Wow, relive the early days of really fucking terrible LCD displays for just under $2000.
What a time to be alive…
Why, for the love of all the gods, do people keep saying and writing “LCD display”.
Tell me what the “D” in “LCD” means!
What does the “D” mean, hmmm!?
I’ll remember that the next time I enter my PIN number at an ATM machine.
The same as the M in ATM machine and N in PIN number, V in HIV virus and C in UPC code!
Oh, the dreaded RAS syndrome!.I’m off to read some DC comics.
I will be reporting this to the American Association Against Acronym Abuse!
You really need to learn about RAS syndrome.
Diode?
Display
For a work machine with a lot of text and little graphics, this is great. Less eye strain for long periods.
In theory yes. But after seeing a review yesterday I am fully disappointed. Even text looks like shit on this monitor.
If I could get a laptop with a screen like this, I could finally sit outside in a park and code like nature intended.
Also a lap desk. And a coffee thermos. And headphones. Second screen.
God, I’m too spoiled for nature, ain’t IThis device runs android, but it’s pretty close https://shop.boox.com/products/tabxc
I’d totally buy this if I had fuck you money.
That… would actually be pretty dope
The US takes tariffs on the good stuff? Looks like there will be more stuff for us in the future.
I’m really keen on one of these displays eventually, as I can set aside the issues with refresh rate and colour accuracy, but the price needs to drop way down. It needs to be competitive with regular LCD monitors.
I look at terminals all day for work, this would make it so much more comfortable.
If you’re coding with them you can already try small ones, unless you need bigger than A4 size for each it isn’t insanely expensive.
Might not need anything except economies of scale. But getting that is the problem.
Tablet sized eink displays found a niche that couldn’t quite be displaced by smartphones and regular tablets. That let them have a market for getting costs down.
There would need to be a similarly wide use case to get the price down on larger eink displays.
economies of scale
And competition. AFAIK, E Ink Corporation holds all the patents (there’s 47 pages of them), so they can ask for as much as they want for the tech.
I think the use case would be for laptops, for people who want to comfortably use their laptops outside or just want their laptop screens to be easier on the eyes. Only slightly different to a tablet insofar as it has a physical keyboard, so i imagine the tablets could be adapted.
There are some annoying usability limitations still, but it has progressed far since early ebook readers, so I’m hopeful.
Waaaaaaaaay too expensive, but I’d love it if big eink displays became a thing, even with shit refresh rates, mostly because I want some for displaying Home Assistant dashboards.
There’s this range of Philips signage displays in up to 32" (~$1800 USD): https://www.ppds.com/display-solutions/digital-signage/philips-tableaux
They even run Android, so should be able to install the Home Assistant app natively. Being intended as a signage solution, there’s also PoE (although it is 45W 802.3bt class5), and even room for four 18650 batteries.
Notably though, they use the newer E-Ink “Spectra” (16 bit, 65,536 colour) panel which offers its full 2560x1600 resolution in both greyscale and colour, not the “Kaleido” one (12 bit, 4096 colour) of this Boox monitor that only has half of its 3200x1800 resolution in colour (Boox recommend using 1400x1050).
I don’t know which of the two panels offers better refresh rates, however.
I bought a trmnl and it’s pricey but works pretty good. I’ve mostly been using a few out-of-the-box plugins for it.
There is a selfhosted/offline version of the server you can run for it, so it can be ‘offline’ in theory. I keep meaning to mess with it more but haven’t put the time aside.
Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.
Feel like we’ve been waiting a long time for it :(
Ah yes just in time for the trade war! Better get yours now
I’m thinking at those prices this is probably intended for corporations that absolutely need a readable display in bright sunlight areas but don’t really care about refresh rate or color depth.
Every drive through and restaurant with outdoor counters and lcd screens I can’t fucking read with sunglasses on because they are polarized should switch to these
I did see something a few months ago about a company making large color e-Ink displays for applications like that and outdoor advertising at bus stops and the like
Not necessarily just corporations, but certainly text-based workflows. I can see this being great if your day job is writing code, working on spreadsheets, editing documents, etc. In those use cases, framerate hardly matters. Would be great for reducing eye strain.
I can see how this would be very attractive to a writer.
Aw yeah! I imagine it’s like 2 fps. Great for gaming.
Its not meant for gaming. People who display a lot of text (eg. coders) could use less strain in their eyes if they’re doing it for a long time. Definitely not at that price though
Pretty sure it’s good for anything that requires text. I’ve already seen several people talk about it’s use in coding, which makes sense since staring at a conventional LCD for hours on end can be a real eyestrain sometimes.
How many seconds per frame does it get?
If the answer matters then your use case isn’t this monitor’s use case. If you spend all day in Excel, or an IDE, something like that, then it could be awesome for eye strain reduction.
Isn’t eye strain mostly due to distance?
Whoosh
Not whoosh, my comment makes sense even if you get the inverted unit joke. So uh, uno reverse card whoosh?
I’ve never had eye strain from a CRT or LCD.
Not sure yet, we’re still waiting for the first frame to finish.
I think it says 23Hz or something
Enough to run doom
It can display Oblivion Remastered at it’s native framerate though.
I remember when OLED was that extensive…
I remember a 42" plasma TV that cost $12,000 at Best Buy.
Plus $1000 a year electric bill
Yeah those early ones - and the one I’m thinking of was like the first big-screen flatpanel they sold, sometime in the late 90s - were extra extra bad about power.
Maybe in 30 years when the patents expire.
Not going to happen. The fog is coming.
I can guess what you are alluding to. But explain anyways.
What is the refresh time? They carefully avoid mentioning that. There’s a comparable Pimoroni monitor whose refresh takes 14 seconds so I’d call it a static display rather than a computer monitor.
The article mentions another display with a 33 Hz refresh rate. But be aware that there would be significant ghosting even just scrolling a page of text, more so than even a measly 33 Hz refresh rate would lead you to believe.
I’m happy with say 3 hz, fast enough to not be too annoying when flipping pages while reading. It’s fine to not be good for video. What I really want is a 16 inch or so e-reader though.
I’d really like a 20" or so e-ink screen as a second/third monitor. I’d have one for video and whatnot, and the other for text.
In another comment response, I linked to some place (DASUNG) out of China that makes eInk monitors.
They make 25" eInk monitors in both black-and-white and color. That’s $1,500 and up, though.
Personally, for me, it wouldn’t make sense. The real selling point of eInk for me is:
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It’s reflective, and eInk is almost the only kind of reflective display out there. That means that it works reasonably outdoors under sunlight and glare, without having to blast enough light to overwhelm the sunlight. But…with a desktop, and especially mixed types of monitors, you’re not going to be lugging those monitors outside under the sun.
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If you’re looking at mostly static images in a lit area, eInk has extraordinarily low average power use, since it only consumes power when updating the image on the screen. That makes it a great fit for e-readers. But…for a fixed computer monitor, I don’t care much about power consumption.
And with that, you get drawbacks of having limited refresh rates, limited size, high price, limited or no color (and if you have color, worse contrast) and not being able to display brightly-lit, emissive stuff.
I mean, yes, eInk does look like paper, and if you’re really set on that particular aesthetic, then it’d have some value there. But for me, that value is just really limited. Yeah, it’d be kind of novel for text to look like it’s on paper, but it’s just not a game-changer.
I get a fair amount of glare, and if it’s low-enough power, I could conceivably bring it with me outside or something. It would be sick if it was powered over USB-C.
But I’m certainly not willing to pay $1k+ for it, more like $200-300.
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Boox Tab Ultra C aint half bad
These guys make eInk monitors:
if you can live with a black-and-white eInk monitor, they say that their fastest model can do 60 Hz.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwwKuvCPKya/
(Not an advertisement - just first google result)
That is a video of a much smaller monitor. It does show reasonably responsive refresh. Do you have one of the 25.3 inch monitor described in the article?
I’m good.
Maybe it’d be useful as a low powered interactive kiosk display? Price needs to come down tremendously before this thing becomes competitive.
What’s the refresh rate and can I play Hunt showdown on it? They say a similar model has a 33hz refresh rate but don’t mention this model
I don’t know if you can play games on this, but I know you definitely won’t want to.
Choice of Games makes games that are unchanging text. You could probably do okay with that.
Actually…come to think of it, they should figure out some way to hook up with an e-reader manufacturer, sell their games in those stores. Like, those games also have basically zilch by way of memory or computational requirements, and I bet that the same kind of person who’d buy a dedicated e-reader to read books would probably be more-interested in a text-heavy game.
they should figure out some way to hook up with an e-reader manufacturer, sell their games in those stores
just sell it as an ebook, with choices being tappable links to specific pages. brand agnostic, and distributable over the countless ebook stores that already exist. I’d be surprised if there weren’t any CYOA books modernised that way already.
Yeah, that’s a thought, but those games have some additional QoL logic to them, like automated stats keeping and checking and stuff. Nice to just have the computer handle it.
Please note that even at 30hz eink displays still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency
