Well firstly you can literally compare anything ;)
But to be more precise: both "emit" light depending on the ambient light. Of course it's comparable.
The only thing really throwing off the LCD would be the white balance, but with the right sensor that too could be fixed (e.g. a camera with fixed wight balance behind milk-glass).
(E-)Paper reflects blue light, LCD backlight emits it. The only difference is that the color balance and brightness don't change with the sunset on your screen unless you install a tool like flux.
Light is light. Looks the same = probably is the same. Bands are just a bit narrower with LEDs, but I wonder if that makes any difference biologically if it looks the same.
With a backlit monitor (or projection screen) your visual system is doing extra work to reconcile two different lighting conditions.
eink/epaper is reflecting ambient light just like every other object in the environment so your vision won't need to adjust when glancing back and forth
This sounds like your monitor is set too bright. (Or less likely, not bright enough.)
If you set your monitor to the same brightness that paper or a non-backlit screen would have in your room, then your vision doesn't have to adjust to the different brightness levels.
Same for TV. Don't watch TV in a dark room!
When I had a modest home theater with a projection TV (the old bulky kind, not a separate projector and screen), one of the best things I did was to light the white wall behind it with a soft neutral gray light.
The technique at the time was to use a small fluorescent desk lamp on a small table behind the TV, with the fluorescent tube wrapped in a specific color of lighting "gel" to make it a neutral gray. The lamp was aimed up at the wall behind the TV. This made everything much easier on the eyes.
You can't compare eInk with backlit LCD, but front-lit LCD panels totally exist; see any pocket calculator. For a dot-matrix display, the original Gameboy Color is the best example I personally own, but I'm sure countless others exist.
The main trouble I think is that very few (any?) manufacturers are making front-lit LCD panels at typical monitor sizes and resolutions. I guess there's not really a market for it? But if such a thing exists I'd compare the heck out of it and eInk.
There is for an example an interesting market in medical radiology imaging. This is a profession like many other who is always looking for ways to reduce eye strain. they see it as an occupational hazard: http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5449879
This is relevant for pretty much any knowledge worker job as well.
Not all LCD screens require a backlight. Reflective and Transparent LCD's can operate without backlights (1, 2), and the hybrid transflective LCD's can use ambient light and/or backlight to illuminate the image. Transflective LCDs improve sunlight readability without the need for an intense backlight.
All LCD's essentially use a similar liquid crystal pixel that serves as a variable light shutter for polarized light. It's the back- and front-planes (e.g. addition or omission of RGB color filters, different types of backlights, fully or partially reflective layers, etc.) that differentiate different types of LCDs. If you have an old LCD laying around, with many of them you can actually take the different layers apart to access the active or passive matrix LCD panel (you'll end up with a transparent LCD). I did it once with a tiny LCD, it's pretty cool. Then you can play around with adding your own layers/lighting effects.
I would like to see the same comparison with a reflective LCD display, which is much closer in practice to an e-paper display. My guess is the main drawback would be viewing angles, but I’d also imagine the same screen size would be about a fifth of the price.
I agree with you. I have an old Seiko watch with something paper like behind the display. At some viewing angles, it looks great.
Frankly, I could use either tech for similar reasons.
E-ink would be superior for overall viewing and eye strain, however both have merit. The LCD would likely be faster, with a much narrower sweet spot for viewing.
And I wonder about these Vanta Black type pigmemts too. E-ink I have seen is really good, but could potentially be crazy good. Maybe that cannot be used, or is too expensive. But yeah, I wonder.
You're right. People seem to have this misconception that the light from reflective displays like eInk is somehow different from that of emissive displays like LCD or OLED. Light is light. An LCD with _perfect_ calibration to the local lighting conditions would look indistinguishable from an eInk display, and thus we would expect it to have the same eye-strain reducing properties.
Put a different way: when light falls on an eInk "pixel" it gets absorbed and then re-emitted, modulo intensity. That's how we see the vast majority of surfaces in the world: they absorb light and then re-emit it, possibly changing its intensity and color (frequency). Technologies like OLED directly emit light; not reacting significantly to the ambient light that falls on them. But if one we able to measure the light falling on each individual pixel of an OLED, one could adjust each pixel to mimic the behavior of a physical object. It could "simulate" eInk, so to speak. If the mimicry is close enough, then there's no fundamental difference between the two. They'd both be emitting the same frequency and intensity of light.
In fact I recall a post, mostly likely here on HN: Someone took a high quality Apple display and rigged it with an array of ambient light sensors, put it in a decorative art frame and hung it on the wall. With some software and calibration they were able to get it to look convincingly like a real piece of art, fooling many of their guests.
eInk has been around for decades now and has remained an obscure niche. It's possible we'll see a renaissance for it, with the patents hopefully expiring? But there's no reason we shouldn't also be pursuing better ambient light calibration for our existing displays.
P.S. It's not accurate to say that eInk is a "reflective" display, as it does not primarily reflect light. Otherwise it would look like a mirror. But saying "emissive" versus "reflective" is common parlance for differentiating technologies like eInk from technologies like LCDs and OLEDs. Nitpicking the terminology is not particularly helpful though.
> misconception that the light from reflective displays like eInk is somehow different from that of emissive displays like LCD or OLED. Light is light.
There is one specific difference between the light from LED screens vs e-ink : polarization. LED displays work by adjusting the polarity of the backlighting and then passing it through a polarizing filter. An e-ink display image is unpolarized light. It's not clear whether the polarity of LED has the potential to cause eye strain or other negative effects, but it is certainly a quantifiable difference.
Yeah, it seems that there's a lot of questionable (to put it mildly) claims and anecdotes surrounding e-paper regarding the long-term health effects - reflective vs emissive, blue light, polarization, contrast, you name it.
I also use an e-ink reader sometimes because it looks so much better under direct sunlight, and because it's a single purpose physical device. But I'd love to see some more substantial work backing the eye and neurological disorders claims, from actual researchers in the field, with n greater than 1. Otherwise, that's how you get a snake oil market for geeks.
Really have to hand it to Jeff Atwood, Sam Saffron, and the team. How many of us (incl myself) thought that the world wasn't looking for a refresh of forum software? Now I realize I haven't even seen phpbb used on a forum made since 2010—everyone just uses Discourse.
I don't understand why there's not more investment into transreflective LCD technology like pixel qi since no one seems to be able to bring down e ink prices.
Pixel qi allows passive lighting in grey scale while also allowing colour with active lighting. And higher frame rate than e ink while still having low power consumption thanks to passive lighting ability.
Thanks, none of those Chinese links were working for me. The refresh rate is better than I expected but I kinda like color. We’re a few years out for me it seems :/
Try to refresh/reload after opening them, they don't seem to like external referers. Or copy the link to a new tab, that's a more reliable way on any browser.
I think I could deal with monochrome for coding. But these monitors are still way too expensive for me, if they retailed for less than ~1k$ I'd consider it.
> But these monitors are still way too expensive for me
I will never be an early adopter for that precise reason. I _do_ think the monitors look quite lovely but I am not interested in a product with such a hefty price tag while being made in China. (Full disclosure, I will go out of my way to avoid Chinese products even if the price tag is more reasonable.) That being said, I would pay $1k for a 13" monitor made in Germany, Europe, Japan or USA.
Not sure of the exact reason you would do so, though if it's about the quality then you may realize that we're not living in the 2000s anymore and there are rises and falls in terms of product quality of a nation's industry. Japanese products were known for being cheap and unreliable until international brands like Sony started to come up. China is also going through this process and brands like Huawei and Xiaomi are already trusted by many international consumers.
Also an irony of you mentioning Germany is that many German companies have actually been bought up by Chinese capital in the recent years.
I’m sure I’ll just be told how stupid and wrong I am... but I like colors for coding. I think it’s important to quickly see keywords vs variables vs functions vs comments vs preprocessor.
I think a couple different grayscale values with different font styles could work fine for coding keywords/variables/comments, but I really would like to know the native refresh rate.
Kindles have only gotten cheaper over time, so I don't see why e-ink monitors can't do the same.
Oh I like colors too, don't get me wrong, I just think I'd be willing to compromise for the comfort of using an e-ink display.
And you don't have to drop all highlighting altogether: you still gave greyscale, underlining, font weight, italics etc... You'll just have to be a little more creative.
From the Chinese poster, it says the price is 1XXX9 CNY (it's intentionally written this way to build up expectations), which ranges from $1530 to $3050.
Yes eink is a very effective way to reduce eye strain especially for thos who work long hours in front of the PC. That's also one of the reasons why some people use it for coding: https://forum.ei2030.org/t/coding-with-an-eink-monitor/46/2
as someone who only use minimal code highlighting and !"zen mode" coding it seems interesting. I wonder what the latency will be though. eg. time between key press and letter showing up on the screen. Although we can tolerate quite high latency. Can't wait for big eInk displays with color support.
I could use this for coding and my current 1920x1200 monitor for video and games... mmm.... so yummy. I already have a Dasung product, the not-eReader which doubles as a 7" eInk monitor and I love it. It's part of my tech EDC kit which I posted to https://imgur.com/a/xmRmYSn
For coding, I'm not sure I could go back to greyscale IDE colours. I love syntax highlighting helping me quickly identify different parts of code at a glance. I would love to try though, might see what the price is first.
I used to think that, but recently I switched my Mac to greyscale, and have actually found it much easier to read and understand code. The shades of Grey are enough to indicate structures and the lack of color makes it much more legible as text.
The syntax highlighting is done via greyscale though? I think there are also such color schemes out there that you can try out to see how it would work for you even on a normal screen.
The awesome thing about eink displays and monitors is the low power consumption. The bad thing is the price. Somehow I doubt this will be any less than 1.5-2k eur.
> No exact pricing yet, but a teaser in form of "1xxx9", so it could be anything from 10009¥ to 19999¥, so about 1500$ and 3000$ or 1250€ to 2500€ respectively.
It looks like the breakthrough here is in making a large (bigger than e-reader-sized) e-paper display available as a self-contained, HDMI-compatible monitor instead of just a display assembly for OEMs and experienced DIYers.
While I don’t expect this to also be a breakthrough in terms of pricing, hopefully it starts driving the volume that will eventually make this type of display more accessible.
A slightly more accessible option right now is an AMOLED screen. If you work on applications with a black background, like a terminal or a text editor, it has some of the same benefits. Namely, there's no backlight as individual pixels get lighted on their own.
Sadly, AMOLED hasn't progressed as quickly as we expected and big screens are both rare and expensive. Besides, eInk has some advantages like lower energy consumption.
This seems like an interesting site, but that is by far the most off-putting and manipulative text I've ever seen on a cookie notice.
> We know having to press this sucks, but unless we see a decentralized Web 3.0, some elements on our site are cookies baked by others that could track you. You have to put up with this, otherwise, might as well shut yourself out of the world.
edit: tyler109 - given that you've linked that site 11 times so far in this thread, I'm guessing you're affiliated with or run that site? If so, might I ask that you edit the cookie text to not be so... bad? Or much better, add a button to it to let readers opt out of the pointless tracking? Also, if you are affiliated with it, could you maybe disclose it in some of the comments where you link to it?
It takes a company like Samsung to singlehandedly pursue a pie in the sky science institute level project for 10 years before even a mere prospect of commercial returns emerges.
If you don't care too much about the vibrant colors and viewing angles of IPS and OLED, I can recommend VA screens. They have far better contrast than IPS. The black is indeed black. I find it great for working in dark mode on text. However the colors and viewing angles are a trade-off. Although I find the viewing angles are still better than TN and can be somewhat mitigated with a curved screen.
I personally use a curved 32" 4K VA screen. The resolution, text size and contrast make this great for text heavy work.
I agree about what you said, I've been on ultra wide 21:9 VA with 1500R curve for a couple of years and it's been really good.
I am curious about the new 1000R displays though, at first it seemed like a gimmick - but it totally makes sense curving the screen so much in order to diminish or even radicate the need to refocus your eyes as they look across the panel.
But I haven't had a chance to try it out in person yet due to the current times. Anyone here on ultra wide 1000R?
What I understood of e-ink technology is that it's about the total amount of changes that are involved. It might be feasible to track a 32x32 cursor at 60fps even though a full refresh might take a whole second or two.
While I don’t expect this to also be a breakthrough in terms of pricing, hopefully it starts driving the volume that will eventually make this type of display more accessible.
eInk is notoriously proprietary and patent-encumbered, which is largely what makes for the astronomical price. Once the patents start expiring, we should start seeing the prices of displays become closer to LCDs.
Is there anywhere where you could actually try one of these out? If they worked as desired, I'd get one. A kindle updates so slowly I'm a little skeptical of the demonstration...
Kindles are not cutting-edge tech, they never were. They are robust and cheap, so they can enable Amazon’s strategy to flog at-cost low-end hardware that makes it easy for consumers to buy higher-margin digital goods. The likes of Dasung and reMarkable actually advance the field.
I have their not-eReader (a tablet sized e-ink display) and it's really nice. I usually have it connected as secondary monitor to my laptop and placed in a small arm/stand next to it. Often, I read docs like man pages or API docs on it while coding. This generally works really well with the included HDMI+USB cable. Sometimes I also read news websites on it and use it as an eReader for "regular" books. It has a sort of custom Android on it and one can install quite a few apps on it as well (e.g. to watch YouTube---yes, not perfect, but surprisingly well). The refresh rate is indeed really nice.
But does that translate to eink? Based on my experience with studying and notetaking, I think retention is better with paper because it's an object you're interacting with. The fact that text (whether I'm reading or writing it) is on a static location relative to the world seems to give it some extra anchor in my memory. Assuming I'm not completely imagining that effect, then an eink monitor wouldn't have any of those benefits.
The Atari ST's late 80s monochrome CRT looked a bit like an eink display, with no discernible flicker even at 72 Hz. It certainly looked very different from a 72 Hz colour CRT displaying a monochrome image. I think it used a different type of phosphor.
You’d need much lower than 72 hz for you to notice flicker. Regular VGA was 60 hz. Amiga interlace had noticeable flicker with an effective rate of 25 to 30 hz.
This is biology-dependent. With CRTs, I could detect flicker all the way up to 85Hz* (where it vanished for me). Made it a real pain to find a good monitor.
* Hitachi 21" CRT which seemed enormous at the time
You are right. Perhaps I should've phrased it as "most people need..."
The Amiga interlace flicker was bothersome to me. When I got an Amiga 3000 with the built in deinterlacer / flicker fixer, it was like night and day...
I don't need color for code. I need high resolution and to be able to stare at it for hours on end. Right now I get around this by having an ambient light sensors adjusting my monitors but it's buggy and error prone.
I look forward to having a red light setup for night coding like my father had for his photography dark room.
An old ColorMunki projector calibrator connected by usb and attached to the screen with a zip tie. I have a python script that polls it when the screen goes to sleep or when I request a re-calibration using redshift.
It used to be automatic but it's not stable because there's only one point of measure. If I stood up and cast a shadow on the screen it decided that the whole room has gone dark and dimmed the screen to be invisible.
The only reason why I prefer that over doing it manually is the white point balance. It beats sitting around with a piece of white paper eyeballing it to match white on the screen.
This approach sounds similar to clight, which uses a webcam to adjust backlight levels (so may be a little less fidgety than using a color calibration sensor if you just care about brightness): https://github.com/FedeDP/Clight
If anything there's individual anecdotal evidence - people able to compare for themselves how their eyes feel using an eink screen vs. backlit; "better for eyes" I believe isn't meant in relation to physical effects (which may exist) but primarily for psychological/biological impact - including sleep patterns, etc.
My eyes used to hurt from staring at my screen. It got a lot better after turning down the brightness to ~15%. With the same strategy I can comfortably read in bed on my iPad with the added benefit of colors and 120Hz. I recommend trying this if eink feels much better to you. Another notable side effect is you might end up going back to light themes.
Anybody who thinks a non e-ink screen is comparable even at "low" brightness should try turning the screen brightness down to lower than 15% in a completely dark room and turning the screen away - you will see that you still essentially have a torch in your hands that you are shining constantly in your eyes when reading.
I have tried every option with smartphone screens,: low brightness, night light filters, dark themes and nothing short of paper is remotely as free of strain as e-ink hardware.
Of course if you're in a completely dark room any LCD is going to be bright. But in that scenario you can't use an eink screen either. The point is if there is some light, you can probably find a brightness setting such that your LCD is emitting about as much light as an eink display will reflect, making them (at least subjectively to me) equivalent.
Not really, I can read a book using the light of my phone displaying a black screen at minimum brightness.
Now OLED _might_ be able to fix things, but manufacturers don't provide low brightness settings for most screens at the moment (even though anything with a LED backlight could have almost arbitrarily low brightness), so I'm not particularly optimistic.
The example from that one guy that made a fake painting by matching light levels to a white wall was pretty convincing though, so I think it can be done it just isn't for some reason.
FYI on iOS you can use the accessibility settings (via the zoom filter, with zoom turned off and darkness turned to max) to lower the brightness beyond the normal limit.
I have this setting tied to triple-clicking the sleep button, so I can activate it easily in the morning or late at night.
Thank you so much for this comment. I can’t believe I didn’t know this, I’ve been inverting my colors & sometimes wearing cheap, non-polarized sunglasses at night — no more!
I had to fiddle with the settings quite a bit to get a 1x zoom w/ the filter, though.
This is a very little-known feature. I work in accessibility and have had an iPhone since day 1. But the only reason I know about this very well-hidden trick is that an Apple employee told me!
I can turn my eink book on with enough backlight to read it and my wife next to me in bed won't notice. Even in total darkness. I haven't managed that with my phone at any brightness
One common source of eye strain is likely due to our eyes having to adjust to the inconsistent brightness of our workspaces.
Another solution you can use instead of or in addition to this is installing backlights and more area lighting. Provide more even lighting coverage throughout the room, and don't compute or watch TV in completely dark rooms. Anecdotally this works for me at least.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24386252 (from 2013) talks about LCD vs E-ink, and determines backlit LCD induces eyestrain (as measured by blinks per second and self reported visual fatigue) at a higher level, and that the E-ink Paperwhite has a profile similar to paper.
I mean there's an industry built on people that prefer it to LCD screens, so while it's hard to say it's objectively better I reckon we can at least conclude that there's a significant group of people that prefer it.
> Is there a body of evidence that suggests it is better for our eyes?
Is there any body of evidence that working with displays with refresh rates in the 60hz range with improper contrast ratio days after days do NOT damage one's vision?
Having run my monitor at 29Hz for work laptop, I feel that refresh rate isn't too big deal. Doesn't look as nice, but really makes not much difference for browsing or coding or even teams calls.
(Old 27" 1440p DELL where I have to use old HDMI-port as DP or Dual-Link DVI isn't option for main pc anymore, so trickery is needed)
I have 13” dasung monitor. Its is an eink monitor so no light beaming from screen. I has solved the headaches I used to get after working on lcd monitor.
Is reflective technology really better for these? The main flaw I see in emissive technology is in situations where they are relatively dark in high ambient lighting. On the other hand, in poor lighting conditions, emissive technologies are easier for the eyes.
It seems to me that if the emissive technology is up to par and properly calibrated it shouldn't be worse.
My first VGA monitor was a bit of an oddity in that it was completely grayscale (a very nice white too). I don't remember the circumstances of how I got it but I didn't spend as much time on the computer at home back then. So it didn't really matter as much.
When VGA itself improved enough to buy my first color VGA monitor, it was a bit of a let down in that the sharpness was a definite step down from that monitor.
VGA monochrome was popular in like the early 90s as an affordable way to get high res VGA without shelling out for the then expensive VGA color monitors.
I'd sometimes put my early 90's Mac into grayscale mode. In my case, it was because my Mac only supported 8 bit color, but in grayscale, the shading was much better. 8 bit grayscale was the equivalent of 16 bit color in terms of clarity. Removed the dithering or weirdness in certain images.
As a kid, I remember how excited I was when we upgraded from CGA to EGA, let alone VGA or SVGA, and now I'm practically drooling over how amazing my eyes would feel from staring at a monochrome e-ink display all day!
I'm sounding like an old man now, but as an 80's kid I couldn't dream of the tech we have available today. We were all imagining flying cars and the like, but in many ways what we have, and so available, is much more incredible.
Back on topic though - if the resolution and refresh rate really are as good as shown in the videos, then as a developer, this would genuinely make a huge difference to my working day. My eyes are practically begging for it!
Unless there are markets I'm not seeing, this is undoubtedly a niche product, and I'm very pleasantly surprised that a company has invested to bring it to fruition. I haven't been this existed since NVMe, and I hope this thing ships soon so I can find out how much it costs and read reviews!
First colour monitor I had was orange, light orange, dark orange and very dark orange - a CGA laptop from my dads work. I remember Railroad Tycoon Ran with option 5,1,2 but Civilisation would have to wait a few years for the full blown desktop 286 (12Mhz, 1M ram and a full 40MB hard drive!)
Well people would prefer color if they could get it, every techie in the ebook world is wistfully awaiting the day that a high quality color e-reader is released.
And a lamp. For all they shortcomings emissive screens carry their own lighting. A reflective screen has the same problems a book page has. We would need a lamp to read it well in a dark room or inside in a cloudy day. Maybe more than one lamp (left and right) especially for a large screen.
Any ideas where to get cheap e-ink displays to hack some hardware projects with? The prices on these things don’t seem to get any better as time progresses.
> Benefits: Zero distraction Zero eyestrain No Bluelight
Why should there be difference? 'Distraction' is a question of applications, not monitor type.
Eyestrain is a result of long-term near focus and insufficient blinking leading to dryness, no reason why eink monitor help with this.
Bluelight - regular LCD has LED backlight that passes through LCD, with eink there is an external LED light, reflected by eink back. The source of light is the same (well, depends on specific type of dides in LED backlight vs LED light).
> Why should there be difference? 'Distraction' is a question of applications, not monitor type.
Distraction is a question of colors and rate of change.
While it's a copout way to address black and white displays, most people who turn their backlit monitors black and white report a noticeable difference in focus. At least for the first week or so.
> Bluelight - regular LCD has LED backlight that passes through LCD, with eink there is an external LED light, reflected by eink back. The source of light is the same (well, depends on specific type of dides in LED backlight vs LED light).
By external LED light you mean the lightbulbs in your home? This is not backlit or frontlit or any kind of lit if you put it in a dark room.
Eyestrain involves many more factors than just “long-term near focus” - brightness, contrast, color intensity... by experience, I can assure you that I’ll never be able to read as comfortably as on e-ink on any LED screen - not even on the highest-quality Apple / Samsung / LG screens. My brain and eyes simply work better with e-ink, it’s all more relaxed.
If this is not you, good (how old are you?), but the numbers clearly show that I’m not the only one with this problem. I’ll likely buy an e-ink monitor as soon as as prices go under £500 for 15’’ or so. I am already tempted by the reMarkable, if it had a “dumb monitor mode” I would have bought it already.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadBut to be more precise: both "emit" light depending on the ambient light. Of course it's comparable.
The only thing really throwing off the LCD would be the white balance, but with the right sensor that too could be fixed (e.g. a camera with fixed wight balance behind milk-glass).
(E-)Paper reflects blue light, LCD backlight emits it. The only difference is that the color balance and brightness don't change with the sunset on your screen unless you install a tool like flux.
Light is light. Looks the same = probably is the same. Bands are just a bit narrower with LEDs, but I wonder if that makes any difference biologically if it looks the same.
eink/epaper is reflecting ambient light just like every other object in the environment so your vision won't need to adjust when glancing back and forth
If you set your monitor to the same brightness that paper or a non-backlit screen would have in your room, then your vision doesn't have to adjust to the different brightness levels.
Same for TV. Don't watch TV in a dark room!
When I had a modest home theater with a projection TV (the old bulky kind, not a separate projector and screen), one of the best things I did was to light the white wall behind it with a soft neutral gray light.
The technique at the time was to use a small fluorescent desk lamp on a small table behind the TV, with the fluorescent tube wrapped in a specific color of lighting "gel" to make it a neutral gray. The lamp was aimed up at the wall behind the TV. This made everything much easier on the eyes.
The main trouble I think is that very few (any?) manufacturers are making front-lit LCD panels at typical monitor sizes and resolutions. I guess there's not really a market for it? But if such a thing exists I'd compare the heck out of it and eInk.
Viewing angle would be another pain point with them, but that also came a long way and you could chose one with good angles if needed.
This is relevant for pretty much any knowledge worker job as well.
All LCD's essentially use a similar liquid crystal pixel that serves as a variable light shutter for polarized light. It's the back- and front-planes (e.g. addition or omission of RGB color filters, different types of backlights, fully or partially reflective layers, etc.) that differentiate different types of LCDs. If you have an old LCD laying around, with many of them you can actually take the different layers apart to access the active or passive matrix LCD panel (you'll end up with a transparent LCD). I did it once with a tiny LCD, it's pretty cool. Then you can play around with adding your own layers/lighting effects.
1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal...
2.) https://www.winstar.com.tw/products/tft-lcd/transflective-tf...
Frankly, I could use either tech for similar reasons.
E-ink would be superior for overall viewing and eye strain, however both have merit. The LCD would likely be faster, with a much narrower sweet spot for viewing.
And I wonder about these Vanta Black type pigmemts too. E-ink I have seen is really good, but could potentially be crazy good. Maybe that cannot be used, or is too expensive. But yeah, I wonder.
Put a different way: when light falls on an eInk "pixel" it gets absorbed and then re-emitted, modulo intensity. That's how we see the vast majority of surfaces in the world: they absorb light and then re-emit it, possibly changing its intensity and color (frequency). Technologies like OLED directly emit light; not reacting significantly to the ambient light that falls on them. But if one we able to measure the light falling on each individual pixel of an OLED, one could adjust each pixel to mimic the behavior of a physical object. It could "simulate" eInk, so to speak. If the mimicry is close enough, then there's no fundamental difference between the two. They'd both be emitting the same frequency and intensity of light.
In fact I recall a post, mostly likely here on HN: Someone took a high quality Apple display and rigged it with an array of ambient light sensors, put it in a decorative art frame and hung it on the wall. With some software and calibration they were able to get it to look convincingly like a real piece of art, fooling many of their guests.
eInk has been around for decades now and has remained an obscure niche. It's possible we'll see a renaissance for it, with the patents hopefully expiring? But there's no reason we shouldn't also be pursuing better ambient light calibration for our existing displays.
P.S. It's not accurate to say that eInk is a "reflective" display, as it does not primarily reflect light. Otherwise it would look like a mirror. But saying "emissive" versus "reflective" is common parlance for differentiating technologies like eInk from technologies like LCDs and OLEDs. Nitpicking the terminology is not particularly helpful though.
Too bad nobody actually makes one. There's no way to buy a hypothetical, so e-ink it is.
The relevant question is whether you can buy an LCD that calibrates well enough, and the answer is not "obviously no".
There is one specific difference between the light from LED screens vs e-ink : polarization. LED displays work by adjusting the polarity of the backlighting and then passing it through a polarizing filter. An e-ink display image is unpolarized light. It's not clear whether the polarity of LED has the potential to cause eye strain or other negative effects, but it is certainly a quantifiable difference.
Are e-readers really obscure? Seems like a pretty big market.
I also saw something but couldn't find it again :)
Is "reflective" always orderly? I mean, can there be a 100% matte reflection?
I also use an e-ink reader sometimes because it looks so much better under direct sunlight, and because it's a single purpose physical device. But I'd love to see some more substantial work backing the eye and neurological disorders claims, from actual researchers in the field, with n greater than 1. Otherwise, that's how you get a snake oil market for geeks.
Really have to hand it to Jeff Atwood, Sam Saffron, and the team. How many of us (incl myself) thought that the world wasn't looking for a refresh of forum software? Now I realize I haven't even seen phpbb used on a forum made since 2010—everyone just uses Discourse.
Pixel qi allows passive lighting in grey scale while also allowing colour with active lighting. And higher frame rate than e ink while still having low power consumption thanks to passive lighting ability.
Edit: Found an interesting article on the fate of pixel qi and some other alternatives to e-ink: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-rise-and...
I will never be an early adopter for that precise reason. I _do_ think the monitors look quite lovely but I am not interested in a product with such a hefty price tag while being made in China. (Full disclosure, I will go out of my way to avoid Chinese products even if the price tag is more reasonable.) That being said, I would pay $1k for a 13" monitor made in Germany, Europe, Japan or USA.
Also an irony of you mentioning Germany is that many German companies have actually been bought up by Chinese capital in the recent years.
Rampant human rights abuses. As long as the CCP is in power in China, I do not feel comfortable buying Chinese products.
> Also an irony of you mentioning Germany is that many German companies have actually been bought up by Chinese capital in the recent years.
That affects none of the companies I value, though.
Kindles have only gotten cheaper over time, so I don't see why e-ink monitors can't do the same.
And you don't have to drop all highlighting altogether: you still gave greyscale, underlining, font weight, italics etc... You'll just have to be a little more creative.
To get back on topic, a 25.3" 3200 * 1800 eInk panel is mentioned at https://www.beck-elektronik.de/en/products/displays/e-paper-... and I doubt there is more than one but all details are "tbd".
So relaxing. For many things, e-ink is amazing tech.
Had given up on it generally. This is good news.
> No exact pricing yet, but a teaser in form of "1xxx9", so it could be anything from 10009¥ to 19999¥, so about 1500$ and 3000$ or 1250€ to 2500€ respectively.
Which isn't a monitor. It's a barebones devkit that doesn't accept video input and takes a couple dozen seconds to refresh.
While I don’t expect this to also be a breakthrough in terms of pricing, hopefully it starts driving the volume that will eventually make this type of display more accessible.
Sadly, AMOLED hasn't progressed as quickly as we expected and big screens are both rare and expensive. Besides, eInk has some advantages like lower energy consumption.
> We know having to press this sucks, but unless we see a decentralized Web 3.0, some elements on our site are cookies baked by others that could track you. You have to put up with this, otherwise, might as well shut yourself out of the world.
edit: tyler109 - given that you've linked that site 11 times so far in this thread, I'm guessing you're affiliated with or run that site? If so, might I ask that you edit the cookie text to not be so... bad? Or much better, add a button to it to let readers opt out of the pointless tracking? Also, if you are affiliated with it, could you maybe disclose it in some of the comments where you link to it?
https://forum.ei2030.org/about
Samsung yet again made a breakthrough in LEDs, now, inorganic.
Then they go dark for 9 years
And almost 10 years later, bang: https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-quantum-dot-successor...
It takes a company like Samsung to singlehandedly pursue a pie in the sky science institute level project for 10 years before even a mere prospect of commercial returns emerges.
I personally use a curved 32" 4K VA screen. The resolution, text size and contrast make this great for text heavy work.
I am curious about the new 1000R displays though, at first it seemed like a gimmick - but it totally makes sense curving the screen so much in order to diminish or even radicate the need to refocus your eyes as they look across the panel.
But I haven't had a chance to try it out in person yet due to the current times. Anyone here on ultra wide 1000R?
eInk is notoriously proprietary and patent-encumbered, which is largely what makes for the astronomical price. Once the patents start expiring, we should start seeing the prices of displays become closer to LCDs.
Some of the earliest ones are starting to expire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY
As well as one of the USB dasung paperlike screens. Unfortunately accessing the software and use on modern windows and mac os seems impossible.
I want a second generation screen :).
And now people are excited many years later for a new kind of grayscale monitor :P
* Hitachi 21" CRT which seemed enormous at the time
The Amiga interlace flicker was bothersome to me. When I got an Amiga 3000 with the built in deinterlacer / flicker fixer, it was like night and day...
I look forward to having a red light setup for night coding like my father had for his photography dark room.
Can you expand a bit more on this solution? Is this something you made or COTS?
It used to be automatic but it's not stable because there's only one point of measure. If I stood up and cast a shadow on the screen it decided that the whole room has gone dark and dimmed the screen to be invisible.
The only reason why I prefer that over doing it manually is the white point balance. It beats sitting around with a piece of white paper eyeballing it to match white on the screen.
I have tried every option with smartphone screens,: low brightness, night light filters, dark themes and nothing short of paper is remotely as free of strain as e-ink hardware.
Now OLED _might_ be able to fix things, but manufacturers don't provide low brightness settings for most screens at the moment (even though anything with a LED backlight could have almost arbitrarily low brightness), so I'm not particularly optimistic.
The example from that one guy that made a fake painting by matching light levels to a white wall was pretty convincing though, so I think it can be done it just isn't for some reason.
I have this setting tied to triple-clicking the sleep button, so I can activate it easily in the morning or late at night.
I had to fiddle with the settings quite a bit to get a 1x zoom w/ the filter, though.
Do you happen to have a link to this? I remember reading the original post years ago, but I didn't save it and could never find it again.
It's been referenced on HN a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Another solution you can use instead of or in addition to this is installing backlights and more area lighting. Provide more even lighting coverage throughout the room, and don't compute or watch TV in completely dark rooms. Anecdotally this works for me at least.
Is there any body of evidence that working with displays with refresh rates in the 60hz range with improper contrast ratio days after days do NOT damage one's vision?
(Old 27" 1440p DELL where I have to use old HDMI-port as DP or Dual-Link DVI isn't option for main pc anymore, so trickery is needed)
It seems to me that if the emissive technology is up to par and properly calibrated it shouldn't be worse.
When VGA itself improved enough to buy my first color VGA monitor, it was a bit of a let down in that the sharpness was a definite step down from that monitor.
As a kid, I remember how excited I was when we upgraded from CGA to EGA, let alone VGA or SVGA, and now I'm practically drooling over how amazing my eyes would feel from staring at a monochrome e-ink display all day!
I'm sounding like an old man now, but as an 80's kid I couldn't dream of the tech we have available today. We were all imagining flying cars and the like, but in many ways what we have, and so available, is much more incredible.
Back on topic though - if the resolution and refresh rate really are as good as shown in the videos, then as a developer, this would genuinely make a huge difference to my working day. My eyes are practically begging for it!
Unless there are markets I'm not seeing, this is undoubtedly a niche product, and I'm very pleasantly surprised that a company has invested to bring it to fruition. I haven't been this existed since NVMe, and I hope this thing ships soon so I can find out how much it costs and read reviews!
Monochrome CRTs can use any color for the phosphor, and cheap displays usually used some variant of green or orange.
Like this
https://gtello.pagesperso-orange.fr/t3200_e.htm
Now, they actually cost more than 20 years ago.
Debating on whether I should go for the A7 (https://goodereader.com/blog/product/hisense-a7-5g-e-ink-sma...) or the Light Phone II (https://www.thelightphone.com/products) - both having e-ink displays, as far as I know - as an upgrade from my SE (2016). Although, both phones do have different use-cases of course.
https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/the-best-e-ink-smartpho...
[0] https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%CB%9D-color-epaper-di...
https://teddit.net/r/eink/comments/kjvsoj/dasung_just_releas...
Though I think there is an old Thinkpad model that had a light on the lid that lit the keyboard. Maybe something like that would work nicely.
-E-mail -Coding -Research -Writing
Benefits: Zero distraction Zero eyestrain No Bluelight
Why should there be difference? 'Distraction' is a question of applications, not monitor type.
Eyestrain is a result of long-term near focus and insufficient blinking leading to dryness, no reason why eink monitor help with this.
Bluelight - regular LCD has LED backlight that passes through LCD, with eink there is an external LED light, reflected by eink back. The source of light is the same (well, depends on specific type of dides in LED backlight vs LED light).
Distraction is a question of colors and rate of change.
While it's a copout way to address black and white displays, most people who turn their backlit monitors black and white report a noticeable difference in focus. At least for the first week or so.
> Bluelight - regular LCD has LED backlight that passes through LCD, with eink there is an external LED light, reflected by eink back. The source of light is the same (well, depends on specific type of dides in LED backlight vs LED light).
By external LED light you mean the lightbulbs in your home? This is not backlit or frontlit or any kind of lit if you put it in a dark room.
Yes
If this is not you, good (how old are you?), but the numbers clearly show that I’m not the only one with this problem. I’ll likely buy an e-ink monitor as soon as as prices go under £500 for 15’’ or so. I am already tempted by the reMarkable, if it had a “dumb monitor mode” I would have bought it already.