I've messed around with this a bunch on some 9" hardware and custom waveforms to attempt to drive the display as hard as possible, it's almost certainly not what you want to be using, especially the color ones as they require multiple passes to actually attain the color. For my Color/Black/White panels that's normally rendering all the Black + Color as black, and then pulling the black pigment back as well to expose the Color one (red or yellow).
For the single color ones you can get sub-500ms latency for updating, at the cost of extreme ghosting. You need to do a lot of changes to the way you think about graphics to make this a reality. Think of an IRC program for example, normally every one of them scrolls up text from the bottom but this is completely a worst case solution for e-ink. To make it work you have to fill half the screen with text, then add new lines sequentially at the end and only scroll when you've run out of space. Additions can reasonably be done without a full refresh, scrolling text just causes it to mud out.
This is pretty spot on. I tried something similar a while back and found that the typing latency was on the order of ~120 ms which made it feel mushy and led to a lot of errors.
The need to rethink graphics to handle refreshes should not be underestimated. A lot of UI patterns (almost all animations and transitions) rely on a period refresh rate. In order to make a compelling experience you need to rework a good bit of the UI.
You'd just need to adjust to typing "by feel", without needing that instant feedback from the screen. A typewriter or teletype also has inherently high "latency", so this fits quite well with that whole "e-paper" approach.
Yeah, this is the best workaround. It is still slower and more error prone than typing on a standard LCD screen. Also, the benefit of an eInk reader is that it is easier to look at - not looking at the display sort of defeats the whole purpose.
The one I worked on had a tape drive, paper tape read / punch for CNC machines, and an analog joystick.
It had a very powerful Basic that included a ton of graphics primitives, capable of many of the images shown. There was a demo tape similar to that video.
Storage tube CRT.
Editing text was done a screen at a time, overwrites done right over existing characters.
When it all got a bit messy, just refresh and carry on after it rendered current text to the screen. Sometimes, and this was often true for the files we were creating, multiple columns could be used to get a lot on the screen to work with, depending on widths.
The higher end ones did something like 4k pixels x 3k pixels.
If you wanted hard copy, you sent it to a pen plotter, or took a photo of the screen.
For text I/O, tape or paper tape.
I was 19 at the time. Had a chance to get one and didn't do it. Still regret it.
Now that we have these nice 4k displays, I am tempted to go find or write an emulation.
I think the CPU was a 6800 running at maybe a few Mhz, or maybe just 1Mhz.
The old "xterm" program has "Tektronix mode" as a command line option. One could send the graphics data and get a scaled bitmap output. I used to do it on SGI computers.
It could become feasible with a custom UI. You could have a version of vim or emacs that doesn't even "scroll" your code conventionally, but just gradually rewrites lines starting from the top down (or from the bottom up when scrolling "back"), sort of doing away with a unified viewport - this would at least address the most common operation in a dev environment that currently requires quick full-screen update.
My understanding is that if you simply turn the brightness on an LCD display down to whatever the ambient brightness is (hold a piece of white paper next to the screen to compare), that there is zero eyestrain over what paper or e-ink would be.
Have you tried that? It feels strange at first -- as if the screen feels "dim" -- but then once you realize the contrast is just fine, you get used to it within minutes.
(And in case you have a problem with glare, just get a matte screen covering, easy peasy.)
One nice thing is that you can see the displayed image by whatever light you want. Outside, inside, firelight, incandescent, vapor-arc, [built-in] LED... whatever.
I have a feeling that the contrast is also better under dim light, but no evidence, so I might be full of shit. And LED/LCD tech is obviously getting better in this regard.
Still, if there was a good implementation of an E-ink monitor with a refresh rate good enough for text editing, I'd easily drop 10k on it. I spend hours every day writing and reading and my preference for staring at E-ink displays over all other technologies is no contest.
You can't really do this because the contrast becomes way too low for comfort. It could become feasible with OLED, but that comes with a preference for dark mode anyway (due to the well-known issues with OLED endurance) which inherently addresses eyestrain.
I believe this is a misconception, and I'm not sure where it comes from.
Blacks on LCD screens really are quite black -- and if you dim your screen to ambient brightness, they obviously become even blacker.
This is why I said it takes a few minutes to get used to -- it "seems" dim or low-contrast, but only because you're comparing it with the ultra-mega-high contrast your monitor has when turned up to high brightness. When compared to paper (where "black" ink often isn't that dark anyways, particularly with matte finish like most books), the contrast is certainly just as good.
The GP is probably thinking of low-end TN panels, which really do have poor contrast, combined with significant variance in off-axis brightness and color reproduction, further exacerbating the problem. These were extremely common until only recently, with even Apple's pre-Retina MacBook Airs using them.
A modern IPS panel, however, can offer much higher contrast than most e-paper displays, and should offer a comparable experience to e-paper if set to an appropriate ambient brightness and color temperature. This last part is key, because otherwise, you end up with a harsh, bluish cast in residential lighting scenarios.
Most TVs and monitors can have their color temperature set manually, but the only OEM I'm aware of that is doing this automatically right now is Apple with its "True Tone" displays.
There is a complete difference between a light emitting screen and a light absorbing screen. Even backlit Kindles are much nicer to read on than iPads of the exact same "brightness".
You could drive down the backlight intensity to try and keep the contrast the same, but then the whole screen would start flickering like crazy due to PWM - and that's assuming that the hardware even supports being driven down to that level! It can also be hard to recover if you accidentally drive the backlight down too much or even turn it off altogether!
I'm not sure what you mean -- both my MacBook and iPad let me reduce the backlight intensity to very little, and there's zero "flickering like crazy" at all.
What devices have this problem? I've personally never encountered it on any LCD screens I've ever owned.
> both my MacBook and iPad let me reduce the backlight intensity to very little
I don't agree - I have a long-standing complaint that Apple doesn't let you reduce the brightness on their devices enough! I would definitely want to lower the brightness on my MacBook Pro more at night if I could.
On my Mac I've even used third-party software that overlays the screen with a semitransparent black square to darken it, but that reduces contrast. On my iPhone I use the accessibility filter to darken the screen.
I assume they've limited the minimum brightness due to PWM flicker.
So... yes, I've experimented with that on the Mac too (I think it was "Shady" or something?), so you certainly can.
But that doesn't reduce contrast beyond what's inherent in reducing brightness -- the blacks when the backlight is at minimum power in a dark room are black. You seriously don't get blacker than that in any practical sense that is relevant to the human eye, certainly not on the high-quality displays MacBooks have.
I don't know what you are trying to say with the word "contrast", but a utility like Shady does exactly what you're asking for -- reduces brightness below the minimum -- with zero negative optical side effects. It seems that whatever you're expecting it to do (dimmer but better contrast) is literally a physical impossibility.
Its not about how dim it is. Daylight is orders of magnitude brighter than any lightbulb out there and has different levels of color wavelengths. Dimming a screeen actually does the opposite of what you would get reading eink outdoors, even in the shade. This is why TV's and projectors have such a hard time reaching the required brightness levels to be seen in broad daylight.
This is thinking based on anecdotal evidence, and is not supported by scientific evidence.
LCDs do not inherently cause eye strain. Specific implementations of any display technology can, but not in general.
Some LCDs have backlights that flicker to reduce motion blur, and some people can be sensitive to this. Most panels do not have this technology. Avoid low-lag 144 Hz gaming displays if you're affected.
Low resolution LCDs can cause eyestrain due to the apparent blurriness of the image making the lens of the eye "hunt" back and forth looking for the ideal focal distance. Simply upgrading to a 4K or better fixes this. It did wonders for me, and now I refuse to use anything else.
People tend to sit at different distances from screens depending on the technology. People sit meters away from their TV, approximately 50-100cm from PC monitors, and within arms-length for handheld displays such as phones or eInk displays. For anyone with vision problems such as myopia, the displays that are held closer tend to cause less strain, but this has nothing to do with the panel technology.
Brighter displays cause the pupil to shrink, which improves the effective focus sharpness for people with astigmatism. There is an actual benefit of eInk displays in that they can be used with high-lux external illumination such as daylight. However, HDR LCD panels can hit an eye-searing 1000 nits sustained, and even the default 300 nits of a good quality panel is more than sufficient to reduce the pupil size to the minimum. Just turn the brightness up and sit in a reasonably well-lit room instead of darkness. The new hotness of dark themes flies in the face of the science of this. My eyes start to hurt within minutes from reading text on a dark background!
Glare from screen coatings also reduces contrast and the glass layer is often 1-2mm closer than the image surface. This can also cause "hunting" of the focus and eye strain. Avoid glossy screens, and clean your monitor regularly to get rid of smudges.
Most of the above is technology-independent. You can simply turn the brightness up on you LCD screen and sit closer or further depending on whether you have myopia or hyperopia.
I once had the pleasure of working with an 8K Dell monitor, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it's amazing. It's like looking at an animated glossy magazine. Zero eye strain. Unfortunately, it strains the wallet, but the new 8K video "push" might bring some competition and lower prices...
When anecdotal evidence is specifically you it's something one would care about :). HiDPI is a must for me can't use a regular ones at all for more than an hour. 8K I def could use for personal side but unfortunately I don't have a decent way to drive it from work issued mbp.
I bought this one: http://www.dasungtech.com/
and it works surprisingly well. Definitely good enough for coding IMO. The only issue I had is that the drivers for Mac were very unreliable (but this was >1 yr ago).
My motivation was being able to work outside and I still plan on using it for that. This reminds me that I should check to see if they have driver updates...
I have the Dasung Not-eRader and it works pretty well for me. I connect it via the supplied HDMI/USB cable and it is recongnized as external monitor on Linux and I can program pretty normally using vim on a terminal.
It's hard for the market to process demand for something that doesn't exist yet.
For use in their main computing device, people would like an e-ink display that could reliably pull 30+ FPS while not costing a fortune, and preferably with some color capacity. They don't want a display from Kindle. Until the gap between that and what we have today is closed, the demand signal won't register.
FWIW, there was a huge initial demand back in the Kindle era; the e-reader use case was absolutely perfect for these screens. Nowadays, from what I can tell, the main demand for e-ink is in retail, for cheap electronic price displays. But that doesn't drive the progress of e-ink much, if in any way at all.
Yeah, just see how smartwatches have moved towards usually-off transmittive LCDs instead of always-on transflective ones... (Which IS IMHO ridiculous...)
Yeah. I dread the day my Pebble Time gives up the ghost; I don't see any equivalent or better smartwatch on the market. I might actually start looking into good ol' mechanical watches instead.
It's the sort of thing that's nice on paper, but the practical limitations make it sort of useless for live updating content. I really like the devices for nearly static information displays because they're not bright and distracting, it's only noticeable if you want that information.
