Eink always could be driven quickly. The issue is that LCDs are more powerful efficient at high refresh rates
EInk needs a lot of power to move the heavier ink particles around. If you are doing that more and more rapidly, then even more power is drawn.
By 75Hz, I'm almost certain that LCD is far more power efficient. The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor, it takes some power to charge but it's exceptionally 'light' compared to eink.
That's why LCDs can go faster and faster. It's just physics. A capacitor / twisted crystal uses less power to turn on or off than EInk.
---------
EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put. So you spend a ton of power moving the ink around and then save lots and lots of power over the next seconds, minutes or more.
That's why EInk is ideal for once-a-day updates of prices (or other retailer tasks). The less you update, the less power used.
Thanks. That article seems to have the quote I was looking for.
> E-ink screens are quite power hungry when it comes to peak current. Modern high-resolution panels can consume >20 W peak.
This is where I was wondering and yeah, 20+W is pretty hefty to support a relatively small 8" EInk screen or something.
All those updates cost all that power as long as updates are occurring. Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
More importantly, it sounds like you've created a full custom FPGA controller over the voltages that go into an EInk display? That's impressive in its own right even if I don't think 75Hz is a good idea lol.
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FPGA or Full Blown Microprocessor are the only choices here. A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism (and probably all the pins required to control the screen. Even a big microprocessor won't have as many low latency pins as an FPGA).
> Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
Yes, that’s definitely something we want to work toward. As the community grows, we hope to tackle these kinds of optimizations together.
> A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism
Yes, precisely for the reasons you stated. We also talk more about it below:
You guys should do a collab with the framework people. I bet they'd be happy to offer an e-ink screen on their laptops just as an option. I've been waiting on an e-ink option for ages.
E-Ink's other advantage is being a non-emissive display. Transflective LCD displays have low contrast. I'm literally holding an e-ink tablet over the transflective monitor I'm typing this on and the difference in contrast at the same ambient illumination is considerable. If the price were right, I'd definitely consider a 75 Hz e-ink monitor even if the power draw was more than a normal LCD monitor.
> EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put.
E-ink's other advantage is that it reads like paper. In a desktop context I could not possibly care less about the power consumption, but being able to read a forum thread, chat channel, HN discussion, etc. without a backlight would make my eyes very happy.
Out of curiosity, if you have 75Hz but you're refreshing sparingly (e.g. you're in VSCode writing, unless you're scrolling, most pixels remain unchanged), wouldn't e-ink remain power-efficient?
Probably. E-ink drivers ("waveforms" is, I believe, the term of art) frequently target refreshes only at the portion of the display that has updated, using rectangles or other more-specific geometries to limit that area.
For text updates, where there's literally a cursor which moves at typing speeds, update frequency is quite low. Where you're updating or paging through documents, paginated navigation (where the whole screen refreshes at once, then remains unchanged for several seconds to minutes or longer) is quite efficient.
That requires the operating system to “hint” to the display that there’s no refresh necessary and for the display to shut down during those times. That’s currently not supported as these kits just take a video signal, but it’s something being worked on for a future version!
Edit: You work on that stuff, right? Then this armchair experting feels silly, just imagine it's for other readers.
It seems much more practical (if a little less power-efficient) to implement the no diff -> no refresh logic for screen regions in the display hardware. The RAM and logic for a display-side framebuffer can't be expensive today, a couple of Euros for the extra board space and chip(s). If that stuff takes off, just additional transistors in the all-in-one ASIC.
For the whole screen, that more or less already exists in laptop hardware: "panel self-refresh". HDMI and DiplayPort might need a new extension or something? Is there anything?
Is this saying that it is an either-or situation? Ideal would be a device that can be written fast when needed, but can also hold. Is there some more fundamental thing at a pixel level that links agility with retention?
E Ink uses microscopic ink bubbles that gets attracted to positive and negative voltages. The ink stays around when attraction stops, holding image. But the ink also require much stronger force than regular LCDs to move around.
LCDs use articulation of liquid crystal chemicals that change shape thus polarization upon application of voltages. They tend to slowly deform back to "the other" state when voltages are removed, and also tend to chemically break down if not moved back to the neutral state. LCDs are driven in pseudo-alternating current for this reason, and never held at either extremes for long time, for this reason.
So you can drive E Ink at 75Hz or whatever, it'll just take more power than it takes LCD to do so, and the last pixel states will persist. Or you can leave LCDs at extremes and disconnect the power, but it will lead to degradation if intentionally used that way.
What you can't do is 1) "watt per frame" figures of LCD, with 2) persistence, and 3) long life. (1, 3) is LCD, (2, 3) is E Ink, (1, 2) is LCD abused as if it's E Ink at expense of rapid degradation, and (1, 2, 3) is the holy grail.
Are LCD screens driven on a pixel by pixel basis, or is the entire screen driven on each refresh? Because the article says they're only causing changed pixels to refresh.
If so, you're probably still right when it comes to watching a video or something, but e-ink could be more efficient for drawing, writing, or reading.
I had worked on mirasol technology. I believe the colors on newer prototypes were much better than any e-reader tech till date. The issues were related to manufacturing most importantly.
Flipping pages right now is very annoying. Slow and with the weird redrawing flashing. If they can find a way to fix that it'll be 100% worth it, even if it means high power draw on page changes.
Kobo devices do a full page refresh periodically, which is probably what you're seeing. iirc it will do it on chapter transitions to make it less jarring.
Basically, it's intentional and relatively rare (unless you have really really short chapters).
and a colour Boox. The refresh on the Boox is so fast, you can watch video.
I don't think the Meebook has refresh issues, it's definitely very fast for back/forward. Of course I don't have page turn animations on. I use the kindle app on it, and KOreader. If you get this, know that there is a thread to drop in a script, so the volume buttons page turn correctly when upside down.
If you live in Amazon turf, you can always buy and return if not suitable?
In the DIY electronics scene, I’ve occasionally come across posts about small cheap e-ink displays essentially burning in and how to try and avoid it (shifting things around like on OLED)
This could be actual burn in, or it could be a failure in how they are refreshing (with some potential fix if refreshed properly). I’m not familiar enough to be certain myself, but I personally suspect they are likely being driven too hard and are truly damaged.
In normal e-reader use I’ve never seen this as a practical issue.
I have an e-ink display that's now 15 years old. It's definitely a bit less clean, there is sometimes mild ghosting even after doing a full refresh. Doing two refreshes in quick succession fixes that.
I also have another display that was exposed to full sunlight through a window for about 8 years. It's now a bit faded as a result.
Yes you can kill or degrade them if you drive them too hard, but achieving higher refresh rates and less ghosting is mostly about finer calibration and faster lookups on bigger tables
I assume that's what Sharp Memory LCDs are doing to reach their absurdly low power specs.
I dunno if LCD screens are multiplexed, but embedded LCDs could need as many as 8x on/off cycles per pixel (because you save 87% fewer wires if you chain 8x pixels on the same line and then put them on different biases and have weird COMmon pins and rows and crap).
Sharp claims that a bit of storage is on each LCD/capacitor and this saves power somehow with smarter decision making. I assume it's minimizing the wasted power somehow (or even recycling the previous power shoved into the capacitor, which typically just goes to waste).
It's some proprietary formula in any case, so it's all guesswork. Only the Sharp Engineer/Inventor would know for sure.
That's what I'm wondering about. I wouldn't mind temporary higher energy usage to get smoother interactions, but I'm not sure what the long-term impact on the screen is.
Regardless of manufacturer (remarkable, boox, supernote…), all e-paper tablets have one major performance problem: quickly scrolling through multiple pages of notes. No idea if the display is the limiting factor, or the cpu, but I’ve hit this issue on all tablets I’ve used. If you like riffling through pages in you paper notebook, you will hit the limit too. I know at least 2 people who stopped using their tablets over time because of this issue.
If this tech helps solve that problem, it’s more important to me than an eink monitor.
Edit: this is mainly important for notes, because sketches, scribbled diagrams and quick notes half-taken in meetings are not really searchable. PDFs and ebooks don’t have this problem.
I play chess on a e-ink smartphone and it is a nice break for my eyes in the evening.
I can not wait for the moment when I would be able to code on a nice colored e-ink desktop screen
BOOX has 13" Tab X C color e-ink reader, which runs Android. I have non-color version (Tab X), and used it few times to work under bright sun (in vim, connected over mosh/ssh to my laptop + wireless keyboard). It was okay experience - not perfect, but quite comfortable.
Be warned: each layer of eink reduces contrast. With 4 layers, the contrast of the color boox tablet is terrible. Also, if you buy from boox, you have to pay about $50 to return it. Not worth it at all in my experience, unless you will always be in direct sunlight.
I went through that and then bought a Carta 1200 display BOOX 13.9 and it's amazing. Black and white only, but the contrast makes the device usable.
If you know you won't return the device, get it on their website because they'll give you extra pen tips and a case. I got mine on Amazon, so I missed out on the extra stuff because of my return experience.
I'm ok with E-paper's capabilities, the problem is cost. Even though it can't display all the content TFT & LCD can, it costs a LOT more. I'm not a hardware person, I just looked into the cost of working on an E-paper based wall-spanning display and just stacking LCD's and doing something ugly was much cheaper. I suspect it has to do with the wholesale economics and its demand.
The article is oddly written. It's not the e-ink display panels that are different; they're off-the-shelf modules from E-Ink that their controller is driving at 75 Hz. Presumably E-Ink themselves know that the panel can be driven at that rate.
And pixel-level addressing isn't innovative either. If you've written on an e-ink tablet and observed that the screen doesn't refresh with every pixel change under the stylus, that is surely because pixels are being toggled individually instead of doing a full screen refresh.
So perhaps the only difference is that it's an open source controller that's competitive with commercial e-ink display controllers? That's no small achievement and worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's not at all made clear by the article.
- Making the project open allows people to reuse displays they already own.
- Others can contribute and build on what’s been created.
- Open source firmware, documentation, and the driver board make development more accessible and help remove barriers that previously slowed community projects.
- It’s designed to work with a variety of electrophoretic panels, not only those from E Ink.
In the long run, this openness will strengthen the ecosystem, making it easier for new ideas to take shape and spread.
I would love to see the performance trade-offs. I don't mind more battery draw, but how many shades of grey does it support? How bad is the ghosting? How white is the background? Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black? How often does it need a full screen refresh?
I use E-ink for the reduced eye strain, the battery draw really does not bother me. I like having devices that last weeks on a single charge, but I would gladly charge them more often for an increased refresh rate.
If your phone screen became a 75hz e-ink display I'm pretty sure that would actually drain your battery faster than currently, which I assume is once per day. Would you accept that compromise of going from weeks to <1 day?
Just an anecdote, but my phone ran out of battery most often when a full charge lasted almost two days. It made me lazy about charging at night. Now I have a wireless charger next to my work computer and in my car, I probably don't need to charge at night any more. Granted, I'd prefer a large battery when I'm traveling, but battery size is less important to me recently.
I think a large part of it is because modos is really good at partial screen updates. This is also, in my understanding, how they achieve the high FPS rate.
The parts of the screen that doesn't update, courtesy of being e-ink, don't use any power at all. LCD will use power if you're looking at a static image, eink won't. And a lot of the time, 95% of the screen is a static image and only 5 percent actually updates. One of Modos' biggest innovations is successfully taking advantage of that.
So it's not actually 75hz all the time then? Depending on what's on the screen?
That's unfortunate.
I'm imagining a fast scrolling game with complex backgrounds where most of the pixels are changing values every frame, I assume it completely breaks down in that case.
It's 75hz when it needs to be, but if 2 frames are mostly identical, it doesn't needlessly move ink around. Effect: 75hz always as far as the user is concerned, but sometimes it uses less power than that when possible, due to very clever optimisations at the firmware level.
Or that's how I understand it anyway.
I saw that Alex Soto himself is in this comment thread, he'll know a lot more than me, I'm just spreading what little knowledge I've gathered from his blog posts and some of the discussions in the modos mastodon server.
I've probably misunderstood a lot of that too, I'm not a hardware engineer, just a lowly java dev with a strong but hobby level interest in eink.
Modos is my dream laptop, but it's currently unclear when that'll become reality.
What about cheaper, bigger displays? I want something that's ~16" but doesn't cost an arm and a leg, for displaying sheet music. Still haven't found anything that's suitable. Plenty of people I know use the 13" iPad Pro, but between the glare (stage lights can be intense) and the roughly-letter-paper size, I still prefer sheets of paper.
does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.
Transflective LCD screens ("e-paper") compete with e-ink currently.
Monochrome e-ink has a better resolution and contrast ratio than old-school LCD devices (I'm comparing my experiences with a Palm Pilot in the 1990s and an Onyx BOOX in the 2020s). LCD can refresh far faster, in the 100+ / 100s Hz range, where typical e-ink refresh rates in my experience have been in the single-digit to low-double-digit Hz range (video is doable but far from ideal).
E-ink also displays quite nicely with a "frontlight", which brightens the background (whiter whites) without washing out the foreground (print/ink). Illuminated LCD displays tend to wash out the dark fields, though I've not viewed e-paper directly and cannot speak to that.
TFA is describing a far higher e-ink refresh rate than I've experienced directly.
I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.
The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.
I suppose if we are at comparable refresh rates to LCDs, next metric to compare against is response time? I see significant amount of trailing while scrolling.
>Modos, a two-person startup with open-hardware roots, thinks it has cracked part of that problem with a development kit capable of driving an e-paper display at refresh rates up to a record 75 hertz.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather see these guys get a couple million than yet another chatgpt wrapper.
The ghosting in that video is unbelievably strong. To the degree that I'd consider that unplayable. It's certainly not the experience the dev intended (given how much effort they put into the moire shader).
Is refresh rate necessarily tied to ghosting? Like higher refresh rate also means higher ghosting?
Eink always could be driven quickly. The issue is that LCDs are more powerful efficient at high refresh rates
EInk needs a lot of power to move the heavier ink particles around. If you are doing that more and more rapidly, then even more power is drawn.
By 75Hz, I'm almost certain that LCD is far more power efficient. The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor, it takes some power to charge but it's exceptionally 'light' compared to eink.
That's why LCDs can go faster and faster. It's just physics. A capacitor / twisted crystal uses less power to turn on or off than EInk.
---------
EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put. So you spend a ton of power moving the ink around and then save lots and lots of power over the next seconds, minutes or more.
That's why EInk is ideal for once-a-day updates of prices (or other retailer tasks). The less you update, the less power used.
Our driver board, under continuous use, draws about 1 to 1.5W. A recent article below goes into some detail about our design choices.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...
Thanks. That article seems to have the quote I was looking for.
> E-ink screens are quite power hungry when it comes to peak current. Modern high-resolution panels can consume >20 W peak.
This is where I was wondering and yeah, 20+W is pretty hefty to support a relatively small 8" EInk screen or something.
All those updates cost all that power as long as updates are occurring. Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
More importantly, it sounds like you've created a full custom FPGA controller over the voltages that go into an EInk display? That's impressive in its own right even if I don't think 75Hz is a good idea lol.
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FPGA or Full Blown Microprocessor are the only choices here. A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism (and probably all the pins required to control the screen. Even a big microprocessor won't have as many low latency pins as an FPGA).
> Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
Yes, that’s definitely something we want to work toward. As the community grows, we hope to tackle these kinds of optimizations together.
> A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism
Yes, precisely for the reasons you stated. We also talk more about it below:
- https://www.youtube.com/live/okjJURIejIY
- https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider?tab=readme-ov-file#desi...
You guys should do a collab with the framework people. I bet they'd be happy to offer an e-ink screen on their laptops just as an option. I've been waiting on an e-ink option for ages.
E-Ink's other advantage is being a non-emissive display. Transflective LCD displays have low contrast. I'm literally holding an e-ink tablet over the transflective monitor I'm typing this on and the difference in contrast at the same ambient illumination is considerable. If the price were right, I'd definitely consider a 75 Hz e-ink monitor even if the power draw was more than a normal LCD monitor.
> EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put.
E-ink's other advantage is that it reads like paper. In a desktop context I could not possibly care less about the power consumption, but being able to read a forum thread, chat channel, HN discussion, etc. without a backlight would make my eyes very happy.
Out of curiosity, if you have 75Hz but you're refreshing sparingly (e.g. you're in VSCode writing, unless you're scrolling, most pixels remain unchanged), wouldn't e-ink remain power-efficient?
Probably. E-ink drivers ("waveforms" is, I believe, the term of art) frequently target refreshes only at the portion of the display that has updated, using rectangles or other more-specific geometries to limit that area.
For text updates, where there's literally a cursor which moves at typing speeds, update frequency is quite low. Where you're updating or paging through documents, paginated navigation (where the whole screen refreshes at once, then remains unchanged for several seconds to minutes or longer) is quite efficient.
That requires the operating system to “hint” to the display that there’s no refresh necessary and for the display to shut down during those times. That’s currently not supported as these kits just take a video signal, but it’s something being worked on for a future version!
Edit: You work on that stuff, right? Then this armchair experting feels silly, just imagine it's for other readers.
It seems much more practical (if a little less power-efficient) to implement the no diff -> no refresh logic for screen regions in the display hardware. The RAM and logic for a display-side framebuffer can't be expensive today, a couple of Euros for the extra board space and chip(s). If that stuff takes off, just additional transistors in the all-in-one ASIC.
For the whole screen, that more or less already exists in laptop hardware: "panel self-refresh". HDMI and DiplayPort might need a new extension or something? Is there anything?
Is this saying that it is an either-or situation? Ideal would be a device that can be written fast when needed, but can also hold. Is there some more fundamental thing at a pixel level that links agility with retention?
E Ink uses microscopic ink bubbles that gets attracted to positive and negative voltages. The ink stays around when attraction stops, holding image. But the ink also require much stronger force than regular LCDs to move around.
LCDs use articulation of liquid crystal chemicals that change shape thus polarization upon application of voltages. They tend to slowly deform back to "the other" state when voltages are removed, and also tend to chemically break down if not moved back to the neutral state. LCDs are driven in pseudo-alternating current for this reason, and never held at either extremes for long time, for this reason.
So you can drive E Ink at 75Hz or whatever, it'll just take more power than it takes LCD to do so, and the last pixel states will persist. Or you can leave LCDs at extremes and disconnect the power, but it will lead to degradation if intentionally used that way.
What you can't do is 1) "watt per frame" figures of LCD, with 2) persistence, and 3) long life. (1, 3) is LCD, (2, 3) is E Ink, (1, 2) is LCD abused as if it's E Ink at expense of rapid degradation, and (1, 2, 3) is the holy grail.
Are LCD screens driven on a pixel by pixel basis, or is the entire screen driven on each refresh? Because the article says they're only causing changed pixels to refresh.
If so, you're probably still right when it comes to watching a video or something, but e-ink could be more efficient for drawing, writing, or reading.
No. I'm saying Tech#1 is more power efficient at 0.05Hz while Tech#2 is more power efficient at 50Hz.
Mysterious future Tech#3 will break the rules. OLED for example uses far less power on black pixels. It's just different.
Mirasol IMOD had 15-60Hz near-zero static power displays.
Color was lower contrast of course.
I had worked on mirasol technology. I believe the colors on newer prototypes were much better than any e-reader tech till date. The issues were related to manufacturing most importantly.
Depending on your requirements, yes: https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/
Flipping pages right now is very annoying. Slow and with the weird redrawing flashing. If they can find a way to fix that it'll be 100% worth it, even if it means high power draw on page changes.
You must have a very old, or very weird device. That sort of behaviour is more than a decade old.
There are refresh modes now which are very good at partial updates.
It's a pretty recent Kobo device.
Kobo devices do a full page refresh periodically, which is probably what you're seeing. iirc it will do it on chapter transitions to make it less jarring.
Basically, it's intentional and relatively rare (unless you have really really short chapters).
I have one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDBYFH81
and a colour Boox. The refresh on the Boox is so fast, you can watch video.
I don't think the Meebook has refresh issues, it's definitely very fast for back/forward. Of course I don't have page turn animations on. I use the kindle app on it, and KOreader. If you get this, know that there is a thread to drop in a script, so the volume buttons page turn correctly when upside down.
If you live in Amazon turf, you can always buy and return if not suitable?
There are some reviews on Amazon.
Do e-ink screens expire? Like screen slowly loose the ability to move the particles around, or the particles loosing the ability to move with charge.
If so, won't high refresh rates degrade eink rapidly.
In the DIY electronics scene, I’ve occasionally come across posts about small cheap e-ink displays essentially burning in and how to try and avoid it (shifting things around like on OLED)
https://github.com/esphome/feature-requests/issues/1109#issu...
This could be actual burn in, or it could be a failure in how they are refreshing (with some potential fix if refreshed properly). I’m not familiar enough to be certain myself, but I personally suspect they are likely being driven too hard and are truly damaged.
In normal e-reader use I’ve never seen this as a practical issue.
I’d recommend watching the video below, where we talk about how fast refresh affects a panel’s lifespan.
https://www.youtube.com/live/okjJURIejIY?feature=shared&t=24...
I have an e-ink display that's now 15 years old. It's definitely a bit less clean, there is sometimes mild ghosting even after doing a full refresh. Doing two refreshes in quick succession fixes that.
I also have another display that was exposed to full sunlight through a window for about 8 years. It's now a bit faded as a result.
All in all, I consider it pretty good.
Yes you can kill or degrade them if you drive them too hard, but achieving higher refresh rates and less ghosting is mostly about finer calibration and faster lookups on bigger tables
> The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor
Would it be possible to re-use the power that is stored in them?
I assume that's what Sharp Memory LCDs are doing to reach their absurdly low power specs.
I dunno if LCD screens are multiplexed, but embedded LCDs could need as many as 8x on/off cycles per pixel (because you save 87% fewer wires if you chain 8x pixels on the same line and then put them on different biases and have weird COMmon pins and rows and crap).
Sharp claims that a bit of storage is on each LCD/capacitor and this saves power somehow with smarter decision making. I assume it's minimizing the wasted power somehow (or even recycling the previous power shoved into the capacitor, which typically just goes to waste).
It's some proprietary formula in any case, so it's all guesswork. Only the Sharp Engineer/Inventor would know for sure.
Nah the energy is negligible.
I thought the issue was duty cycle, and that low refresh rates kept the screen working longer. Has e-ink tech gotten around this?
That's what I'm wondering about. I wouldn't mind temporary higher energy usage to get smoother interactions, but I'm not sure what the long-term impact on the screen is.
I’d recommend watching the video below, where we talk about how fast refresh affects a panel’s lifespan.
https://www.youtube.com/live/okjJURIejIY?feature=shared&t=24...
I have been thinking e-ink would be good for weather reports on boats.
I mean, it depends on just how much power is needed I guess, but I'd be willing to make the trade for e-ink's contrast.
I love my e-ink tablet.
Regardless of manufacturer (remarkable, boox, supernote…), all e-paper tablets have one major performance problem: quickly scrolling through multiple pages of notes. No idea if the display is the limiting factor, or the cpu, but I’ve hit this issue on all tablets I’ve used. If you like riffling through pages in you paper notebook, you will hit the limit too. I know at least 2 people who stopped using their tablets over time because of this issue.
If this tech helps solve that problem, it’s more important to me than an eink monitor.
Edit: this is mainly important for notes, because sketches, scribbled diagrams and quick notes half-taken in meetings are not really searchable. PDFs and ebooks don’t have this problem.
I play chess on a e-ink smartphone and it is a nice break for my eyes in the evening. I can not wait for the moment when I would be able to code on a nice colored e-ink desktop screen
BOOX has 13" Tab X C color e-ink reader, which runs Android. I have non-color version (Tab X), and used it few times to work under bright sun (in vim, connected over mosh/ssh to my laptop + wireless keyboard). It was okay experience - not perfect, but quite comfortable.
Be warned: each layer of eink reduces contrast. With 4 layers, the contrast of the color boox tablet is terrible. Also, if you buy from boox, you have to pay about $50 to return it. Not worth it at all in my experience, unless you will always be in direct sunlight.
I went through that and then bought a Carta 1200 display BOOX 13.9 and it's amazing. Black and white only, but the contrast makes the device usable.
If you know you won't return the device, get it on their website because they'll give you extra pen tips and a case. I got mine on Amazon, so I missed out on the extra stuff because of my return experience.
What e-ink smartphone do you use?
Not OP but I'm on a BigMe HiBreak Pro! Works... well enough.
There are already multiple color e-ink desktop monitor manufacturers... they're just not 75hz.
I'm ok with E-paper's capabilities, the problem is cost. Even though it can't display all the content TFT & LCD can, it costs a LOT more. I'm not a hardware person, I just looked into the cost of working on an E-paper based wall-spanning display and just stacking LCD's and doing something ugly was much cheaper. I suspect it has to do with the wholesale economics and its demand.
The article is oddly written. It's not the e-ink display panels that are different; they're off-the-shelf modules from E-Ink that their controller is driving at 75 Hz. Presumably E-Ink themselves know that the panel can be driven at that rate.
And pixel-level addressing isn't innovative either. If you've written on an e-ink tablet and observed that the screen doesn't refresh with every pixel change under the stylus, that is surely because pixels are being toggled individually instead of doing a full screen refresh.
So perhaps the only difference is that it's an open source controller that's competitive with commercial e-ink display controllers? That's no small achievement and worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's not at all made clear by the article.
I agree with your points. I would add:
- Making the project open allows people to reuse displays they already own.
- Others can contribute and build on what’s been created.
- Open source firmware, documentation, and the driver board make development more accessible and help remove barriers that previously slowed community projects.
- It’s designed to work with a variety of electrophoretic panels, not only those from E Ink.
In the long run, this openness will strengthen the ecosystem, making it easier for new ideas to take shape and spread.
I would love to see the performance trade-offs. I don't mind more battery draw, but how many shades of grey does it support? How bad is the ghosting? How white is the background? Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black? How often does it need a full screen refresh?
> How many shades of grey does it support?
16 levels of grayscale support.
> How bad is the ghosting?
Ghosting depends on the mode you're using and the content.
> How white is the background?
Varies, depends on the panel you're using.
> Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black?
Yes
> How often does it need a full screen refresh?
That's up to you; you can manually clear with a button press, use auto-clear mode, or programmatically control it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoDYEZE7gDA&ab_channel=Modos
How long do the pixels last before they start getting stuck?
I've had over half a dozen E-ink devices, and do not recall ever noticing a stuck pixel.
In your sample size of 7+, do any of those devices refresh 75 times per second?
I've been using a Kobo Libra color lately, and man E-ink has gotten SO GOOD.
It's high resolution, snappy, and the whole package is light as a feather and with batteries that last for ages.
I know some people prefer paper, but I love modern e-readers. They're amazingly tuned.
FPGA and e-ink at 75Hz? It sounds like it will have a high power draw.
I use E-ink for the reduced eye strain, the battery draw really does not bother me. I like having devices that last weeks on a single charge, but I would gladly charge them more often for an increased refresh rate.
If your phone screen became a 75hz e-ink display I'm pretty sure that would actually drain your battery faster than currently, which I assume is once per day. Would you accept that compromise of going from weeks to <1 day?
Curious.
Just an anecdote, but my phone ran out of battery most often when a full charge lasted almost two days. It made me lazy about charging at night. Now I have a wireless charger next to my work computer and in my car, I probably don't need to charge at night any more. Granted, I'd prefer a large battery when I'm traveling, but battery size is less important to me recently.
I'm curious too. But I would definitely take the risk and purchase such a device, so long as it comes with an EMR stylus.
Our driver board, under continuous use, draws about 1 to 1.5W. A recent article below goes into some detail about our design choices.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...
Compared to other e-ink devices, yes.
Compared to LCD, oled or what have you, my understanding is that it uses significantly less.
LCDs can have superior power draw than EInk.
See the microwatts of power that Sharps MemoryLCD displays have. They often beat comparable EInk screens in power draw.
Is that because it doesnt have a backlight?
I think a large part of it is because modos is really good at partial screen updates. This is also, in my understanding, how they achieve the high FPS rate.
The parts of the screen that doesn't update, courtesy of being e-ink, don't use any power at all. LCD will use power if you're looking at a static image, eink won't. And a lot of the time, 95% of the screen is a static image and only 5 percent actually updates. One of Modos' biggest innovations is successfully taking advantage of that.
So it's not actually 75hz all the time then? Depending on what's on the screen?
That's unfortunate.
I'm imagining a fast scrolling game with complex backgrounds where most of the pixels are changing values every frame, I assume it completely breaks down in that case.
It's 75hz when it needs to be, but if 2 frames are mostly identical, it doesn't needlessly move ink around. Effect: 75hz always as far as the user is concerned, but sometimes it uses less power than that when possible, due to very clever optimisations at the firmware level.
Or that's how I understand it anyway.
I saw that Alex Soto himself is in this comment thread, he'll know a lot more than me, I'm just spreading what little knowledge I've gathered from his blog posts and some of the discussions in the modos mastodon server.
I've probably misunderstood a lot of that too, I'm not a hardware engineer, just a lowly java dev with a strong but hobby level interest in eink.
Modos is my dream laptop, but it's currently unclear when that'll become reality.
Again, Alex Soto will know more.
What about cheaper, bigger displays? I want something that's ~16" but doesn't cost an arm and a leg, for displaying sheet music. Still haven't found anything that's suitable. Plenty of people I know use the 13" iPad Pro, but between the glare (stage lights can be intense) and the roughly-letter-paper size, I still prefer sheets of paper.
How about mobile monitors? Like Uperfect?
I want color e-paper that can show large paintings, like 30” x 40”. When is that coming out finally !!
does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.
Transflective LCD screens ("e-paper") compete with e-ink currently.
Monochrome e-ink has a better resolution and contrast ratio than old-school LCD devices (I'm comparing my experiences with a Palm Pilot in the 1990s and an Onyx BOOX in the 2020s). LCD can refresh far faster, in the 100+ / 100s Hz range, where typical e-ink refresh rates in my experience have been in the single-digit to low-double-digit Hz range (video is doable but far from ideal).
E-ink also displays quite nicely with a "frontlight", which brightens the background (whiter whites) without washing out the foreground (print/ink). Illuminated LCD displays tend to wash out the dark fields, though I've not viewed e-paper directly and cannot speak to that.
TFA is describing a far higher e-ink refresh rate than I've experienced directly.
I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.
The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.
I suppose if we are at comparable refresh rates to LCDs, next metric to compare against is response time? I see significant amount of trailing while scrolling.
Response time is on par with LCDs - the trailing you’re seeing is ghosting, which in most situations is not common but does occur occasionally.
>Modos, a two-person startup with open-hardware roots, thinks it has cracked part of that problem with a development kit capable of driving an e-paper display at refresh rates up to a record 75 hertz.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather see these guys get a couple million than yet another chatgpt wrapper.
Nice, they have a video of playing Return of the Obra Dinn on the screen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw
The ghosting in that video is unbelievably strong. To the degree that I'd consider that unplayable. It's certainly not the experience the dev intended (given how much effort they put into the moire shader).
Is refresh rate necessarily tied to ghosting? Like higher refresh rate also means higher ghosting?
Another gameplay video I'd recommend seeing is Blanc: https://www.youtube.com/live/9PAKPfHBa5Q?feature=shared&t=11...
That game is beautiful, more so on the eink display...
Clearly there are some issues with ghosting?
Fun that this is getting the attention it deserves. I order the kit and am excited to get it.
Don't want 75Hz or even 10Hz from my Epaper. Want a maximum battery life, 1Hz is plenty
This is great, but I see lots of ghosting and apparently low contrast. Sad to see no mention of it in the article.