Why make this for a desktop? E-ink is mostly useful for wireless applications and anywhere power is limited or there's a need for always on, static display.
I have a Dasung e-ink monitor (by the power of grayscale). I find a lot of interesting reading on my work computer, but getting those links onto e-ink devices like my Boox has been irksome. Reading on the e-ink monitor was _almost_ worth the price. Ultimately, however, I retired it because the desktop real-estate, macOS's limited multi-monitor capabilities, and if I'm going to buckle down and read something long form I need to get away from my desk anyway.
There's likely a market for office workers since there's a significant reduction of stress on the eyes.
You'd save about 0.5 kwh a day in electricity, more if the AC is running. So I could see them becoming popular once the price comes down. People who run 2 monitors might be interested as well.
Methods: Participants read for several hours on either e-Ink or LCD, and different measures of reading behaviour and visual strain were regularly recorded. These dependent measures included subjective (visual) fatigue, a letter search task, reading speed, oculomotor behaviour and the pupillary light reflex.
Results: Results suggested that reading on the two display types is very similar in terms of both subjective and objective measures.
There is a significant reduction in color depth and refresh rate, plus a need to provide external lighting to make up for the lack of built-in lighting, which, depending on the office environment may cancel out any power savings.
That depends on the environment. Natural light fights against the functioning of light-emitting displays. Reflective displays cooperate with natural light.
You in the dark? Use OLED. Under the sun? Use EPD.
I don't know too many people operating desktop computers under the sun. They are usually situated indoors, often distant from any window access. Anyways the point stands that additional lighting discounts any power savings from using e-ink in a desktop environment. I get the use case for e-ink in the field. This product is not for in-field use.
HN is nth standard deviation sensitive. There is always market for some.
> additional lighting discounts any power savings
Not necessarily. Lighting today can cost fractions of watts, and on the other hands EPD can be energy costly - it depends on how many cell updates you are causing. So, the matter is probably less with energy consumption, and more about getting a better effect based on user and environment.
> This product is not for in-field use
Sure, it does not seem specific. But it can have its places. Be it some production site - maybe a quarry near the tropics -, be it personal - maybe you want to do some work in your garden...
To relieve eye strain. Reading on an e-ink screen is so much more comfortable than on any emissive monitor. With current tech the downside is of course reduced refresh rate as well as low color contrast.
Depending on the workload, that might be a worthy trade off. I tried coding on a grayscale eink display for a while and noticed a big difference in eye strain and overall concentration levels after a long session. But the display I had was too small and I didn't like living without syntax highlighting, so I went back to a normal screen. This product would solve those issues.
Authors and writers in general might be another target audience for this product. It's niche for sure, but eink has a lot of applications beyond price displays in a store.
Some people have an inverse problem - it is difficult to position a monitor so that it doesn't reflect a window. This technology sounds perfect for that.
EPD displays aren't magically paper-like; in fact they are far from looking like actual paper. There's either plastic or glass in front, and they give the same glare as any other matte or glossy display. If anything, active lighting (either backlight or frontlight) helps mitigate glares, shadows, and other external lighting non-uniformities.
If you are young or if you are old with eyestrain issues it may be worth your while to learn about things like bias lighting, blue filters, PWM dimming, etc.
If you are old with good vision then I guess just keep doing what works :)
Many folks in my office have an ancillary monitor or two to the side of their main monitors, often in portrait mode, just for keeping docs, diagrams, and other reference material. But having so many backlit monitors in your field of view can become a little fatiguing.
An e-ink display with sharp text and without a backlight could be useful for such a use case.
But agreed that mobile contexts seem more broadly useful.
Well it is arguably easier on the eyes for reading so it'd me great for terminals or for browsing documentation, content with little movement but lots of reading. I'd like to see this on a netbook to get better battery life and still be able to use emacs and remotely logging into systems. Just to carry around in a backpack while being on call.
I print everything to read it (if it's more than a couple of pages) because I have a hard time reading with a backlight, so I'm seriously considering backing this, if for nothing else than to reduce my paper consumption (even though I do religiously recycle).
Mate, why don't you "print" on an EPD tablet - an advanced "E-Reader"?
There are already plenty around. If you need to read a long document, transfer it to the tablet in its best format (PDF, markup etc). If you need to browse a lot of documents, create a VNC connection and use the tablet as a display.