I remember when OLED was that extensive...
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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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
Please note that even at 30hz eink displays still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency
I don't know if you can play games on this, but I know you definitely won't want to.
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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.
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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How many seconds per frame does it get?
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.
I've never had eye strain from a CRT or LCD.
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Not sure yet, we're still waiting for the first frame to finish.
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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.
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.
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.
Boox Tab Ultra C aint half bad
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.
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:
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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.
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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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https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwwKuvCPKya/
(Not an advertisement - just first google result)
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?
Maybe in 30 years when the patents expire.
Not going to happen. The fog is coming.
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.
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.
I can see how this would be very attractive to a writer.
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.
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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.
Maybe it’d be useful as a low powered interactive kiosk display? Price needs to come down tremendously before this thing becomes competitive.
I'm good.