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Ask HN: Will e-ink laptops be a thing soon, or ever?

20 points by Kluny ↗ HN
I'm a writer by night and a programmer by day. I have to stare at bright LCD all day for work because I don't have a choice right now, but when I'm writing, an e-Ink display would be more than enough, and much, much easier on my eyes.

My dream would be something with a Mac keyboard, a 13-inch e-ink display like a kindle, a simple word processor (rich text only, no need for MS word or anything fancy), days of battery power, light weight, and a simple means of transferring snippets of text and document files from my main machine or phone to the tablet. I would probably do research on a "real" computer then copy and paste snippets to the word processor machine as needed.

Internet connectivity for basic email and file transfer would be nice, but I can save the facebooking and the gaming for my main computer.

Anyone else thinks this is a good idea?

25 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] thread
f_allwein
Yes, that might be nice to have. The One Laptop Per Child laptop (XO) had a dual-mode display with a "Reflective (backlight off) monochrome mode for low-power use in sunlight" [1]. Does not seem to have caught on though. Wasn't the same, but as far as I remember, it was alright.

I guess the majority of users would not want a greyscale display (or at least manufacturers think so).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO

dragonwriter
I think the problem is that e-ink (and similar, e-ink itself is, IIRC, a particular brand) displays are slow (and possibly power-intensive) to update. They are excellent for their optimized uses, where updates are (compared to typical laptop displays) infrequent, but perhaps not otherwise.

I know there has been work on faster and color e-ink (etc.) displays, but I don't know that there is much progress toward the point where they would make sense for general workloads.

Kluny
Do you mean power intensive if you're updating the screen constantly, like you would if typing?

This article mentions that they're very efficient:http://www.wired.com/2016/05/get-ready-world-covered-electro...

"...[e-ink price tags] will last two to five years on the coin-cell battery that comes inside."

That refers to tags that are updated once or twice a day at most though.

dragonwriter
> Do you mean power intensive if you're updating the screen constantly, like you would if typing?

That's what I meant. (And I'm not sure; ISTR that they are more power intensive for updates, but I don't know in typical general-computer-use cycle how they would fare against more typical laptop displays, if it would just be reducing their advantage or flipping to a disadvantage.)

Kluny
Yeah, I would be interested to know how they stack up. Seems to me that a lot of power is saved by not lighting the screen up brighter than the sun. The updates take a lot of power, I thin, because the whole screen has to be refreshed with each keystroke. But that's the same as with LCDs, isn't it?
Tiksi
I could be wrong on this, but I recall reading that the slow refresh on most eink screens isn't so much a hardware issue as a battery issue. Quick refresh would be pretty pointless on an ereader and be using power for nothing so they're tuned down.

This was an old ereader that people managed to hack and get a faster refresh on in 2012: http://liliputing.com/2012/01/hacked-sony-reader-shows-just-...

There are also people who have run linux on kindles and it looks surprisingly usable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8aFW5wROS4

jonbruner
There's a stripped-down, e-ink word processor similar to what you're describing called Freewrite (https://getfreewrite.com/). It launched on Kickstarter as Hemingwrite a couple of years ago. It's got an e-ink display and syncs documents over WiFi.

I think the real selling point is a distraction-free venue for writing, but the e-ink display could be a plus as well.

Kluny
That's exactly what I'm after. Thanks for the link.

edit checked it out. screen is parallel to typing surface, looks like a recipe for hideous neck pain. I'll wait til v2 I guess. Still, nice to see that a market exists.

andrei_says_
Also, the screen is tiny. I'm wondering if someone can come up with an optical contraption to turn this tiny-screen-on-a-keyboard into a less tiny screen parallel to one's face.

Something like the screen magnifiers seen in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Kluny
Lens-based enlargment allows perfect image fidelity, while looking cool and steampunk!
GrumpyYoungMan
The closest thing to what you're looking for would be the Dasung 13" e-ink monitor (http://dasung.com.cn) plus some sort of ultrabook. (Yes, I acknowledge that their web site looks incredibly sketchy but, insofar as I know, it is a real product.) I believe their most recent production run is sold out though, according to their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/dasungtech).

A review can be found at http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/07/10/one-week-with-dasun...

(Disclaimer: I'm neither affiliated with Dasung nor a customer.)

Kluny
Yep, that Dasung item is mostly what I found while googling about this. It's a good start, but not useful for my application - coffee shops, beaches, and tents in the mountains.
mattm
I had shown interest in the Dasung and was on their mailing list for when they had a recent production run. Unfortunately for them, they emailed everyone in CC so customers who bought the product and didn't have a good experience could (and did) email everyone else to tell them.

I didn't buy it but from what others wrote it seems they still need to iron out issues which is not surprising from a new product. I didn't buy because the price was way too much ($1000). I would want to wait for it to come down to under $500 before considering buying plus I don't know if it works on Linux.

Like the OP, I too would like an e-ink monitor for programming and doing most things that don't need a high refresh rate but it seems the technology is still at least a few years away.

rwallace
Can't you get the same result with off-the-shelf hardware by turning down the brightness? Like, change the background color in your editor from (255,255,255) to something dimmer?
Kluny
Not really, no, but making the screen black and white or grayscale at least would probably help. Maybe I'll try that.
vanattab
Does anyone know of a ultra low power lightweight laptop. I am dreaming of someday working remotely while backpacking and would like a small laptop I could charge off solar panels.
drkrieger00
Chromebook is the first thing to pop into my head; small panel, battery and inverter would be be able to keep one charged no problem. I dunno how small you can go, but since most chromebook's AC adapters aren't more than 40w, should be able to find something that would fit in a backpack.
Kluny
I was thinking about that also, and mentioned it to a friend who has some experience with them. She said that they're terrific as long as you have internet access; as soon as you're offline they're holy pain in the ass.

When I'm writing I want to be offline pretty often, either because I've gone someplace where there's no wifi or because I want to eliminate distractions. For simple word processing, will a Chromebook make my life difficult if I'm offline?

id122015
i asked this question many years ago. +1 Count me in. The best thing is to be proactive and start making the list of people who want such a device. For me even just the monitor is enough, not need to wait for a full laptop. next time when they crowdfund a new project we will be ready to act.
mbrock
You could also research e-ink Android tablets with USB/Bluetooth for the keyboard. (I looked at some a year ago, but I forgot their names.)
alok-g
About me: I have spent nearly a decade researching a display technology (Qualcomm's mirasol) more capable than E-ink in terms of colors and refresh speed.

Both an e-ink screen and an emissive display like an LCD is basically sending light to your eyes. If the brightness, viewing angle, surface reflection, contrast, etc. match between the two, then one cannot be better than the other.

The most practical solution at least for now is to use emissive displays with wide viewing angle, anti-reflective coatings, matte finish, and with appropriately adjusted brightness, contrast, and also font sizes. All of these seemingly small factors matter.

Try this experiment: Apply a white background on the emissive screen, and now put a blank printer paper in the front of half of the screen. If the screen looks too bright as compared to the paper (good chance it will), you need to get its brightness down still more!

I cannot find anymore, but there was a post on Hacker News of someone making an LCD image look indistinguishable from a printed photo in a frame.

Kluny
Thanks! Can you give any more tips? I'm super interested in anything I can do to make, for example, my macbook pro (non retina) easier on my eyes. I've got flux on already, and I'm thinking about using grayscale instead of color.