If the colors are good enough, this would be awesome as a digital photo frame though. Current digital photo frames emit light which is not something you want from a photo on your wall.
A few of these, updating them maybe once a day, would be excellent.
Also for outdoor advertisement. Replacing those LED backlight. Unfortunately the video has shown the quality isn't anywhere near good enough. PPI and colour accuracy are too low.
Oof, that's even way too slow for e-book usage. Still, it's nice to see this technology progressing. There's obviously a massive use case for battery-limited devices like smartwatches and smartphones.
The dream of someday coding on a high-resolution decent-refresh-rate color e-paper monitor is still alive!
Well, what you could do is strap two back to back to each other. So like front: page1, back: page2. Then when you "turn the page" it skips evens/odds and you just flip the display over to get page2 while page3 buffers on the other side :p
Digital photo frames that cycle throughout the day, dynamic posters and murals with art that changes with the time or viewer, refreshing price labels, clocks with minute resolution, data visualization over large time intervals, informational displays...
You might not even have to paint the entire screen at once, but can perhaps update only the dirty regions.
Not everything needs to display video or respond in real time to human input. There's so much painted in the world around us that could have value added by letting it refresh on the day, hour, or minute.
The only way I'd accept one of these hanging on my wall was if it had computer vision to check & verify that there's nobody in the room before it starts that god-awful flickery 25 second update process. Eurgh.
Someone did something like this with a torn-apart 5k iMac, mounting the display in a gilded frame and having it cycle through various images of fine art but only when the camera determined that nobody was looking at it.
>A fun (but impractical and frustrating) variant of this feature is to have the image change as soon as the viewer looks away. So you’re looking at a painting, glance away to another room, and look back to find a new painting hanging on the wall.
Also interesting that the iMac doesn't have TrueTone, so he had to do the white-balance matching himself.
Oh come now, if it updated oncer per day, that's 25 seconds of flicker per 86,375 seconds of viewing. And you could set it to update at 2am when everyone is asleep.
(Computer vision would be cool though, imagine if it was different every time you left and re-entered a room?)
Humans are pretty perceptive of things flickering in the periphery of their vision, especially when they happen only rarely (as opposed to, say, xmas tree lights).
That said, you could probably put a one-cell LCD (like those shadeable windows on the 787) over the screen to black it out during the update.
> The dream of someday coding on a high-resolution decent-refresh-rate color e-paper monitor is still alive!
Honestly I'd say this is possible now. Modern two-color (usually black/red) e-paper panels can refresh at 5-10hz. Grayscale only panels can go even faster, but it's not a huge problem for text. My e-reader gets around 100 hours of battery life but drops under 10 if I enable wifi and any lighting. That's running a lightly modified android. I'd imagine a dedicated os just for text and vpn/git could do quite well. Currently the only players in the big e-paper market are going for ereader or "sketchbook" markets.
I'm guessing it's faster if it's only rendering a small photo within a page (like a textbook). If the area of the image is roughly 1/10 the page, with the rest being basic b&w text. It should take a few seconds only.
> "I'm still waiting with bated breath for a reliable e-ink computer monitor comes out with a decent refresh rate. I'd even be happy with just greyscale."
Dasung's current generation grayscale e-ink monitor comes pretty close, IMO. It even does adequate video playback: https://youtu.be/vnUACe8Bsyg?t=27
I have one and agree. The software support for Linux is nonexistent which is a shame, but it’s still great after you tune your colors for it (eg. Black text on white background).
I don't know if anyone is really working on this, the "killer feature" of eInk is that the display only draws power when it's refreshing. You can drive them much faster, iirc there have been several proof of concepts using extant consumer screens going at 60Hz, so it's totally possible. I just don't think there's much market for it and I bet it stresses the tech in weird ways to run it that fast. Definitely possible though.
I'm optimistic because devices like smart phones and smart watches are things that benefit from having very low idle power when just displaying mostly static info but require a much faster refresh rate in active use. Being able to read them easily in bright daylight would also be a great plus. That's a good market.
Even laptops would probably benefit from it, when you're typing some text or reading a document you don't need 60fps refresh rate (especially if you can only refresh portions of the screen). That might save a significant amount of battery.
Non-backlit LCDs already have pretty low idle power though. Normal digital watches last about a decade on a battery and smartwatches like the Amazfit Bip last about a month on a charge with the screen always on (and bluetooth, heart rate monitor, etc which are surely a pretty large fraction of the power draw). And then the biggest smartwatch manufactures have decided to use OLED and have 2 day battery life for some reason.
For what it's worth, I have a Garmin 645 smartwatch, which uses a transflective display; the user experience is about the same as e-ink. I love it. The "white" is kinda silver-grey, but it's perfectly functional, and I get a week's battery life. As a former Pebble owner, I think the trend toward smartwatches with OLED displays and short battery life is a terrible one.
The Sharp "memory LCD" displays are nearly zero power and can update at 60hz if you really felt like it. They stopped making them sadly, but they were used in the Pebble Watch (it's marketing claimed ePaper, it wasn't).
Neither do most of the other common display technologies available to us!
EDIT: Can't reply to TeMPOraL, but I think that's not true, they need polarized light. I'm not an expert on this but my intuition is there are unrealized advances to be made in the field of reflective LCD-based displays. I just don't think there's much demand to research these applications and connect the dots. I would be surprised if you couldn't make a pretty decent, high refresh rate reflective display using an LCD based approach.
One thing I noticed with my Pebble Time is how, unlike any other LCD I've seen so far, polarized glasses don't have an effect on it for some reason ! (It might be due to multiple layers of weird liquid crystals ?)
> I'm still waiting with bated breath for a reliable e-ink computer monitor comes out with a decent refresh rate. I'd even be happy with just greyscale.
CLEARink have a best-of-all-worlds high-refresh rate color e-paper that want to release products around mid 2020.
They've shown excellent pre-production models, and have $300m in ‘confirmed commitments’. I'm not going to bet they'll be on time, but it seems wrong to dismiss them as just talk.
From what I've seen, they have 2 demo displays that are locked in cabinets under controlled lighting conditions. They might have a viable product but they're still in the R&D stage from what I can tell.
Sure, if everything prior to actively mass manufacturing counts as R&D, but they've proven they can manufacture, that the product works and outperforms the competitors, and they have customers. I was objecting to ‘early stages startup’ and ‘No sign of product demos’, not to the idea that there are still challenges to overcome.
Refresh rates on eink are generally poor. But it seems uncommon to worry about Hertz or frames per second, because the advantage of low power usage disappears if they are refreshed at anything approaching "realtime".
For applications which need fast refresh rates and characteristics like good readability under sunlight, transflexive LCD displays seem to be more popular and economical.
Remember, eink works by physically moving 'ink' particles within each pixel using a magnetic field. It takes a lot of power and time compared to how quickly electronic signals usually propagate, and it seems difficult to get around that physical limitation.
Refresh rates can actually vary a lot. They're intentionally slow on book readers, because eInk is rather power hungry when it redraws, so fast refresh is not free. But for a dedicated display, it's not a problem, so e.g. Dasung jacks the refresh rate way up on their monitors. Take a look at e.g. typing and scrolling here:
The problem I’ve had is just how jarring the transitions are on refresh. I don’t need it to run continuously at 24/29/60/120 FPS, but I do want it to load the next page in like 25ms. So imagine it taking more power to update the display, but it still isn’t refreshing continuously so would hopefully still have power consumption advantage.
(Even a drawing application could maybe handle it if you could refresh subsections of the display)
At least for grayscale e-ink (Carta) displays they have this under control quite nicely. Full refresh isn't needed often, and when it's needed it's a fast rolling refresh rather than the traditional full screen blanking. Although I'm not sure if that is a reMarkable specific feature.
Ignoring the details of the physics and mechanics of how it would work of course :). My highest Physics grade was an NZ C+, so somewhere in the 55-60% range :)
If you don't mind power consumption then you can also use reflective LCD display's.
Brand like Pixel Qi offer those. They have 3 modes: backlight, reflective, and a combination of both.
But to be fair the reflective mode always looks monochrome to me.
Why is that? Do you do a lot of computing outdoors in direct sunlight? I'll admit, the idea of a laptop whose LCD can go transparent to reveal an e-ink display behind it is very appealing.
Not OP, but I daydream of a big character cell display for console work, especially my development work which is basically vi and a few other tools multiplexed in tmux. Not sure how it’d play out in reality, but in my mind it’s just more pleasant to work with hour over hour.
That close to why I got the Dasung: to be able to work outside. I’m mostly in tmux, Emacs, or reading docs, so the colors is irrelevant and refresh rates ok.
Ah cool! So you have practical experience - how’s that all going then? The biggest Dasung I saw on my quick search was ~13”, and very expensive; do you feel like yours was a worthwhile experience?
For me it's kind of pointless indoors and the weather is not yet ideal for outdoors. When I did use it outdoors (a couple of days) it worked as advertised, but using an external monitor was awkward. A notebook with the same panel would have been much better.
TL;DR: probably not, but I'm still evaluating. (A proper stand for it might also help - what's included is laughably flimsy)
It wouldn't need an e-ink display. The backlight is separate from the display, remember the GameBoy Color? You just need a reflective layer that polarizes the light.
These various applications sound like static images without fast refresh requirements. I wonder what the refresh rate is like on these.
I'm still waiting with bated breath for a reliable e-ink computer monitor comes out with a decent refresh rate. I'd even be happy with just greyscale.