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by adolph 3 hours ago
Wow, I'm glad to see that person is getting some more recognition for this work.

A claim in the video that I can't verify but makes economic/logistic sense is that the speed problem isn't the panels but the controllers. The current crop of controllers are optimized for low power, which fits the e-reader use case but that is not optimal for the interactive use case.
1 comments
jolmg 1 hour ago
> The current crop of controllers are optimized for low power, which fits the e-reader use case but that is not optimal for the interactive use case.

Why try to contort the technology for something it's not good at, instead of using a more appropriate technology like transflective LCDs? Eink isn't the only option for reflective displays. If you increase the power use of eink to get better refresh rates, I imagine you'd end up using more power than (and still end up with lower refresh rates than) an MIP display.

I don't understand the growth of the market as a whole for eink monitors, when tLCDs exist and are disappearing from the market.

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enragedcacti 29 minutes ago
I'm pretty sure e-ink has a much higher ceiling for reflectance than TLCDs/RLCDs, so you'll be able to use it comfortably without a frontlight in a lot more situations which could more than make up for increased power usage. I think they are also naturally better in terms of glare compared to any type of LCD.
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Groxx 7 minutes ago
Viewing angles are also fantastic compared to almost all T/R LCDs - they tend to be fairly directional. It's a great display tech for many things that don't need 60+fps.
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adolph 1 hour ago
It isn't clear to me that eink's underlying display technology isn't good at the interactive computing use case so much as the implementations aren't optimized for it. There could be a position where more power than an eink reader is used but still far less than traditional active displays since unchanged pixels aren't driven.
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alex-a-soto 4 minutes ago
That's how I think about it too.

E-readers are vertically integrated devices: the hardware, software, UI, and refresh behavior are all tailored around reading. E-ink tablets like reMarkable are similar, but optimized around writing and annotation.

A traditional monitor is much more general-purpose, so it doesn't get the same kind of end-to-end optimization for the display medium. I think there's room for an in-between category: a more interactive e-ink device where both the hardware and software are designed around the strengths and limits of the panel.

There's some related work happening in this direction:

https://nlnet.nl/project/epd-wayland/

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