Waaaaaaaaay too expensive, but I'd love it if big eink displays became a thing, even with shit refresh rates, mostly because I want some for displaying Home Assistant dashboards.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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I bought a trmnl and it's pricey but works pretty good. I've mostly been using a few out-of-the-box plugins for it.
There is a selfhosted/offline version of the server you can run for it, so it can be 'offline' in theory. I keep meaning to mess with it more but haven't put the time aside.
Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.
Feel like we've been waiting a long time for it :(
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If I could get a laptop with a screen like this, I could finally sit outside in a park and code like nature intended.
Also a lap desk. And a coffee thermos. And headphones. Second screen.
God, I'm too spoiled for nature, ain't I
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This device runs android, but it's pretty close https://shop.boox.com/products/tabxc
I'd totally buy this if I had fuck you money.
That... would actually be pretty dope
I’m thinking at those prices this is probably intended for corporations that absolutely need a readable display in bright sunlight areas but don’t really care about refresh rate or color depth.
I can see how this would be very attractive to a writer.
Not necessarily just corporations, but certainly text-based workflows. I can see this being great if your day job is writing code, working on spreadsheets, editing documents, etc. In those use cases, framerate hardly matters. Would be great for reducing eye strain.
How many seconds per frame does it get?
Not sure yet, we're still waiting for the first frame to finish.
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.
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I think it says 23Hz or something
Wow, relive the early days of really fucking terrible LCD displays for just under $2000.
What a time to be alive...
Why, for the love of all the gods, do people keep saying and writing "LCD display".
Tell me what the "D" in "LCD" means!
What does the "D" mean, hmmm!?
The same as the M in ATM machine and N in PIN number, V in HIV virus and C in UPC code!
Oh, the dreaded RAS syndrome!.
I'm off to read some DC comics.
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I'll remember that the next time I enter my PIN number at an ATM machine.
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For a work machine with a lot of text and little graphics, this is great. Less eye strain for long periods.
In theory yes. But after seeing a review yesterday I am fully disappointed. Even text looks like shit on this monitor.
Maybe in 30 years when the patents expire.
Not going to happen. The fog is coming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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These guys make eInk monitors:
if you can live with a black-and-white eInk monitor, they say that their fastest model can do 60 Hz.
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I'm good.
Maybe it’d be useful as a low powered interactive kiosk display? Price needs to come down tremendously before this thing becomes competitive.
I remember when OLED was that extensive...
I remember a 42" plasma TV that cost $12,000 at Best Buy.
Plus $1000 a year electric bill
Yeah those early ones - and the one I'm thinking of was like the first big-screen flatpanel they sold, sometime in the late 90s - were extra extra bad about power.
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.
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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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.
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
I don't know if you can play games on this, but I know you definitely won't want to.
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Please note that even at 30hz eink displays still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency
The US takes tariffs on the good stuff? Looks like there will be more stuff for us in the future.
Aw yeah! I imagine it's like 2 fps. Great for gaming.
Its not meant for gaming. People who display a lot of text (eg. coders) could use less strain in their eyes if they're doing it for a long time. Definitely not at that price though
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