Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?
Context upfront: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13771203
I'd really like to have a decent (let's say >13") display to hang on a wall in my room and display weather, my todo list, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be E-ink proper, but I like the idea of having something that doesn't emit its own light. More like an electronic whiteboard.
Alternatives include something like the Vestaboard, which is not cheap, and probably fairly noisy.
Are there products I'm missing here?
172 comments
[ 965 ms ] story [ 1681 ms ] threadI imagine in 5-10 years or so, we'll see what you're imagining.
Quirks: Expect ghosting. You'll have to press the "clear" button if the only thing moving on the screen is the mouse. This is oddly satisfying and not nearly as annoying as it sounds. Like "time for a fresh slate!" Getting the right contrast is also something you'll have to get used to. Dark themes are basically unusable because of ghosting. The monitor's very high DPI isn't handled well by gnome, so stuff is smaller on the eink display than on my main monitor. It's got different needs than an LCD in terms of software configuration of themes, color management, etc. I don't think any OS was made with this thing in mind, so there are quirks. I wish there were some better "per-display" settings in gnome. But oh well.
In spite of the quirks, I don't regret getting this thing at all. It was expensive but now I'll be able to work outside. It's way easier on my eyes.
Right now I pretty much just use it for reading and writing code or doing stuff in the shell. And it's great for that. Vim is like the perfect text editor for this. I also got vs code setup alright for it too now, but it's really great with vim, and has been motivating me to use vim more.
Btw, I also got the Dasung "not e-reader" tablet which is also awesome.
These devices are quirky but really well made and designed.
Could you expand on the "easier on the eyes" part? What did your eyes feel like at the end of a work day before acquiring this monitor versus now?
For context, I had been going through some burnout. So some part of this was probably psychological. But I would look at the screen and just feel overstimulated. Like my brain wouldn't let my eyes focus on that bright little rectangle any more.
This thing is just much more gentle to look at.
The sense of physical relief is very similar to the sense of relief you'd feel when moving from a bright screen with no blue light filter to a nice warm screen.
(Assuming you have comfortable lighting in your environment, of course.)
You can try this at home:
1. Stare at a page of a book
2. Stare at a light bulb while it's turned on (just kidding don't actually do it it's not worth it)
Which one would you rather do for 8 hours a day? I don't blame you if you say "neither one".
I haven't tried a large e-ink display (though I'd love to, especially for coding), but I've been using Kindle e-book readers for years - the difference compared to a glossy, or even matte, Led display is incredible; it's just like reading a printed book. No squinting, no eye-strain, just really pleasant to use.
Also, can you share more about the resolution?
This timing is superb; I'm this very week considering purchasing a Pro-F (1600x1200) from Dasung, which has faster refresh but lower resolution. Also a few hundred $$ cheaper. Really curious if you think the lower resolution will be a bummer, or if the higher frame rate will be unnecessary.
One important thing to consider, which maybe I should have shared in the other post: I don't really enjoy using the mouse on the e-ink display, because of the refresh rate. It's doable, but noticeably choppy.
If using the mouse is important to you while you code, go for the faster refresh rate!
The lower resolution might actually be nice too since it might better match your other displays.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696017
There's going to be a big display revolution soon. Microled will probably outclass everything until we're at cheap retinal laser displays.
Other “e-ink” displays has way too low visual quality and markets don’t like that. Brighter backlight LCD and huge battery usually solves the same problem better. IOW/IMO if such technology is to hit the market it would need to be closely comparable to LCD.
1: https://youtu.be/zjJ2-cdhwMQ
The only commercial product I know of that uses it is from Visionect but it's a meant for digital signage rather than as a computer display: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/. It's less expensive than their earlier system but still around $2500.
[1] https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%cb%9d-monochrome-epaper...
[2] https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%cb%9d-color-epaper-di...
They're pretty cool but I think the limiting factor is demand rather than technology (although they do have a pretty niche construction in that the control sillicon is AFAIK actually fabricated inside/along the LCD panel)
Something like [1] with no front light.
1. https://youtu.be/kDk-t6XkFvc
Such as an older LCD panel without a backlight? It doesn't sound like you're looking for anything special here.
I wonder what it would look like with just paper behind it instead? (or a slightly more reflective white material). I wouldn't expect color to "transflect" very well, but it might work ok as a simple 1-bit screen, fully transmissible as possible reflecting off the paper, or fully opaque.
The LCD still needs continuous power, but far far less than the backlight.
That might end up being a superior balance... a small amount of continuous power, with the benefit of up to 60hz refresh rate if you want it.
Also to parent comment: backlit LCD without backlight looks like brownish tinted frosted glass. Transreflexives look like calculators and never like a paper. There were high contrast monochrome variant in those Memory LCD products and it looked like half silvered mirror, respectively.
(A later version of the Advance SP had a regular back-lit LCD screen.)
Dasung sells a 13.3" e-ink monitor: https://www.amazon.com/Dasung-Paperlike-13-3-E-Ink-Monitor/d...
It’s a pity because I’d love that thing to read the web on actually.
https://calibre-ebook.com/
https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
I'm not sure what the status of drm circumvention for fair/own use is in the US - I think there was a case that opened up for viewing/backing up dvds, but if not - this is still illegal, which partly defeats the purpose of buying through Amazon.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...
I always wondered if the kindle file was actually unencrypted.
It can sometimes take a minute or two and sometimes it just hangs completely and you have to close the book and re-open it. I assume it's because it has to somehow render the whole book, to support the handwritten annotations and put them in correct places.
Though my main pain point is that you lose the book position syncing you get with the Kindle hardware/apps.
Kidding aside, my primary use case is reading and annotating pdf textbooks and legal documents. I used a 10.5" iPad Pro for over a year for that and, while doable, not very pleasant for my eyes after a couple of hours of reading. Upgraded to the 12.9" iPad Pro this year and my eyes felt noticeably more relaxed even after 4-5 hours of reading and working on the iPad.
Ideally, reMarkable would make an XL version that closely resembles the aspect ratio and size of a 8.5x11 paper, but I'd settle for something slightly smaller with that aspect ratio.
https://shop.boox.com/products/boox-note-pro#custom-tab-1
This is the black/white one, they do a black/white/red one too. But beware, they take really long to refresh (the red color takes several refreshes to appear). And the one with red is on backorder till June.
It can be powered by a raspberry pi (or ESP32 or Arduino) and is (much) cheaper than the ereader options of the same size: Only about $170.
PS Beware: You can't simply start up a user interface like X-Windows on it. You have to write software to display on it. The display is addressed in 4 separate sections so it's not super easy.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6-h1TSBG6x/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B3o6RirB5iU/
I would suspect they have smaller ones too.
https://www.quirklogic.com/collections/all
There are some projects dedicated to driving the screen with an ESP32, which already has WiFi built in, has good low power modes and is pretty cheap as well [1] [2].
There's also a project driving e-ink displays with an stm32 [3] and one to do it with an FPGA [4].
Beyond 13" things get really expensive and hard to find - best I can do is 12,48" for 150€ [5].
[0]: https://aliexpress.com/item/32983492389.html
[1]: https://github.com/dqydj/PaperBack_EPaper_Display
[2]: https://hackaday.io/project/168193-976-e-paper-controller-ki...
[3]: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar
[4]: https://github.com/vd-rd/project_rorschach
[5]: https://aliexpress.com/i/32929629021.html
I don't know specifics about the voltage conversion yet (these screens need about -20V - 20V), but I reckon that if you're really frugal you could make a battery powered wall display for under 60€ with this stuff - and that's part 1 of what I'm thinking of doing.
Part 2 would be to stick in a Pine64 SOPINE System On a Module [6], put on a capacitive touch layer [7] and run a mainline Linux with KOReader and maybe even a Wayland compositor to be able to run any Linux app (the high contrast GTK theme seems perfect for this application).
All hopefully for under 200€, which is a lot less expensive than other e-readers if that size and a whole lot cooler.
Any tips?
[6]: https://store.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64
[7]: https://aliexpress.com/item/32984143128.html
[8]: https://github.com/koreader/koreader
I would not copy them unless you have the billions for them to fall back on.
Creating something motivates most of the people on this planet, and without going into specifics, I would claim that Gateses and Jobses of this world are not all that rare as far as their abilities are concerned. Situation and, well, luck, are a big part of where life takes people. And having been provided for will discourage most from being as driven to "succeed" (in either financial or tech/scientific sense, two most common accepted ways to success on HN).
Which is to say: don't judge according to your standards of "success".
And raising kids is anything but science, unless you have such a large number of them that statistics applies (though even then, you'd probably be breaking a bunch of laws if you tried to be scientific :)).
As such, addiction to screens is usually, imo, an addiction to specific type of content, or rather interaction (or lack thereof) type.
It's actually quite interesting that you even consider Gates and Jobs having "great achievements" (other than business success, which is clear), yet condone screen addiction (which their core business were mostly about).
A quick search does not give me any study relating technical properties of screens to addiction-like effects: do you have any pointers? (Other than the common "LED-light-interferes with sleep patterns".)
The premium is not really high just from them having to spend particularly much. Either they make very nice margins on it, or it's really that expensive to get a screen that size.
And that would be a wrong guess. Eink readers with wacom styluses are not particularly new (e.g. Hanvon, onyx etc.). The remarkable 1's "claim to fame" was a greatly improved latency compared to these, i.e. to be much better than what you describe.
Back in the days of the C64, it was normal to have sub-frame average latency with +-0.5 frames jitter, due to low-level control that prevented artifacts when drawing directly to the framebuffer.
Dasung, Onyx have been market leaders in this category and they are expensive. There are E-ink tablets from several other manufacturers as mentioned in other comments, but they rarely are external displays.
Then there are reliability issues with cheap DIY E-Ink displays, they don't last long and especially when displaying low refresh rate data like Weather, todo list; there will be ghosting issues quite soon.
I'm not exactly sure on whether manufacturing large E-ink external displays is just an unit-economics problem which will get resolved with improvement in technology or there is some underlying Intellectual Property issues from the likes of Amazon,Dasung,Onyx etc.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter...
Sony is apparently still selling the DPT-RP1, and it still doesn't connect to Linux or read DjVu. I guess at least it has an OSX client.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytpRnRke6I0 (Intro)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k (2nd channel longer look, mini review)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D38dcArwCNc (6 months later, tips / tweaks / long term review)
[1] http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/max2-hdmi-not-useable-wr...
Reg feedback for Onyx, you can try passing it to this YouTuber; he covers electronic shows world over and seems to have good relations with Onyx - https://mobile.twitter.com/charbax.
What would be the interface for using it as external display? or are you telling about using it just as a document reader?; in that case it might not even serve OP's needs.
One that I know is Kingjim Pomera line. They have a few reflexive LCD models based on some rare Toshiba uC, an E Ink model that runs on good old ARM926EJ-S, IIRC, and a color backlit LCD model that just runs Android Linux stripped bare(no Android GUI at all). Some people are running X on the last one.
Those are only available in Japan with JP106 keyboard(think of ANSI with ISO return, ISO symbols and two extra keys next to spacebar) and I can’t assure hackability, but as an input...
http://einkcn.com/post/216.html
https://www.sohu.com/a/330365162_100238338
I think it's a waste of tax-payers money. Besides why it's not been stolen yet?
For consumer electronics I found modern e-ink tablets have very good refresh rate. Watching video is pretty smooth.
Because it's not really useful to anyone.
Anything worth stealing in China does get stolen, like their attempted solar cell bicycle paths.
Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.
I think non-US space would be enough of a market?
The only reason I can think of is that scaling the production would be difficult for some reason?
So maybe another reason would be that offering lower prices for big displays would reduce profits from these business clients more than it would increase profits from the additional low-margin mass-market volumes.
The most interesting problem to tackle was “the blue glowing screen problem”.
One of the many ways that screens give themselves away as screens is by emitting light that is “out of character” with the surrounding environment. They can be too bright or too dark relative to the things around them, and indoors, displays often seem too blue.
I solved these problems with what I call “luminance matching”. The basic idea is to sample the light falling on the frame several times a second, and then adjust the display and image parameters so that what’s displayed is “correct” given the surrounding environment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900439
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels
He claims to have invented it prior to Apple, but he didn't publish before they got their patent in.
People like that are the worst. The sorest losers. I have unfortunately known quite a few of them and they tend to overestimate their abilities by a lot.
Anyway, I hate the use of "invent" here: people come up with similar ideas all the time — mostly because the tooling and technology of an era makes a set of problems solvable in a "novel" way that was not possible beforehand. Who gets to patent anything does not necessarily mean they "invented" it.
A patent is a form of intellectual property protecting an invention. An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition or process.
If it was a invention worthy of patent in March 2015 - according to Apple - then it was an invention worthy of patent in Dec 2014, when Clay claimed to have devised and built the device.