formats won't be supported. And a decade or so out, what was once a generous provisioning of storage and memory will frequently come to seem small. Android-based devices such as the Onyx BOOX line probably won't be able to get newer OS updates even if the vendor was willing to support them as Android itself seems to have a moving hardware baseline (I'm typing this on ... an older Android device).
That said, the displays themselves should still function, yes.
Depends on how things are set up with the refresh rate; subpixel rendering may have an effect IIRC. Details I don’t really understand, but e ink has a shorter lifespan than other tech.
Of particular note with all Onyx readers is that they run Android, opening up the ecosystem of the Play store and particularly your note-taking app of choice.
Unfortunately, color eink are roughly 100 dpi compared to the 300 of b&w, although it's a layer over the b&w display so normal black and white content is still much crisper. The color layer does make it all appear darker though.
Also, ghosting can be a problem. Onyx has a few refresh settings that minimize it at the cost of refresh time. It looks like note taking is usually done on a faster refresh rate with occasional full screen refreshes to clean things up.
I'm not sure the tech is fully there yet, but it looks like it works well enough for things like color PDFs and comics. For heavy note taking color is probably not a requirement for most. I like the idea of the other larger b&w Onyx readers running android though. The Play store apps would add a lot of options over the Remarkable.