6 ms·

E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays.

E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.

Double_a_92 9y ago
Have you ever played gameboy as a kid?
- andai 9y ago
  Transflective LCDs are another tech that didn't go anywhere. It lets you use LCDs outdoors by reflecting the natural light, which solves the problems of color and video. There were even models with solar cells embedded, so not only you get longer battery life but recharge in the sun.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    I think that's what the Pebble Time watches used, a transflective Sharp Memory LCD (that Pebble calls "e-paper"). In direct sunlight, the screens are actually easier to read, and the colors are really vibrant. Indoors, it's a bit dim without using a backlight, though still better than a blank screen. It seems to be the key to the Pebble's 7 - 10 day battery life even with an always-on display.
vortico 9y ago
I'm out of date. Does E-ink still have ~500ms latency of refreshing the screen? If so, that's the #1 reason I believed it wouldn't be successful when I used them 6 years ago.
- theshrike79 9y ago
  But they're still amazing for status displays, e-readers and stuff that don't need low latencies. What's keeping them from being more popular is the price, anything over a 1" e-ink display costs a literal arm and a leg.
  - vortico 9y ago
    I would argue that e-readers actually do need reasonably low latencies. The reason I still read books is because I can flip through pages quickly and glance over 20 pages a second as I look for the page with a certain pattern of text or an image.
    - tajen 9y ago
      but you don’t need that for signage, calendar on your door, paper decorations on your bedroom walls, meeting room reservation sheets...
      - vortico 9y ago
        Are those use cases significant enough to make e-ink "take the world by storm"?
    - theshrike79 9y ago
      IMO eInk readers are only good for "linear fiction", books that are read from start to finish. Anything that needs to be browsed or flipped through, nope. Very few electronic versions are usable in this case, be they normal LCD screens or eInk.
  - j_s 9y ago
    Not sure how specific you're trying to be - here's a specific example of 4.2" at $35. I actually would be interested to see a graph of cost-per-square-inch to see where the arms and legs actually do come into play. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400x300-4-2inch-E-Ink-display-module-SPI-Without-backlight-Compatible-with-variuous-board-Ultra-low/32827172081.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400x300-4-2inch-E-Ink-displa... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721766
- IshKebab 9y ago
  They're a lot faster than they used to be. Maybe 200ms? Still not as fast as video. And I don't know why everyone seems to think they aren't successful. Amazon sells a ton of Kindles. They're very successful.
- olavgg 9y ago
  There is a Norwegian startup that has decreased the latency dramatically. https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/ https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo
  - Terretta 9y ago
    I have one. Really is remarkable. No meaningful latency while writing unless you draw fast large figures while watching for lag. Upsides: Feels like pencil on paper. With iPad Pro I keep going back to paper. With this... it’s paper. Downsides: Mobile software clunky, doesn’t connect to all WiFi, hardware paging buttons should not have been on bottom.
    - luck_fenovo 9y ago
      I have one too. The drawing/writing is pretty great, though once it's transferred back to a PC, the resolution seems kind of poor. Not too bad, but I'd like it to be smoother. The only other major issue is software stability especially when reading. I've had it hardlock while reading something, then have to wait for the battery to drain because it won't respond to any input, then once I have it back up it forgot where I left off so I lost progress. So for the time being it sits, though once a software update or 2 come out I'll try again.
    - agentultra 9y ago
      I have one too. I love it. I was blown away when I was able to write some technical specifications in emacs, render them to PDF and share them to the device, then go for a coffee and review my work. I can markup my documents, sync them back to my machine, etc. I do wish the resolutions of the documents on my desktop were better. I've drafted presentations on the device while thinking. I vastly prefer paper for thinking. This device is perfect for that. I just wish I could do more with it. I want to be able to hook up a cloud service to interpret my math hand-writing, run it on my theorem prover or checker, and return the results, etc.... much like what people were doing in Xerox Parc ages ago. There's so much potential here.
    - drcongo 9y ago
swyx 9y ago
100% agree. imagine my shock when as a young technology analyst I discovered that E-Ink was a smallcap tech company in Taiwan and basically produced kindle displays, store price tags and that cool double sided phone that one time. I thought it was a huge deal when they managed to do color E-Ink. but no one cared.
- wrinkl3 9y ago
  Around 2010 I assumed it would a matter of a couple of years until we were reading comic books on our Kindle Color ink tablets.
  - deusum 9y ago
    Still waiting on that E-Ink phone that lasts a month between charges.
    - lucaspiller 9y ago
      The Motorola F3 is that phone, if all you care about are phone calls (it can’t really do SMS). You are probably better getting a similar era Nokia though, as the battery life was about the same and they were a lot more functional.
    - frik 9y ago
      I bought a Motorola F3 phone like 10 years ago for relatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone E-ink display, good for elder people, you can drop it from 100 feets height, or run a tank over it, drop it in a pool. It will survive.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  You can buy 3-color (white, black, and read all over) ones for ... I want to say about 20 yuan which is like $3? I haven't looked into driving them yet; that's step 3 and I'm still on step 1 (monochrome OLEDs) but I think you might have to do some funky temperature adjustment stuff to get good results out of them...maybe that hasn't quite been integrated into the display controller chips yet?
mseebach 9y ago
The Kindle and it's e-reader kin are pretty successful? I think the problem is that a device with an e-ink display is necessarily single purpose. General purpose devices can't use e-ink, they need to support video playback and browsers with full colour.
- Andrenid 9y ago
  I'd love an e-ink dashboard in my car so it's not so glary, e-ink tablet that does a bit more than a Kindle but isn't a full media player (super thin super light with basic browser for wiki, news, rss, and email), ~20" e-ink screen on the inside of my apartment door with calendar and notifications and todolist, there's so many cool things we could do with the tech if we could produce it cheaper and bigger. Not everything needs to be able to play video.
  - oeuviz 9y ago
    I'd really love that too! And if it was for color, I would really appreaciate a photoframe as I just think a backlight is not needed for these things and is just annoying at night. I really do not care about video, most relevant content is pretty static and does not even require the already possible 4-5 changes per second.
  - SteveMoody73 9y ago
    Have you seen reMarkable? Doesn't seem to have a browser from what I can see but more capable than a kindle. https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/
    - michaelmior 9y ago
      I got mine a few weeks ago. It's true there's no browser but the note-taking capabilities are great. It's running Linux so I can only assuming it's a matter of time before someone starts releasing some custom updates.
      - mattferderer 9y ago
Yizahi 9y ago
I think it was one of the technologies that are actually hard. So they got where we are with low/medium effort and expenses but unwilling to go further because they can't or don't have money. I suspect color eink tanked because of this.
krylon 9y ago
Many years ago, I heard a politician give a speech, and he used a phrase there (I am translating from German, so it might sound a little clumsy): The worst enemy of Good is Better. Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".
- Itaxpica 9y ago
  A comparable English expression is “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, which I think every software engineer should have engraved on to their monitors as a reminder.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    A slightly different twist, but also a popular idiom, is that "excellence is good enough". [I'm frantically resisting the urge to redraft that sentence]
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  The common English idiom I’ve heard that is similar to the 2nd one is “‘Good Enough’ never is”, which is grammatically a bit strange but a fun one.
herbst 9y ago
Still strong and evolving with smart watches and eReaders isnt it?
bitwize 9y ago
For me it was transflective LCD. Very low power compared to IPS panels, high contrast in direct light. Not quite as low power as e-ink, but it looked like e-ink and had a high refresh rate.
amerkhalid 9y ago
I love E-Ink display. Fell in love with it when I bought my first Kindle. I could read all day and my eyes won't be tired at all. Since then I had been waiting for E-Ink based laptop for work. It doesn't need to play videos or even display color. As a backend developer, I can live with grey scale display. It doesn't need high refresh rates either. But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen.
- mycat 9y ago
  I thought recently they made e ink monitor. But not laptop though.. More like a giant tablet http://www.dasung.com/english/ http://www.dasung.com/english/
  - lj3 9y ago
    Dasung is on their second version of the display. If you look up youtube reviews of the second version, I think you'll be disappointed with what you find. The refresh rate continues to be a major hurdle.
- lj3 9y ago
  Will an android tablet do? https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-13-3-e-reader https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-13-3-e-re...
  - amerkhalid 9y ago
    Tablet might be fun to play with, but really want full replacement for work laptop. But e-ink monitors could be useful, I'll have to look more closely into that.
- poutrathor 9y ago
  I arrive a bit late to the party. I have the same wish and though about startup it. So I digged around last year > But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen Some Chinese are trying to do that already : Dasung-Ink-Paperlike-13-3-Monitor There are reviews around the web about it and you can buy one on Amazon. I have not do it yet for the price is still high at 1200$ I also met with a great manager from the Taiwan Eink company. Eink technologies (for they have several similar ones) are mechanical based which implies many constraints. For the stories the MIT guys who develop it spend around 20 years on it before passing the baby on to the Tawain based company. Except Amazon, most big companies are not pushing it, I guess because pictures and videos are so prevalent nowadays.
gilbetron 9y ago
E-Ink is a technology that couldn't be developed well enough, it just never got there. I mean, I love my Kindle paperwhite, but without color and rapid (60hz+) refresh, it won't ever be quite good enough. It's a fascinating case of a technology path that fizzles out.
swsieber 9y ago
E-Ink never took off because once it reached a profitable niche, it stopped being developed. And it's patent encumbered. I expect E-Ink development will resume around 2030 or so if it first appeared in 2010.
ddlatham 9y ago
I wish I could get a programmable e-ink display at a reasonable price, that I could mount on the wall or desk. To show quotes, photos, weather, calendar, anything that is nice to have passively updated in the environment, using low power, and not emitting its own light.
- nicolerenee 9y ago
  This is something I would love to have. The possibilities are endless. Status screens, quotes, project progress, server health, etc. I really wish something like this existed that I could use to show some basic info that would be nice to have a screen at home, but not so nice a monitor is even a remote possibility.
dm319 9y ago
Yes, where's my 6" Palmtop device with e-ink, keyboard and Linux?
- lj3 9y ago
  https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-6-8 https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-6-8

Double_a_92 9y ago

Have you ever played gameboy as a kid?

andai 9y ago
Transflective LCDs are another tech that didn't go anywhere. It lets you use LCDs outdoors by reflecting the natural light, which solves the problems of color and video. There were even models with solar cells embedded, so not only you get longer battery life but recharge in the sun.
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  I think that's what the Pebble Time watches used, a transflective Sharp Memory LCD (that Pebble calls "e-paper"). In direct sunlight, the screens are actually easier to read, and the colors are really vibrant. Indoors, it's a bit dim without using a backlight, though still better than a blank screen. It seems to be the key to the Pebble's 7 - 10 day battery life even with an always-on display.

vortico 9y ago

I'm out of date. Does E-ink still have ~500ms latency of refreshing the screen? If so, that's the #1 reason I believed it wouldn't be successful when I used them 6 years ago.

theshrike79 9y ago
But they're still amazing for status displays, e-readers and stuff that don't need low latencies. What's keeping them from being more popular is the price, anything over a 1" e-ink display costs a literal arm and a leg.
- vortico 9y ago
  I would argue that e-readers actually do need reasonably low latencies. The reason I still read books is because I can flip through pages quickly and glance over 20 pages a second as I look for the page with a certain pattern of text or an image.
  - tajen 9y ago
    but you don’t need that for signage, calendar on your door, paper decorations on your bedroom walls, meeting room reservation sheets...
    - vortico 9y ago
      Are those use cases significant enough to make e-ink "take the world by storm"?
  - theshrike79 9y ago
    IMO eInk readers are only good for "linear fiction", books that are read from start to finish. Anything that needs to be browsed or flipped through, nope. Very few electronic versions are usable in this case, be they normal LCD screens or eInk.
- j_s 9y ago
  Not sure how specific you're trying to be - here's a specific example of 4.2" at $35. I actually would be interested to see a graph of cost-per-square-inch to see where the arms and legs actually do come into play. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400x300-4-2inch-E-Ink-display-module-SPI-Without-backlight-Compatible-with-variuous-board-Ultra-low/32827172081.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400x300-4-2inch-E-Ink-displa... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721766
IshKebab 9y ago
They're a lot faster than they used to be. Maybe 200ms? Still not as fast as video. And I don't know why everyone seems to think they aren't successful. Amazon sells a ton of Kindles. They're very successful.
olavgg 9y ago
There is a Norwegian startup that has decreased the latency dramatically. https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/ https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo
- Terretta 9y ago
  I have one. Really is remarkable. No meaningful latency while writing unless you draw fast large figures while watching for lag. Upsides: Feels like pencil on paper. With iPad Pro I keep going back to paper. With this... it’s paper. Downsides: Mobile software clunky, doesn’t connect to all WiFi, hardware paging buttons should not have been on bottom.
  - luck_fenovo 9y ago
    I have one too. The drawing/writing is pretty great, though once it's transferred back to a PC, the resolution seems kind of poor. Not too bad, but I'd like it to be smoother. The only other major issue is software stability especially when reading. I've had it hardlock while reading something, then have to wait for the battery to drain because it won't respond to any input, then once I have it back up it forgot where I left off so I lost progress. So for the time being it sits, though once a software update or 2 come out I'll try again.
  - agentultra 9y ago
    I have one too. I love it. I was blown away when I was able to write some technical specifications in emacs, render them to PDF and share them to the device, then go for a coffee and review my work. I can markup my documents, sync them back to my machine, etc. I do wish the resolutions of the documents on my desktop were better. I've drafted presentations on the device while thinking. I vastly prefer paper for thinking. This device is perfect for that. I just wish I could do more with it. I want to be able to hook up a cloud service to interpret my math hand-writing, run it on my theorem prover or checker, and return the results, etc.... much like what people were doing in Xerox Parc ages ago. There's so much potential here.
  - drcongo 9y ago

swyx 9y ago

100% agree. imagine my shock when as a young technology analyst I discovered that E-Ink was a smallcap tech company in Taiwan and basically produced kindle displays, store price tags and that cool double sided phone that one time. I thought it was a huge deal when they managed to do color E-Ink. but no one cared.

wrinkl3 9y ago
Around 2010 I assumed it would a matter of a couple of years until we were reading comic books on our Kindle Color ink tablets.
- deusum 9y ago
  Still waiting on that E-Ink phone that lasts a month between charges.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    The Motorola F3 is that phone, if all you care about are phone calls (it can’t really do SMS). You are probably better getting a similar era Nokia though, as the battery life was about the same and they were a lot more functional.
  - frik 9y ago
    I bought a Motorola F3 phone like 10 years ago for relatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone E-ink display, good for elder people, you can drop it from 100 feets height, or run a tank over it, drop it in a pool. It will survive.
leggomylibro 9y ago
You can buy 3-color (white, black, and read all over) ones for ... I want to say about 20 yuan which is like $3? I haven't looked into driving them yet; that's step 3 and I'm still on step 1 (monochrome OLEDs) but I think you might have to do some funky temperature adjustment stuff to get good results out of them...maybe that hasn't quite been integrated into the display controller chips yet?

mseebach 9y ago

The Kindle and it's e-reader kin are pretty successful? I think the problem is that a device with an e-ink display is necessarily single purpose. General purpose devices can't use e-ink, they need to support video playback and browsers with full colour.

Andrenid 9y ago
I'd love an e-ink dashboard in my car so it's not so glary, e-ink tablet that does a bit more than a Kindle but isn't a full media player (super thin super light with basic browser for wiki, news, rss, and email), ~20" e-ink screen on the inside of my apartment door with calendar and notifications and todolist, there's so many cool things we could do with the tech if we could produce it cheaper and bigger. Not everything needs to be able to play video.
- oeuviz 9y ago
  I'd really love that too! And if it was for color, I would really appreaciate a photoframe as I just think a backlight is not needed for these things and is just annoying at night. I really do not care about video, most relevant content is pretty static and does not even require the already possible 4-5 changes per second.
- SteveMoody73 9y ago
  Have you seen reMarkable? Doesn't seem to have a browser from what I can see but more capable than a kindle. https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    I got mine a few weeks ago. It's true there's no browser but the note-taking capabilities are great. It's running Linux so I can only assuming it's a matter of time before someone starts releasing some custom updates.
    - mattferderer 9y ago

Yizahi 9y ago

I think it was one of the technologies that are actually hard. So they got where we are with low/medium effort and expenses but unwilling to go further because they can't or don't have money. I suspect color eink tanked because of this.

krylon 9y ago

Many years ago, I heard a politician give a speech, and he used a phrase there (I am translating from German, so it might sound a little clumsy): The worst enemy of Good is Better. Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".

Itaxpica 9y ago
A comparable English expression is “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, which I think every software engineer should have engraved on to their monitors as a reminder.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  A slightly different twist, but also a popular idiom, is that "excellence is good enough". [I'm frantically resisting the urge to redraft that sentence]
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
abritinthebay 9y ago
The common English idiom I’ve heard that is similar to the 2nd one is “‘Good Enough’ never is”, which is grammatically a bit strange but a fun one.

herbst 9y ago

Still strong and evolving with smart watches and eReaders isnt it?

bitwize 9y ago

For me it was transflective LCD. Very low power compared to IPS panels, high contrast in direct light. Not quite as low power as e-ink, but it looked like e-ink and had a high refresh rate.

amerkhalid 9y ago

I love E-Ink display. Fell in love with it when I bought my first Kindle. I could read all day and my eyes won't be tired at all. Since then I had been waiting for E-Ink based laptop for work. It doesn't need to play videos or even display color. As a backend developer, I can live with grey scale display. It doesn't need high refresh rates either. But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen.

mycat 9y ago
I thought recently they made e ink monitor. But not laptop though.. More like a giant tablet http://www.dasung.com/english/ http://www.dasung.com/english/
- lj3 9y ago
  Dasung is on their second version of the display. If you look up youtube reviews of the second version, I think you'll be disappointed with what you find. The refresh rate continues to be a major hurdle.
lj3 9y ago
Will an android tablet do? https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-13-3-e-reader https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-13-3-e-re...
- amerkhalid 9y ago
  Tablet might be fun to play with, but really want full replacement for work laptop. But e-ink monitors could be useful, I'll have to look more closely into that.
poutrathor 9y ago
I arrive a bit late to the party. I have the same wish and though about startup it. So I digged around last year > But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen Some Chinese are trying to do that already : Dasung-Ink-Paperlike-13-3-Monitor There are reviews around the web about it and you can buy one on Amazon. I have not do it yet for the price is still high at 1200$ I also met with a great manager from the Taiwan Eink company. Eink technologies (for they have several similar ones) are mechanical based which implies many constraints. For the stories the MIT guys who develop it spend around 20 years on it before passing the baby on to the Tawain based company. Except Amazon, most big companies are not pushing it, I guess because pictures and videos are so prevalent nowadays.

gilbetron 9y ago

E-Ink is a technology that couldn't be developed well enough, it just never got there. I mean, I love my Kindle paperwhite, but without color and rapid (60hz+) refresh, it won't ever be quite good enough. It's a fascinating case of a technology path that fizzles out.

swsieber 9y ago

E-Ink never took off because once it reached a profitable niche, it stopped being developed. And it's patent encumbered. I expect E-Ink development will resume around 2030 or so if it first appeared in 2010.

ddlatham 9y ago

I wish I could get a programmable e-ink display at a reasonable price, that I could mount on the wall or desk. To show quotes, photos, weather, calendar, anything that is nice to have passively updated in the environment, using low power, and not emitting its own light.

nicolerenee 9y ago
This is something I would love to have. The possibilities are endless. Status screens, quotes, project progress, server health, etc. I really wish something like this existed that I could use to show some basic info that would be nice to have a screen at home, but not so nice a monitor is even a remote possibility.

dm319 9y ago

Yes, where's my 6" Palmtop device with e-ink, keyboard and Linux?

lj3 9y ago
https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-6-8 https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-6-8