312
submitted 2 years ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[-] itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 116 points 2 years ago

my HP version won't let me read a book without replacing the Cyan e-ink

[-] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 26 points 2 years ago

No, it's fine. The text is black. Can it display just the black?

[-] harry315@feddit.de 24 points 2 years ago

HP being like: ... and I took that very personally

[-] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 9 points 2 years ago

Hahahaha! Wait till hp makes these, and charges you a subscription to display anything.

[-] Hello_there@kbin.social 100 points 2 years ago

Someone would make a killing of they created an easy to use home dashboard with an eink display. Low power, 8x11, customizable with Android apps. Refreshes once a minute. Has weather and traffic and calendar in the morning, and displays photos in the afternoon.
LCDs are terrible in terms of power consumption. But a big, slow eink would be great.

[-] echo64@lemmy.world 45 points 2 years ago

Android eink tablets already exist, have done for years. It's expensive and doesn't work as well as you want. The eink company owns patents that keeps everything expensive.

[-] Hello_there@kbin.social 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

See, I don't want a tablet. Tablet implies fast refresh rates, minimal ghosting, fast processor, etc.
It's a different purpose than a screen I can stick on a wall and only look at a few times in the morning. That lower quality on the panel and hardware should bring costs on the tech lower.
Hell, I don't even really need 8 shades of color.
If someone can stick a low power processor on there and make it run on some rechargeable AAAs, even better.

[-] echo64@lemmy.world 25 points 2 years ago

Just to be clear, the costs are in licensing the eink tech from the company that owns the patents. The processors in the eink tablets available today are not expensive processors.

[-] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 2 years ago

It's the display that is prohibitively and arbitrarily expensive. None of the other variables matter since all of the low power / retain image advantage is solely because of that display.

And large e-ink displays will remain niche, simply because of the company's pricing.

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[-] overzeetop@lemmy.world 41 points 2 years ago

“I own the only patent - I will license it for just $10/square inch.”

And that’s a short story about how eInk never got commercialized.

[-] christophski@feddit.uk 11 points 2 years ago

I'm not so sure, I think it would go the way of smart speakers - a solution without much of a problem to solve

[-] bitsplease@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

You say that as though people aren't buying the shit out of them

I agree it's kind of a dumb product, but people buy the shit out of smart speakers. Their market size in 2022 was 10.8 billion USD and rising every year.

I could absolutely see a consumer driven home wall panel selling like crazy - I have a HA driven wall panel at my house and every guest thinks it's the coolest thing and asks where they can get one

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[-] phx@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 years ago

I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.

It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big

  • 8 colors is pretty limited, especially when it's a specific 8 colors (not just 8 max).
  • Refresh times are slow
  • The pico memory and storage are limited
  • Due to the above, mine ran in two cycles with a reboot between to clear memory. One to pull images from my website and another to cycle through existing pictures until it needs to grab more
  • Images needed to be converted to the appropriate size+ 8-color palette and dithered etc beforehand into a format the pico can read (hence then being on my website where they were reduced to an uncompressed palletized BMP)

Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.

Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar

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[-] demesisx@infosec.pub 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Sounds cool until you realize that you’d have to turn on the lights to read it at night.

If only there wAs soMe technOLogy out thEre already Doing that…

[-] Rockslide0482@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 years ago

You're on the same wavelength as me. My ideal product is an e-ink display to stick in the kitchen or some other high traffic area to display relevant family information and with touch controls to do some fairly basic things like toggle digital switches/dials or just switch to alternative dashboards. If I could find a touch-enabled e-ink display that's a good size but not stupid expensive (keeping in mind this is absolutely a luxury item so I'm not looking to shell out any significant volume of monies on the thing), I could attach one to a Pi and make one myself.

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[-] radarsat1@lemmy.ml 86 points 2 years ago

I spend my days in emacs and terminal emulators and I want this very badly in a laptop form factor so I can comfortably work outside.

[-] a1studmuffin@aussie.zone 10 points 2 years ago

Yeah I'm really surprised they didn't go with a laptop screen rather than a monitor designed to be left in a fixed place! Whoever's first to market with a good laptop e-ink display is going to rake it in.

[-] superflippy@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago

I suspect that it’s simpler to make a standalone display as proof of concept. If it’s popular enough, laptops could follow. This monitor will be great for film sets & videos. No flicker!

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago

Framework should offer an e-ink display as a component you can drop in to their laptops.

[-] Wats0ns@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 years ago

It's already possible, with a remarkable 2 and a special vnc client https://github.com/matteodelabre/vnsee. Though I have not tried it yet, it looks great, but the screen is way smaller than an usual pc monitor

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[-] Norgur@kbin.social 47 points 2 years ago

The title really grinds my gears... "New eInk display is basically like a bigger version of another eInk display"...

[-] eltimablo@kbin.social 34 points 2 years ago

E-ink technology uses some pretty fascinating chemistry to display more natural paper-like on-screen textures as opposed to regular digital Word documents and PDFs.

I have a feeling this author might just be fucking stupid.

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

Wait... Is this... Like that kindle thong mayhaps? Me am the smartyballs thinkerpersen!

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[-] sepiroth154@feddit.nl 30 points 2 years ago

So LED screens are basically just 25 inc lamps?

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[-] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago

Any mention of the refresh rate? I didn’t see that in this article and thats usually the downside. Completely fine for books, comics etc but maybe not the best for a computer monitor

[-] Nioxic@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago

Its not on their website either

It must be ... bad.

Its also 1750 bucks.. lol

It might be more of a proof of concept... It's the first of it's kind, so I'd check back where this tech is a few years down the line

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

We can see it refreshing in the video, the "refresh rate" doesn't look much better than an e-reader and the device is very expensive, but it's the first of its kind. Honestly if it was the price of a regular OLED screen of 25" I'd consider buying it to code.

[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 4 points 2 years ago

Second on if affordable, I’d buy it… and I don’t even code much anymore. For anything that doesn’t need to be rapidly refreshed (I.E just about anything that’s not watching/editing videos or playing games), this will be so much more comfortable for extended use!

It can hit a smooth 30 SPF

[-] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 years ago

Sadly, the technology stagnated for quite some time. This along with the physical nature of how the displays function (moving the pigment particles closer and further from the viewing plane) makes high refresh rates unlikely.

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[-] johnthedoe@lemmy.ml 22 points 2 years ago

Slap a battery in it a call it an e-newspaper

[-] kitonthenet@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago

I would seriously kill for an e-newspaper ngl

[-] Kichae@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've been waiting for a flexible, two page, tabloid sized e-newspaper for, like, 20 years now.

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[-] Rokin@lemm.ee 19 points 2 years ago

This is the tech I've been waiting for

[-] OofShoot@beehaw.org 8 points 2 years ago

I have been wanting one of these things for so fucking long. I can't wait!

[-] kitonthenet@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago

Does it have a frame rate of like 5? I can’t see any info in the article abt it

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 years ago

The video makes it look reasonable. I could see this being good for coding work - soothing and still fast enough. But not for the $2000+ they'll be charging.

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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
312 points (100.0% liked)

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