this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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(page 2) 34 comments
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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (4 children)

How many seconds per frame does it get?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

Not sure yet, we're still waiting for the first frame to finish.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (5 children)

If the answer matters then your use case isn’t this monitor’s use case. If you spend all day in Excel, or an IDE, something like that, then it could be awesome for eye strain reduction.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago

I've never had eye strain from a CRT or LCD.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe in 30 years when the patents expire.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not going to happen. The fog is coming.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can guess what you are alluding to. But explain anyways.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What is the refresh time? They carefully avoid mentioning that. There's a comparable Pimoroni monitor whose refresh takes 14 seconds so I'd call it a static display rather than a computer monitor.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The article mentions another display with a 33 Hz refresh rate. But be aware that there would be significant ghosting even just scrolling a page of text, more so than even a measly 33 Hz refresh rate would lead you to believe.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm happy with say 3 hz, fast enough to not be too annoying when flipping pages while reading. It's fine to not be good for video. What I really want is a 16 inch or so e-reader though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'd really like a 20" or so e-ink screen as a second/third monitor. I'd have one for video and whatnot, and the other for text.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

In another comment response, I linked to some place (DASUNG) out of China that makes eInk monitors.

They make 25" eInk monitors in both black-and-white and color. That's $1,500 and up, though.

Personally, for me, it wouldn't make sense. The real selling point of eInk for me is:

  • It's reflective, and eInk is almost the only kind of reflective display out there. That means that it works reasonably outdoors under sunlight and glare, without having to blast enough light to overwhelm the sunlight. But...with a desktop, and especially mixed types of monitors, you're not going to be lugging those monitors outside under the sun.

  • If you're looking at mostly static images in a lit area, eInk has extraordinarily low average power use, since it only consumes power when updating the image on the screen. That makes it a great fit for e-readers. But...for a fixed computer monitor, I don't care much about power consumption.

And with that, you get drawbacks of having limited refresh rates, limited size, high price, limited or no color (and if you have color, worse contrast) and not being able to display brightly-lit, emissive stuff.

I mean, yes, eInk does look like paper, and if you're really set on that particular aesthetic, then it'd have some value there. But for me, that value is just really limited. Yeah, it'd be kind of novel for text to look like it's on paper, but it's just not a game-changer.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Boox Tab Ultra C aint half bad

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

These guys make eInk monitors:

https://shop.dasung.com/

if you can live with a black-and-white eInk monitor, they say that their fastest model can do 60 Hz.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

That is a video of a much smaller monitor. It does show reasonably responsive refresh. Do you have one of the 25.3 inch monitor described in the article?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Maybe it’d be useful as a low powered interactive kiosk display? Price needs to come down tremendously before this thing becomes competitive.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I remember when OLED was that extensive...

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Obligatory Linus video for a similar, but not identical, monitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUxxn53mBE

This Dasung model is mentioned at the bottom of the article. TL;DW: These things have the exact list of drawbacks you think they do including miserable contrast, color accuracy so bad it's fallen off the bottom of the chart, a low refresh rate, and quite a bit of ghosting. So it's awful, but surprisingly not as awful as you'd think if your primary experience is an e-reader form the first couple of generations. Linus being Linus he does attempt to game on it and gets... a result... but this is a display technology with niche applications and still best suited to displaying mostly static content.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Thanks, that was actually a pretty good look at them.

I do think that they did raise one point that I wouldn't have thought of. The color eInk doesn't have great resolution, but they were viewing old comics printed using halftoning (what the guy in the video was calling "cheap dot patterns"). Comics at the time were, had to be, designed to deal with being printed that way, and that results in images that could deal with really low color resolution. So specifically for viewing them, the color eInk display was a pretty good match for the content.

Problem is, I just can't see how many people would buy a monitor just to view old-style comics.

I think that eInk is a good match for a portable e-reader that you potentially take outside, where it's already available in the role. Outside of that...

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Looks awesome on the photo, but I guess I have better uses for such money and night sky and trees for enjoying what I see.

Also lower refresh rates are not such a terrible problem when it's not a CRT blinking in front of you.

Grainy look is kinda fine. That's about the "compromises" part.

So a cheaper one I'd probably use. Being part of some dream computer to be useful in transport, while walking, at home, with battery life longer than nuclear fallout effects and unbreakable box and EOL date of the kind castles in Europe have. Otherwise nah, many other things to break my eyes against.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

What's the refresh rate and can I play Hunt showdown on it? They say a similar model has a 33hz refresh rate but don't mention this model

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't know if you can play games on this, but I know you definitely won't want to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Choice of Games makes games that are unchanging text. You could probably do okay with that.

Actually...come to think of it, they should figure out some way to hook up with an e-reader manufacturer, sell their games in those stores. Like, those games also have basically zilch by way of memory or computational requirements, and I bet that the same kind of person who'd buy a dedicated e-reader to read books would probably be more-interested in a text-heavy game.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Please note that even at 30hz eink displays still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency

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