cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19284817
This article has completely missed a selling point of e-readers for people like myself: no constant refreshing.
My eye strain, when reading for a long time, doesn’t come from the light (or lack thereof), which is evident as a positive of backlit Kindles and other e-readers, though the constant flicker of screens. E-ink solves this issue perfectly, and with every device in that article mentioning “60Hz” on their alternatives I feel as though they’ve missed a big point of having an e-reader and what exactly constitutes as “paper like” (it’s a lot more than just “low/no backlight”).
Are you talking about pwm? Most screens don’t refresh if nothing is changing
This isn’t technically correct. CRT, LCD, and OLED displays are generally constantly refreshing the image. There are some niche exceptions like memory-in-pixel displays but they are few and far between. eInk displays are very different in this aspect because the display itself acts as a physical memory of the image because its mechanism of creating an image involves physical changes (pigmented particles moving closer or further away from the visible plane).
I just wanted to add this video to your comment because e-ink is so cool and this guy has a bunch of macro shots of the displays that are awesome and you can see the particles in the screen changing colors.
So cool!
Welcome news, with the caveats others have highlighted. E-ink is still quite expensive for reasons I dont understand. Someone said there were only a couple of manufacturers.
Cheap (and by that I mean rubbish) 10” tablets are available for under £30 in china, but if you want e-ink it’s at least double .
The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.
It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.
The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).
Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?
Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.
Backlit OLED? You may be thinking of QLER QLED because OLED is self emissive
I think what he means is emissive in general. OLED, LCD, whatever, all are powering through ambient light, so need really high brightness in high lighting scenarios.
E-ink and these rLCD screens use the ambient light to their advantage, so they’re almost always lit at the appropriate level automatically, and you can supplement with much less fatiguing front-lighting in low light scenarios so you don’t have the emission from the display shining in your face.
Reflective LCD, like my palm pilot used? I didn’t think we would see those make a comeback.
and generally aren’t very useful for high-motion graphics like videos or games.
I do like the fact that my e-reader is just for reading books without distractions. Thats also kinda the point of e-ink, to be as close to paper as possible and make digital reading better. I don’t see the need yet for a paper like screen to animate video because it won’t be as good as a normal screen. I’ll prefer specialized screens over a catch-all type any day.
I mostly agree, but it would be nice if it was a bit faster to be able to use it for web browsing. I still like reading long form articles and such but navigating and scrolling isn’t very viable yet on e-readers.
EinkBro lets you treat sites (or the reader mode) like pages and turn them accordingly. My boox go color 7 also has page turn buttons, and allows you to configure them to scroll x distance on a per app basis, which works like a page turn on apps that only allow scrolling. It makes reading articles with omnivore work pretty well. Example And switching to speed mode
I’m not sure if you can easily make the same tweaks on the other Boox devices or using volume buttons on other Android devices or whatever, but there are ways around it.
I definitely do agree with you that the capability of faster refresh would be nice to have, but right now isn’t bad.
