[rockostrich]

> IMO the real benefit of these screens is in consuming long-form text content.

Hard disagree. E-readers already do this and are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper. Long-form text content barely need 1 Hz refresh rates.

The real benefit of these screens is being able to use a computer without the associated eye-strain. Most jobs that involve looking at a screen all-day don't really require high refresh rate screens. The main exceptions are any folks doing design or editing work. This is a huge game changer for the vast majority of folks on HN that are looking at a terminal, text editor, or docs for 90% of their day.

[packetlost]

> This is a huge game changer for the vast majority of folks on HN that are looking at a terminal, text editor, or docs for 90% of their day.

Hard disagree. Unless you're not typing all that much and particularly insensitive to input latency, you're not going to want to do too much typing on these. I know I couldn't stand it.

[sublinear]

Input latency is really bad even at 24hz. My typing speed slows down dramatically and typos feel so painful to correct compared to 60hz and above.

[mdp2021]

Some of us suspended the habit to look at the text while typing (on systems with latency), and look at the typed only periodically (off, on, off, on).

[sublinear]

I get that you're talking about situations like typing into a remote terminal, but this technique still causes eye strain which brings us back to square one with slow eink displays which are like this all day long.

[mdp2021]

I was talking chiefly about typing on EPD :) (Soooo many keystrokes, so many hours.) I personally felt no eye strain - it may depend on your ability to adapt into the process.

[SoftTalker]

Way back in the day I remember using a terminal (TeleVideo maybe?) where the characters just sort of faded in as you typed. The latency was really bad. But I got used to it pretty quickly and didn't find it really bothersome.

[sublinear]

> Long-form text content barely need 1 Hz refresh rates.

The problem with such low refresh rates is that your eyes may have to work much harder to locate where you're at after you've scrolled the page.

Not all content is formatted to never break sentences or paragraphs, and not all software even supports pagination as an alternative to scrolling.

[layer8]

> The real benefit of these screens is being able to use a computer without the associated eye-strain.

Depends on your eyes. For my aging eyes e-ink is much too low-contrast. A high-DPI OLED screen on the other hand…

[agentultra]

I think it does depend a lot because my aging eyes, even high-DPI OLED screens tire me right out. E-Ink, on the other hand, requires much less strain as my eyes only have to take in the ambient light and not be staring directly into a high-nit source.

[layer8]

I normally set the brightness of displays so that they are similar to the brightness of the environment (which is the general recommendation for ergonomics). Similar to how bright a piece of white paper would appear in that environment. I’m thus usually not “staring directly into a high-nit source”, regardless of the display technology.

The problem with e-ink is that their “white” is light gray instead of white, and their “black” is gray instead of black.