Eink always could be driven quickly. The issue is that LCDs are more powerful efficient at high refresh rates
EInk needs a lot of power to move the heavier ink particles around. If you are doing that more and more rapidly, then even more power is drawn.
By 75Hz, I'm almost certain that LCD is far more power efficient. The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor, it takes some power to charge but it's exceptionally 'light' compared to eink.
That's why LCDs can go faster and faster. It's just physics. A capacitor / twisted crystal uses less power to turn on or off than EInk.
---------
EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put. So you spend a ton of power moving the ink around and then save lots and lots of power over the next seconds, minutes or more.
That's why EInk is ideal for once-a-day updates of prices (or other retailer tasks). The less you update, the less power used.
In my experience using e-ink readers (admittedly I have a Kobo, which may not be the state of the art), I would like to refresh the screen rapidly in bursts -navigating menus, flipping past an index - and then have a non-backlit screen with low power cost to show the same content for a while. In other words, a variable refresh rate.
If you think of the refresh rate not as a constant frequency but as variable with user input, there are some cases where driving eink quickly in short bursts could make sense? It seems like this project offers a foundation for such a controller, where e-reader controllers are strictly optimizing for low refresh rates. E-ink is not going to be competitive for playing a video game or watching a video, but you can create a more responsive experience with less eye strain for typical tasks like marking up documents.
E-Ink's other advantage is being a non-emissive display. Transflective LCD displays have low contrast. I'm literally holding an e-ink tablet over the transflective monitor I'm typing this on and the difference in contrast at the same ambient illumination is considerable. If the price were right, I'd definitely consider a 75 Hz e-ink monitor even if the power draw was more than a normal LCD monitor.
> EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put.
E-ink's other advantage is that it reads like paper. In a desktop context I could not possibly care less about the power consumption, but being able to read a forum thread, chat channel, HN discussion, etc. without a backlight would make my eyes very happy.
Out of curiosity, if you have 75Hz but you're refreshing sparingly (e.g. you're in VSCode writing, unless you're scrolling, most pixels remain unchanged), wouldn't e-ink remain power-efficient?
So I guess an e-ink display would not be good with my book reading habits then. I will often scroll a few lines at a time and that sounds power expensive.
Is this saying that it is an either-or situation? Ideal would be a device that can be written fast when needed, but can also hold. Is there some more fundamental thing at a pixel level that links agility with retention?
IANAE but won't e-ink at high refresh rates have the same benefit as OLED in terms of only refreshing what needs changing? perhaps in practical situations the power consumption should be lower than the worst-case scenario.
Flipping pages right now is very annoying. Slow and with the weird redrawing flashing. If they can find a way to fix that it'll be 100% worth it, even if it means high power draw on page changes.
I am absolutely not surprised to see his name behind this startup. I've been following his work for years at this point; his YouTube channel has always deeply impressed me, and he's done wonderful open source work in the realm of E-paper for quite some time now.
The article doesn't even touch on what I think is one of the coolest features: the ability to change update modes locally in subregions of the panel. And even better, they're already working on integrating that with the Wayland Content Type Hint protocol to let the compositor automatically pick the right mode for a given application for you, which then would work even if multiple applications are on the screen[0].
Regardless of manufacturer (remarkable, boox, supernote…), all e-paper tablets have one major performance problem: quickly scrolling through multiple pages of notes. No idea if the display is the limiting factor, or the cpu, but I’ve hit this issue on all tablets I’ve used. If you like riffling through pages in you paper notebook, you will hit the limit too. I know at least 2 people who stopped using their tablets over time because of this issue.
If this tech helps solve that problem, it’s more important to me than an eink monitor.
Edit: this is mainly important for notes, because sketches, scribbled diagrams and quick notes half-taken in meetings are not really searchable. PDFs and ebooks don’t have this problem.
Their demos most definitely show scrolling through long websites very quickly, and they show playing computer games and playing videos on e-ink displays as well. Amazing stuff really.
I play chess on a e-ink smartphone and it is a nice break for my eyes in the evening.
I can not wait for the moment when I would be able to code on a nice colored e-ink desktop screen
BOOX has 13" Tab X C color e-ink reader, which runs Android. I have non-color version (Tab X), and used it few times to work under bright sun (in vim, connected over mosh/ssh to my laptop + wireless keyboard). It was okay experience - not perfect, but quite comfortable.
The article is oddly written. It's not the e-ink display panels that are different; they're off-the-shelf modules from E-Ink that their controller is driving at 75 Hz. Presumably E-Ink themselves know that the panel can be driven at that rate.
And pixel-level addressing isn't innovative either. If you've written on an e-ink tablet and observed that the screen doesn't refresh with every pixel change under the stylus, that is surely because pixels are being toggled individually instead of doing a full screen refresh.
So perhaps the only difference is that it's an open source controller that's competitive with commercial e-ink display controllers? That's no small achievement and worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's not at all made clear by the article.
- Making the project open allows people to reuse displays they already own.
- Others can contribute and build on what’s been created.
- Open source firmware, documentation, and the driver board make development more accessible and help remove barriers that previously slowed community projects.
- It’s designed to work with a variety of electrophoretic panels, not only those from E Ink.
In the long run, this openness will strengthen the ecosystem, making it easier for new ideas to take shape and spread.
Why does everyone seem to think straight away of portable devices.
I would get this for my main desktop monitor.
Seems like a great way to be able to do work and only work.
I would love to see the performance trade-offs. I don't mind more battery draw, but how many shades of grey does it support? How bad is the ghosting? How white is the background? Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black? How often does it need a full screen refresh?
Did anyone tested Viwoods AiPaper ?
Forgetting about the AI part, the screen is Carta 1300 + Mobius which is rare. It’s really thin and light as well and software is updated regularly to match the competition, it has Android to install apps. While not perfect it looks quite good !
Working with a modern terminal is very much dynamic... It always was, really.
We always aimed at fixing the lag, be it terminal rendering performance, network jitter (mosh anyone?), proper tab completion (including the ones that require network responses to complete), TUIs...
I'd still use eink for terminal, if it was cheaper. Just saying refresh rate is important for terminals.
I use E-ink for the reduced eye strain, the battery draw really does not bother me. I like having devices that last weeks on a single charge, but I would gladly charge them more often for an increased refresh rate.
I'm ok with E-paper's capabilities, the problem is cost. Even though it can't display all the content TFT & LCD can, it costs a LOT more. I'm not a hardware person, I just looked into the cost of working on an E-paper based wall-spanning display and just stacking LCD's and doing something ugly was much cheaper. I suspect it has to do with the wholesale economics and its demand.
What about cheaper, bigger displays? I want something that's ~16" but doesn't cost an arm and a leg, for displaying sheet music. Still haven't found anything that's suitable. Plenty of people I know use the 13" iPad Pro, but between the glare (stage lights can be intense) and the roughly-letter-paper size, I still prefer sheets of paper.
>Modos, a two-person startup with open-hardware roots, thinks it has cracked part of that problem with a development kit capable of driving an e-paper display at refresh rates up to a record 75 hertz.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather see these guys get a couple million than yet another chatgpt wrapper.
does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.
Transflective LCD screens ("e-paper") compete with e-ink currently.
Monochrome e-ink has a better resolution and contrast ratio than old-school LCD devices (I'm comparing my experiences with a Palm Pilot in the 1990s and an Onyx BOOX in the 2020s). LCD can refresh far faster, in the 100+ / 100s Hz range, where typical e-ink refresh rates in my experience have been in the single-digit to low-double-digit Hz range (video is doable but far from ideal).
E-ink also displays quite nicely with a "frontlight", which brightens the background (whiter whites) without washing out the foreground (print/ink). Illuminated LCD displays tend to wash out the dark fields, though I've not viewed e-paper directly and cannot speak to that.
TFA is describing a far higher e-ink refresh rate than I've experienced directly.
I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.
The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.
“I would say instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce,” says cofounder Alexander Soto. “You don’t even need to use the panel we’re offering. You could use a different panel and still get [75 Hz].”
The ghosting in that video is unbelievably strong. To the degree that I'd consider that unplayable. It's certainly not the experience the dev intended (given how much effort they put into the moire shader).
Is refresh rate necessarily tied to ghosting? Like higher refresh rate also means higher ghosting?
I suppose if we are at comparable refresh rates to LCDs, next metric to compare against is response time? I see significant amount of trailing while scrolling.
Eink always could be driven quickly. The issue is that LCDs are more powerful efficient at high refresh rates
EInk needs a lot of power to move the heavier ink particles around. If you are doing that more and more rapidly, then even more power is drawn.
By 75Hz, I'm almost certain that LCD is far more power efficient. The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor, it takes some power to charge but it's exceptionally 'light' compared to eink.
That's why LCDs can go faster and faster. It's just physics. A capacitor / twisted crystal uses less power to turn on or off than EInk.
---------
EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put. So you spend a ton of power moving the ink around and then save lots and lots of power over the next seconds, minutes or more.
That's why EInk is ideal for once-a-day updates of prices (or other retailer tasks). The less you update, the less power used.
Our driver board, under continuous use, draws about 1 to 1.5W. A recent article below goes into some detail about our design choices.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...
In my experience using e-ink readers (admittedly I have a Kobo, which may not be the state of the art), I would like to refresh the screen rapidly in bursts -navigating menus, flipping past an index - and then have a non-backlit screen with low power cost to show the same content for a while. In other words, a variable refresh rate.
If you think of the refresh rate not as a constant frequency but as variable with user input, there are some cases where driving eink quickly in short bursts could make sense? It seems like this project offers a foundation for such a controller, where e-reader controllers are strictly optimizing for low refresh rates. E-ink is not going to be competitive for playing a video game or watching a video, but you can create a more responsive experience with less eye strain for typical tasks like marking up documents.
E-Ink's other advantage is being a non-emissive display. Transflective LCD displays have low contrast. I'm literally holding an e-ink tablet over the transflective monitor I'm typing this on and the difference in contrast at the same ambient illumination is considerable. If the price were right, I'd definitely consider a 75 Hz e-ink monitor even if the power draw was more than a normal LCD monitor.
> EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put.
E-ink's other advantage is that it reads like paper. In a desktop context I could not possibly care less about the power consumption, but being able to read a forum thread, chat channel, HN discussion, etc. without a backlight would make my eyes very happy.
Out of curiosity, if you have 75Hz but you're refreshing sparingly (e.g. you're in VSCode writing, unless you're scrolling, most pixels remain unchanged), wouldn't e-ink remain power-efficient?
So I guess an e-ink display would not be good with my book reading habits then. I will often scroll a few lines at a time and that sounds power expensive.
Is this saying that it is an either-or situation? Ideal would be a device that can be written fast when needed, but can also hold. Is there some more fundamental thing at a pixel level that links agility with retention?
IANAE but won't e-ink at high refresh rates have the same benefit as OLED in terms of only refreshing what needs changing? perhaps in practical situations the power consumption should be lower than the worst-case scenario.
Flipping pages right now is very annoying. Slow and with the weird redrawing flashing. If they can find a way to fix that it'll be 100% worth it, even if it means high power draw on page changes.
For mobile devices that matters, but plenty of use cases for stationary displays, including desktops.
Actually, the advantage is that it is reflective and works better in high ambient light.
I wonder if we could engineer a lighter ink
Do e-ink screens expire? Like screen slowly loose the ability to move the particles around, or the particles loosing the ability to move with charge.
If so, won't high refresh rates degrade eink rapidly.
> The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor
Would it be possible to re-use the power that is stored in them?
I thought the issue was duty cycle, and that low refresh rates kept the screen working longer. Has e-ink tech gotten around this?
I have been thinking e-ink would be good for weather reports on boats.
I mean, it depends on just how much power is needed I guess, but I'd be willing to make the trade for e-ink's contrast.
> says Modos cofounder Wenting Zhang
I am absolutely not surprised to see his name behind this startup. I've been following his work for years at this point; his YouTube channel has always deeply impressed me, and he's done wonderful open source work in the realm of E-paper for quite some time now.
Kudos to him, and I wish him all the best.
The article doesn't even touch on what I think is one of the coolest features: the ability to change update modes locally in subregions of the panel. And even better, they're already working on integrating that with the Wayland Content Type Hint protocol to let the compositor automatically pick the right mode for a given application for you, which then would work even if multiple applications are on the screen[0].
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...
I love my e-ink tablet.
Regardless of manufacturer (remarkable, boox, supernote…), all e-paper tablets have one major performance problem: quickly scrolling through multiple pages of notes. No idea if the display is the limiting factor, or the cpu, but I’ve hit this issue on all tablets I’ve used. If you like riffling through pages in you paper notebook, you will hit the limit too. I know at least 2 people who stopped using their tablets over time because of this issue.
If this tech helps solve that problem, it’s more important to me than an eink monitor.
Edit: this is mainly important for notes, because sketches, scribbled diagrams and quick notes half-taken in meetings are not really searchable. PDFs and ebooks don’t have this problem.
Their demos most definitely show scrolling through long websites very quickly, and they show playing computer games and playing videos on e-ink displays as well. Amazing stuff really.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor
I play chess on a e-ink smartphone and it is a nice break for my eyes in the evening. I can not wait for the moment when I would be able to code on a nice colored e-ink desktop screen
BOOX has 13" Tab X C color e-ink reader, which runs Android. I have non-color version (Tab X), and used it few times to work under bright sun (in vim, connected over mosh/ssh to my laptop + wireless keyboard). It was okay experience - not perfect, but quite comfortable.
What e-ink smartphone do you use?
There are already multiple color e-ink desktop monitor manufacturers... they're just not 75hz.
The article is oddly written. It's not the e-ink display panels that are different; they're off-the-shelf modules from E-Ink that their controller is driving at 75 Hz. Presumably E-Ink themselves know that the panel can be driven at that rate.
And pixel-level addressing isn't innovative either. If you've written on an e-ink tablet and observed that the screen doesn't refresh with every pixel change under the stylus, that is surely because pixels are being toggled individually instead of doing a full screen refresh.
So perhaps the only difference is that it's an open source controller that's competitive with commercial e-ink display controllers? That's no small achievement and worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's not at all made clear by the article.
I agree with your points. I would add:
- Making the project open allows people to reuse displays they already own.
- Others can contribute and build on what’s been created.
- Open source firmware, documentation, and the driver board make development more accessible and help remove barriers that previously slowed community projects.
- It’s designed to work with a variety of electrophoretic panels, not only those from E Ink.
In the long run, this openness will strengthen the ecosystem, making it easier for new ideas to take shape and spread.
Why does everyone seem to think straight away of portable devices. I would get this for my main desktop monitor. Seems like a great way to be able to do work and only work.
If you want a greyscale display, you can use a tool like f.lux to de-colorize all your monitors.
I would love to see the performance trade-offs. I don't mind more battery draw, but how many shades of grey does it support? How bad is the ghosting? How white is the background? Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black? How often does it need a full screen refresh?
> How many shades of grey does it support?
16 levels of grayscale support.
> How bad is the ghosting?
Ghosting depends on the mode you're using and the content.
> How white is the background?
Varies, depends on the panel you're using.
> Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black?
Yes
> How often does it need a full screen refresh?
That's up to you; you can manually clear with a button press, use auto-clear mode, or programmatically control it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoDYEZE7gDA&ab_channel=Modos
How long do the pixels last before they start getting stuck?
Did anyone tested Viwoods AiPaper ? Forgetting about the AI part, the screen is Carta 1300 + Mobius which is rare. It’s really thin and light as well and software is updated regularly to match the competition, it has Android to install apps. While not perfect it looks quite good !
I always think refresh rate and color aren't the problem, eink vendors need to find the right customer crowd.
For color e-ink displays, instead of competing with LCDs, target a niche market: 8-color terminals for programmers.
Then refresh rate is a problem.
Working with a modern terminal is very much dynamic... It always was, really.
We always aimed at fixing the lag, be it terminal rendering performance, network jitter (mosh anyone?), proper tab completion (including the ones that require network responses to complete), TUIs...
I'd still use eink for terminal, if it was cheaper. Just saying refresh rate is important for terminals.
> instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce
I enjoyed that quote.
Not really knowledgeable enough about the tech, to comment further, but I like EInk, and look forward to seeing it be more useful.
Thanks!
What's the best e-paper/e-ink display on the market with a good price-performance ratio that I can use to tinker around with?
I basically want to build a custom e-reader with a RasPi Zero for learning/home use, 8-10inches would be great.
Don't care much about it being touchscreen.
Remarkable
FPGA and e-ink at 75Hz? It sounds like it will have a high power draw.
Our driver board, under continuous use, draws about 1 to 1.5W. A recent article below goes into some detail about our design choices.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...
I use E-ink for the reduced eye strain, the battery draw really does not bother me. I like having devices that last weeks on a single charge, but I would gladly charge them more often for an increased refresh rate.
Compared to other e-ink devices, yes.
Compared to LCD, oled or what have you, my understanding is that it uses significantly less.
I'm ok with E-paper's capabilities, the problem is cost. Even though it can't display all the content TFT & LCD can, it costs a LOT more. I'm not a hardware person, I just looked into the cost of working on an E-paper based wall-spanning display and just stacking LCD's and doing something ugly was much cheaper. I suspect it has to do with the wholesale economics and its demand.
Can you stick it into type-c of macbook air and work on a sunny outside environment?
What about cheaper, bigger displays? I want something that's ~16" but doesn't cost an arm and a leg, for displaying sheet music. Still haven't found anything that's suitable. Plenty of people I know use the 13" iPad Pro, but between the glare (stage lights can be intense) and the roughly-letter-paper size, I still prefer sheets of paper.
How about mobile monitors? Like Uperfect?
I want color e-paper that can show large paintings, like 30” x 40”. When is that coming out finally !!
I've been using a Kobo Libra color lately, and man E-ink has gotten SO GOOD.
It's high resolution, snappy, and the whole package is light as a feather and with batteries that last for ages.
I know some people prefer paper, but I love modern e-readers. They're amazingly tuned.
>Modos, a two-person startup with open-hardware roots, thinks it has cracked part of that problem with a development kit capable of driving an e-paper display at refresh rates up to a record 75 hertz.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather see these guys get a couple million than yet another chatgpt wrapper.
does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.
Transflective LCD screens ("e-paper") compete with e-ink currently.
Monochrome e-ink has a better resolution and contrast ratio than old-school LCD devices (I'm comparing my experiences with a Palm Pilot in the 1990s and an Onyx BOOX in the 2020s). LCD can refresh far faster, in the 100+ / 100s Hz range, where typical e-ink refresh rates in my experience have been in the single-digit to low-double-digit Hz range (video is doable but far from ideal).
E-ink also displays quite nicely with a "frontlight", which brightens the background (whiter whites) without washing out the foreground (print/ink). Illuminated LCD displays tend to wash out the dark fields, though I've not viewed e-paper directly and cannot speak to that.
TFA is describing a far higher e-ink refresh rate than I've experienced directly.
I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.
The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.
“I would say instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce,” says cofounder Alexander Soto. “You don’t even need to use the panel we’re offering. You could use a different panel and still get [75 Hz].”
Nice, they have a video of playing Return of the Obra Dinn on the screen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw
Another gameplay video I'd recommend seeing is Blanc: https://www.youtube.com/live/9PAKPfHBa5Q?feature=shared&t=11...
The ghosting in that video is unbelievably strong. To the degree that I'd consider that unplayable. It's certainly not the experience the dev intended (given how much effort they put into the moire shader).
Is refresh rate necessarily tied to ghosting? Like higher refresh rate also means higher ghosting?
Clearly there are some issues with ghosting?
I suppose if we are at comparable refresh rates to LCDs, next metric to compare against is response time? I see significant amount of trailing while scrolling.
Response time is on par with LCDs - the trailing you’re seeing is ghosting, which in most situations is not common but does occur occasionally.
This is great, but I see lots of ghosting and apparently low contrast. Sad to see no mention of it in the article.
Fun that this is getting the attention it deserves. I order the kit and am excited to get it.
Don't want 75Hz or even 10Hz from my Epaper. Want a maximum battery life, 1Hz is plenty
Also, new battery tech quadruples energy density, and new discovery brings us 10 years closer to fusion energy. More news at 10.
I wish e-paper would soon reach the realm of my wallet.
Sick and tired of seeing really neat announcements with pricing out-of-bounds for hobbyists.
(At least those who aren’t prepared to spend thousands just to experiment with a new toy screen)