Thread #108663121
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Why aren't these things more popular?
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My perfect setup would be a vertical e-ink display for coding and reading and a 4 by 3 240hz monitor for videos and gaymen
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>>108663121
because they're expensive as fuck
>>108663143
no. there's high refresh rate e-paper screens but they're not e-ink, they're reflective LCDs
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>>108663121
Weird i was just recently looking at eink displays
Shits expensive... even the tiniest screens for diy projects cost around 20-40 dollaridoos
Fuck my chud ass life man i just want to read shit without eyestrain
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>>108663121
Expensive and the ones with color are even more expensive.
A 8inch color E ink tablet with a half decent soc in it so you can seamlessly
scroll trough books&magazines&comics&manga under 300€ would be a game changer.
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>>108663121
Refresh rate is still an issue (iirc the best case is 15hz, and that's expensive as fuck), so your only use case is e-readers, clocks, and dynamic labels, all of which already use e-ink
>>108663125
As with every piece of technology, some patents have expired, but it's just the old ones. So competitors can only match what the company behind it was doing ~12 years ago
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>>108663121
I pre-ordered a https://shop.trmnl.com/collections/devices/products/trmnl-x but they keep getting screwed over by suppliers who don’t supply what they asked for and ordered
>>108663419
black/white/red/yellow is a thing: https://shop.trmnl.com/collections/devices/products/trmnl-bwry
I saw BWRY tags at my local Lowe’s
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>>108663121
because I can't into the money to beingly buying of
>>108663192
eink is the only real daylight viewable display. Where do you get your vials of blood?
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>>108663185
>4:3 videos
Do you just watch old anime and Star Trek: TOS?
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>>108666146
NTA but goddamn do i appreciate 4:3 more and more as my ageing eyes fail.
men have narrower vision than women. there was no 'non-sexist' solution but it's so refreshing when something is natively 4:3.
see also: dedicated mono/stereo mixes. i can hear vocals in old films PERFECTLY.
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>>108666201
>é
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>>108666201
Later seasons of Stargate and the widescreen version of Babylon 5
>>108666211
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>>108663121
I have an rpi 500+, eink display, battery pack as my sort of thin client setup, and it’s great. I get excellent battery life, I can use it outside, and it renders text perfectly.
I think it is less popular because it does need a lot of configuration/custom software to make things nice to use with eink, but that is straightforward these days.
I would strongly advise against the colour eink displays though. They use a colour filter array, and look like shit, with terrible lower resolution off colours, weird tinting of black/white and lower contrast.
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>>108663331
E-ink is actually perfect for this. For work I am basically running multiple instances of claude code and codex, ssh-ing into beefier machines with the same software, and it’s really great.
At the end of the day what you’re doing is reading its responses, and a bunch of md files, and some code. Black and grey syntax highlighting is actually surprisingly good.
Also since you can’t really do much else besides this, it is great for focus.
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>>108663121
they are expensive as fuck for what they are,
if there was a decent BW 60Hz display like this id consider it, not just as extended display but also hack it into a rPi tablet especially if it includes a touch digitizer.
If I understood correctly, color e-Ink are dimmer, display isnt as shallow as unlit BW units, but those are pretty much extinct in favor of backlit
also higher resolution makes cost astronomical, there has to be a monopoly somewhere and patents that prevent these from being accessible (for what they are)
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To be clear this is how commercially available colour eink displays work. It’s not colour ink, it’s black and white ink under a filter array, so each pixel is either red filtered, green filtered, or blue filtered (no subpixels like LCDs). When you render black and white, the white is illusory (close together red green and blue) and more of a tinted grey, and the black is weirdly blueish. This is also why the colour ppi is listed as half the original.
Black and white gets you true 300ppi and way better contrast without the tinting. You just have to deal with the absence of colour, which is mostly problematic in text editing, graphs and diffs.
You’re also going to want to use pixel fonts, or at least avoid antialiasing and built in text-enhancement features. And try to keep things as hard black/white as possible.
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>>108663121
I have an e-ink tablet (also from Boox). I use it for reading obviously and it's amazing for that, but doing other things where you frequently interact with the device still feels quite clunky given the slow update rate, or alternatively the lower quality of the image if the screen is set in one of the fast update modes.
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>>108666717
I have a color e-ink device, you are right that they are dimmer, but that can be offset with the frontlight. If you set it appropriately for your ambient lighting conditions the screen just looks like a b&w e-ink screen, as in you can't tell it's lit but it also doesn't look dim.
>>108666757
>black is weirdly blueish
This isn't true, at least not on the one I have.
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>>108666705
I actually get a fair bit of use out of color in Claude Code when the “Jitterbugging…” text goes red — that means it’s not sending data back and forth
>>108666831
I think most people would be OK with 30Hz or less
t. OK with 4K@30Hz on his old PC running Debian that he doesn’t watch movies on
>>108666757
Odd — nobody’s talking about 4-bit (16 grays) displays?
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>>108666951
Sorry, you are right. The CFA based (Kaleido) colour displays aren’t blueish. I was thinking of the true colour eink display (Gallery 3) that the remarkable paper pro uses.
They are much lower contrast though, on account of the CFA
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>>108667008
The black and white displays are 4bit. But you will ultimately end up fighting dithering patterns due to post processing in HDMI targeting displays, and end up using at most 3 tones for UIs and making full use for images.
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>>108667014
Contrast certainly isn't amazing compared to any non-e-ink screen I use, though I've never seen an e-reader with "good" contrast in images, even grayscale. To me it looks pretty similar to actual paper for grayscale. In color it's more limited, colors are always somewhat muted.
Note that pic related looks blue-ish and kinda smudged because of my phone camera fucking something up, it's neither blue-ish nor smudged IRL. I guess the blue tint is because the phone fucked up the white balance.
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I've been considering getting a Modos Paper for coding and browsing the web.
I'm also dreaming of getting some arm laptop and modding it with an eink display for use outdoors and for the battery life increase. I'd mod the battery too, I don't care if it would weigh 3 kg more as long as I would get days worth of charge for off the grid work.
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>>108663121
that looks really weird. not the display but the two piece keyboard. i don't think i could work out in public with that.
that said in the pic it seems he's on his own balcony, that's nice. seems comfy. wish spring would come a little sooner so i could do that too, before i have to move out.
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>>108667578
>I'm also dreaming of getting some arm laptop and modding it with an eink display for use outdoors and for the battery life increase. I'd mod the battery too, I don't care if it would weigh 3 kg more as long as I would get days worth of charge for off the grid work.
turning off display on my x220 got me from like 12 watts to 6 watts
just go headless bro
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>>108663242
Not eink, but I use a huawei matepad x papermatte that i find great to read everything, it was quite cheap for what it offers. it's not 8inches but they probably have something like that, or other chinese company
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>>108671092
>papermatte
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>>108663121
>>108666681
Is it possible to have them display inverted color scheme (black background, white text)?
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>>108670701
Dark mode is good in the dark
light mode is good in the light
E-ink is good in really bright light
when I’m outside in the shade I need to run https://www.getvivid.app to crank up my monitor’s brightness enough
And it works, and it gets me through the stand-up meeting, but I lose a percentage point of battery **per minute** when it’s on
>>108671237
Totally.
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>>108663121
can they handle web browsing yet
wanted to get one for manga and studying
but I would prefer if it could handle web browsing decently because I study by reading pdf and then spending some time going through flashcards or question banks
anything smaller than 10" is unacceptable for manga btw
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>>108663121
Why would the average /g/ user care?
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>>108676363
Does that work? Presumably you also have access to other lights you can turn on, and actual books not having a built-in light never stopped anyone from reading into the night, even when we didn't have anything better than candles.
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>>108663121
I always wanted something like the remarkable for notes. However, all these fucking tablets/digital notepads require all kinds of online connection, cloud storage bullshit, etc. I literally just want the ability to take notes and save to a local card, no online shit. Simple and easy. Doesn't exist because they need to max out profitability vectors.
So I just won't buy one and stick to paper/pencil.
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>>108676260
>You can't use your iPad in direct sunlight.
reading books in direct sunlight is stupid. that's how you get sunburn.
compare an actual piece of paper side by side with an ereader and you'll see a huge difference.
>>108676352
>That's why you can find devices with adjustable frontlights built right in.
that defies the whole purpose of using a screen without built in light.
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>>108663121
>slow
>monochrome or washed colors
>will start ghosting and shitting itself in bad weather
>expensive compared to lcd/oled
E-ink is only useful as a replacement for paper/books, and it was made for that thing exactly. If you use it for cooding like picrel you're insane, if you want something that can be legible /out/side, low power, and high refresh rate, look at reflective lcd.
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>>108663222
>Fuck my chud ass life man i just want to read shit without eyestrain
I find darkmode, lowering the screen's brightness and using something like redshift helps. Until we have some real reflective full color tech. But I suspect we will never get something like that because you will be creating camouflage which will be a deadly weapon in wars. Maybe it's like creating a better automobile engine, the def won't allow it.
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>>108666681
It is seductive. Something about black text on a reflective white background in a 4:3. is just perfect.
But how about the refresh rate? ghosting? and that annoying flickering?
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>>108677075
>refresh rate
37Hz, mostly relevant to input latency desu, which is barely noticeable. Using tiling and TUIs makes everything snappier than macOS with all its animations even on 120Hz.
>ghosting
certainly evident if you don’t use tiling and TUIs but rather things with smooth motion and scrolling. In general ghosting artefacts will build up over time, so if you care (they’re subtle, i tune out to them) you can manually clear them with a button.
>flicker
Only when you press the button. That’s the tradeoff, you either get ghosting, or flickering from the clearing of the screen. Otherwise there is no flicker, e-ink displays are persistent, like an etch-a-sketch
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>>108677360
Yeah, unfortunately with this particular display it’s for generic HDMI input, which means you need to go through some power hungry DSP chip to post-process for eink and the blanking is either via the button or whatever the onboard driver is doing.
What would be much nicer is to drive the display directly perhaps as a terminal emulator alone. This is how I suspect devices like ereaders work, which is much more integrated and can be much more power efficient.
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>>108676889
>that defies the whole purpose of using a screen without built in light.
Have you ever actually used one? It sounds like you have no idea what you're talking about.
If you don't crank the light to the max or something and adjust it appropriately the screen just looks whiter instead of grey and you can't even perceive the fact that it's actually lit up unless you turn it up way beyond ambient conditions.
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>>108663121
I'd upgrade to an e-ink phone if they become more affordable but I doubt that will happen since it's a niche area. Ideal for me since I don't use mine for video/constant scrolling like a braindead zoomie. Sadly, that's why they aren't popular.
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>>108663216
You'd use the e-ink display purely for reading long texts on your PC though, alongside other monitors or with display out from a laptop. I'd love to have one for "productivity reading" (excuse my cringe) on a desk as a CFW Kindle is only better for casual reading.
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>>108666831
If you type at 100 WPM, imagine seeing the text appear on a single digit Hz display. It'd be unbearably choppy, let alone scrolling through a source file. It's great for the purpose it's most used for (e-readers), but even for text-heavy computer use it's still not there.
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>>108676031
the ones who are asking aren’t average /g/ users
there is some /fit/ and /out/ crossover
>>108678765
no disagreement there
>>108679243
I type pretty fast but I’d think a little bit of choppiness wouldn’t bother me
On the other hand, the Berkeley Mono guy tried Monaspace and hated how the texture healing (“mim” has extra-wide “m”s and extra-skinny “i”s) made the freshly-typed letters jiggle a bit
https://lettermatic.com/custom/monaspace-case-study
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