To set a pixel to anything other than white or black requires a distracting and time consuming pattern of white and black flashes.
But... There exists multiple different patterns of flashes that end up with the same grey scale shade. So the logical solution seems to therefore be for neighbouring pixels to use different flash patterns such that when viewed from a distance the flashes are hidden - ie. At any point in time while the flash pattern is occurring, the average color of an area is the the target colour, even if each individual pixel isn't that shade.
Obviously in eink, pixels disrupt neighbouring pixels, and the target colour of a pixel may change during the flashing pattern. You therefore will be requiring a very complex model/optimizer to figure out how to transition every pixel from its current state towards its destination color while maintaining dithered-flicker.
Seems like a good target for a tiny per-pixel ML model - put as input a state vector representing the current visible and hidden state of the pixel and a few neighbours, together with the target color, and have the ML model output the next signal to output to the screen and the new hidden state. This could be trained with a screen in the lab with a camera pointed at it outputting random patterns for a few days. You could also have as input to the ML model the temperature and per-screen and per-pixel calibration vectors to deal with process variation, and maybe an encoding for the age of the screen if wear starts to occur. Training should be pretty quick, because on a 1 million pixel screen, every frame is a million training data points. The execution of the ML model would run great on a modest GPU in real-time as a shader - it's the perfect fit for that.
It seems this solution covers all the usecases people are wanting... Fast updates for things like mice, fast motion for films, quick updates for typing, high quality for static images, anti aliasing for static text, no blurring for moving things, etc.
I don't know how current your experience is, but on a year-old Onyx BOOX, I'm generally not seeing the flicker issue you're describing provided display mode is appropriate to application context.
In Normal/Regal mode, yes, there's a flash as a page is refreshed. This mode should be used only for applications which use page-based (rather than scroll-based) navigation, and which don't have animated elements.
"Speed mode" works exceptionally well for virtually anything else --- most web browsers and even some video, as well as Termux (a terminal-based Linux environment for Android).
The higher-speed modes offer even better refresh rates. The image quality loss / ghosting is only very slightly higher for A2 mode, though for X-Mode it's quite noticeable. The latter is really only for video viewing, or perhaps gaming if that's your thing. Neither of those are uses well-suited to E-ink.
For general reading (PDFs, EPubs, etc.), podcasting (AntennaPod), or web browsing (EinkBro, which is truly awesome, or FennicFox), I prefer e-ink to OLED tablets.
Alas, I would love to implement this, but the world of eink is filled with patents and lawsuits, and I think that if I implemented this and it worked well I could never sell it. Even if I gave it away for free, I'd probably have lawyers banging on my door wanting to take away my home.
> but the world of eink is filled with patents and lawsuits, and I think that if I implemented this and it worked well I could never sell it. Even if I gave it away for free, I'd probably have lawyers banging on my door wanting to take away my home.
I work in the display industry. I've never heard anything like what you describe, except on HN comments and blogs that use HN comments as citations. Look at my comment history. I think your claim is false because everytime I've challenged a claim like yours the poster has never been able to substantiate it, but I keep an open mind, if you can provide some real citations backing your claim then I'm happy to be corrected.
Please excuse my ignorance but are there new patents coming in every year or is it more like mp3 where we had a patent but eventually it expired? My question is like will we have e ink in about twenty years?
I wonder what the display's lifetime is with this kind of usage? I see someone asked in the YT comments but it is unanswered.
I can't find any official data (as usual with eink) but I have heard that an eink pixel's lifetime is around 10 million pixel transitions. Not sure where that number comes from or how accurate it is and how it varies from one display to the next. But if true, you'd get only a couple days with this kind of usage.
I am still hoping for a large, reasonable priced eInk display that I can frame and hang up on a wall. Does not even have to be color, I would be fine with just changing through different black&white dithered images over time. But large eInk displays are prohibitively expensive for what is basically a gimmick :-/
This. I'd buy a reasonably priced 10+ inch E-ink display that I can use as an art display on the wall or a creative dashboard of things I care about. However, anything above the size of a Kindle is too expensive for this purpose. A kindle is rather too small...
I will wait until I can buy one for < EUR 200.
I dont need wifi, "smart", or "cloud" features in it. Just the ability to push images into it statically.
Me too, but perhaps cheap AMOLEDs will come sooner and they can kind of be an okeyish replacement? If one runs an AMOLED on black background, e.g. a terminal, a text editor or an inverted PDF, only the pixels displaying characters will be lit.
Maybe this is good enough? I experimented with an AMOLED tablet displaying inverted PDFs and it felt similar to a Kindle. However, this was my completely subjective perception. It could be that in the long run, it is tiring for the eyes as well. IMHO, the worst part about displays is staring at a bright LED backlight all day long. Screens such as Dell UltraSharp, which are able to dim the backlight a lot and do not flicker feel much better.
Good news is they do exist, and manufacturers do make them even if they are prohibitively expensive. If you want it enough you can actually pay to get it made and shipped to you, which is better than not having that option at all.
Last time I checked in the displays in the sizes I am interested in (>= DIN A2) are in the lower five figure ranges ... for that price I could buy several real art pieces that I like :-)
It's incredible how as a society we have accepted that people must spend hours upon hours glued to screens that were never made to be reading devices.
It would be like if we invented sofas before chairs and so every office worker needs to awkwardly work on a sofa instead if sitting on a nice Herman Miller
They mention the issue of dithering changing "everywhere" when e.g. a mouse cursor is moving, which is obviously distracting. I wonder if you couldn't make an error diffusion dithering technique where the amount of error to diffuse is mollified by the signed distance from the moving pixels?
* Seed signed distance function with -1 in all pixels that changed, +1 in static pixels
* Use a fast marching method to re-initialize a narrow-band signed distance function
* Compute gradient of signed distance to get a vector field
* Multiply error to be diffused by a sigmoid function of signed distance
* Diffuse error in the direction of the vector field
Also, I've found in my own toying around that introducing a bit of randomness in the error diffusion matrix of traditional dithering methods gives much more pleasing results.
Thanks for the link, that was a nice writeup indeed!
It's a different technique though, using a dither pattern gives a very different look from error diffusion (which IMO looks more natural). But in the example you posted, the pattern is a nice stylistic effect.
I might actually have to try and code up what I outlined above to see if it works.
> “This is possible and used on eReaders, so texts, images, and UI elements could use different update modes, but not with the current available Eink monitor + software stack. Our controller supports per-pixel update mode settings, but this would need support from the software side.”
That “per-pixel update mode settings” sounds very useful for things like interactive books, where the static text could be anti-aliased with grayscale, and moving pictures (physics animation, mathematical graphs, etc.) would be 1-bit monochrome and react smoothly to adjustments.
They show something in this direction in their second video, embedded further down in the linked page, where letters being typed are first rendered immediately in 1-bit mode, then after a delay smoothed out.
Companies have tried for years [0] to make progress here and none of these problems (ghosting, refresh time, price) have proved solvable given the quantity of units demanded. I wonder if anything has changed or if this is just an exploratory survey that precedes any of those advances
During the aughts, I got used to saying "Linux is not Windows" --- if you're looking for a Microsoft experience on a Free Software operating system ... you're liable to be disappointed.
If you accept the strengths, and weaknesses, of a platform, you're going to be far happier.
The first computers I used didn't have e-ink displays. They had ink displays. Teletype access to an early Unix system, mostly offering BSD games. No, I didn't do Real Work on those systems....
But I was doing real work on glass-tty VT-200 Wyse terminals about a decade later, also on campus-wide Unix servers. (Benefit: walk into any terminal room, log on, and all my work was Just There.)
As I've noted for a while, E-Ink has features which differ from emissive (OLED / LCD) displays:
- Persistence is free. Once the display is set, it does not change, even with power shut off.
- Pixels are cheap. Current displays tend around 220--300 DPI. That's the effective resolution of most laserprinters (given toner drift and paper coarseness).
- Refreshes are ... slowish. Not seconds, but 4-10 Hz is a typically upper end, rather than 60--120 FPS of an emissive display. Higher-quality refreshes may be slower.
- Colors are nonexistent to few. My monochrome display offers 16 greyscale shades, though with dithering and/or halftoning, that increases. Photographs appear slightly posterised without those. Colour displays exist, though they're limited in size/format, muted in saturation, slower than B&W e-ink, and carry a price premium.
- Paginated navigation is strongly preferred to scrolling. A single whole-screen flush is much better than scrolling a pixel at a time. This is where EInkBro really shines over conventional tablet browsers, in that it supports paginated navigation through a web page.
- Displays are reflective rather than emissive. The brighter the ambient light, the easier the display is to read, with direct sunlight being the optimum. I suspect colour displays will also reflect a mix of ink-vs-light colour design / mixing.
Ultimately, e-ink applications and platforms should play to the medium's strengths. E-Ink does fixed text and graphics exceptionally well. Operating systems, graphical shells, and controls which reflect this should do well. Those that fight these characteristics will deliver disappointing experiences.
Yep, I think there's no need to make e-ink into a competitor for oled or lcd monitors. Something like a tablet or small purpose built computer like a POS machine with built in scanner and card reader is something I think would fit best for this kind of display rather than forcing LCD/OLED to handle small form factors but somehow compete on power usage.
It's that e-ink is a viable display, but that it provides a different set of capabilities which must be recognised in the tools (applications, interfaces) which are used on it. Some of those already exist, others might have to be developed or tweaked. And platforms in which the display endpoint is not predefined (e.g., Web content), consideration of e-ink and other alternative display formats and factors will have to be increasingly considered either be designers or by application developers. Again, EinkBro is an examplar of the latter: an e-ink optimised Web browser with a specific design philosophy informed by the characteristics of e-ink displays. (I've had numerous exchanges with the developer, Daniel Kao, and he gets it.)
Text- and static-graphic-centric presentation works well. High-colour and dynamic displays don't. A large set of traditional text-mode tools (e.g., traditional Unix/Linux userland, and tools inspired by these) work quite well, as do many graphical presentations so long as they respect the properties of the display.
I've reflected a fair bit on the MOAD (mother of all demonstrations), now 54 years in our past. MOAD was based on the principles of high-framerate emissive displays, and virtually all elements shown in the demonstration remain the core elements of present-generation graphical displays, despite the migration from CRT to LED to OLED/Plasma displays. All effectively are emissive and low-latency.
Another alternative would be to adopt different display options. LCD (or transflective LCD) is one option; these work fundamentally by light polarisation, which means that they halve whatever ambient or backlight intensity is provided, greatly reducing apparent contrast.
What might be interesting would be a materials advance in which substances or fluid cells transition between primary colour states, giving the ability to directly create static pixels of a given colour, under some influence --- electric or magnetic influence, perhaps some induced pH state change. If that's a durable shift (e.g., there's a stable state that isn't changed until a new stimulus is applied), then we'd have a new display technology. That might even give a true ink-mixing behaviour, if, say, a given fluid cell or particle fibre might include multiple colour elements which would mix as paint or ink pigments do. Any material scientists know of materials which transition between white and CMYK spectra?
Advantages of E-Ink include not only power but readability in high-ambient light situations, or under normal room lighting rather than requiring an independently illuminated display as with LCD screens.
Depending on how displays are specifically addressed, the possibility of arbitrarily large displays at lower costs might also exist. That ... would be interesting. I have the usual present fear: that these would be appropriated principally for advertising and propaganda on wall- or building-sized form factors.
Readit News
To set a pixel to anything other than white or black requires a distracting and time consuming pattern of white and black flashes.
But... There exists multiple different patterns of flashes that end up with the same grey scale shade. So the logical solution seems to therefore be for neighbouring pixels to use different flash patterns such that when viewed from a distance the flashes are hidden - ie. At any point in time while the flash pattern is occurring, the average color of an area is the the target colour, even if each individual pixel isn't that shade.
Obviously in eink, pixels disrupt neighbouring pixels, and the target colour of a pixel may change during the flashing pattern. You therefore will be requiring a very complex model/optimizer to figure out how to transition every pixel from its current state towards its destination color while maintaining dithered-flicker.
Seems like a good target for a tiny per-pixel ML model - put as input a state vector representing the current visible and hidden state of the pixel and a few neighbours, together with the target color, and have the ML model output the next signal to output to the screen and the new hidden state. This could be trained with a screen in the lab with a camera pointed at it outputting random patterns for a few days. You could also have as input to the ML model the temperature and per-screen and per-pixel calibration vectors to deal with process variation, and maybe an encoding for the age of the screen if wear starts to occur. Training should be pretty quick, because on a 1 million pixel screen, every frame is a million training data points. The execution of the ML model would run great on a modest GPU in real-time as a shader - it's the perfect fit for that.
It seems this solution covers all the usecases people are wanting... Fast updates for things like mice, fast motion for films, quick updates for typing, high quality for static images, anti aliasing for static text, no blurring for moving things, etc.
In Normal/Regal mode, yes, there's a flash as a page is refreshed. This mode should be used only for applications which use page-based (rather than scroll-based) navigation, and which don't have animated elements.
"Speed mode" works exceptionally well for virtually anything else --- most web browsers and even some video, as well as Termux (a terminal-based Linux environment for Android).
The higher-speed modes offer even better refresh rates. The image quality loss / ghosting is only very slightly higher for A2 mode, though for X-Mode it's quite noticeable. The latter is really only for video viewing, or perhaps gaming if that's your thing. Neither of those are uses well-suited to E-ink.
For general reading (PDFs, EPubs, etc.), podcasting (AntennaPod), or web browsing (EinkBro, which is truly awesome, or FennicFox), I prefer e-ink to OLED tablets.
I work in the display industry. I've never heard anything like what you describe, except on HN comments and blogs that use HN comments as citations. Look at my comment history. I think your claim is false because everytime I've challenged a claim like yours the poster has never been able to substantiate it, but I keep an open mind, if you can provide some real citations backing your claim then I'm happy to be corrected.
Meanwhile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2mP23IvraI&t=30s
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dont-buy-e-reader-upcoming-tec...
I can't find any official data (as usual with eink) but I have heard that an eink pixel's lifetime is around 10 million pixel transitions. Not sure where that number comes from or how accurate it is and how it varies from one display to the next. But if true, you'd get only a couple days with this kind of usage.
Anyone know any more on this?
I will wait until I can buy one for < EUR 200.
I dont need wifi, "smart", or "cloud" features in it. Just the ability to push images into it statically.
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...
Maybe this is good enough? I experimented with an AMOLED tablet displaying inverted PDFs and it felt similar to a Kindle. However, this was my completely subjective perception. It could be that in the long run, it is tiring for the eyes as well. IMHO, the worst part about displays is staring at a bright LED backlight all day long. Screens such as Dell UltraSharp, which are able to dim the backlight a lot and do not flicker feel much better.
Nothing can replace the dynamics of an e-ink display as of today.
It would be like if we invented sofas before chairs and so every office worker needs to awkwardly work on a sofa instead if sitting on a nice Herman Miller
And how does E-Ink fit into this idea?
Deleted Comment
It's about how to perform realtime dithering of a 3D scene such that the amount of annoyance you describe is minimized
It's a different technique though, using a dither pattern gives a very different look from error diffusion (which IMO looks more natural). But in the example you posted, the pattern is a nice stylistic effect.
I might actually have to try and code up what I outlined above to see if it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_photography_and...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise#Blue_noise
That “per-pixel update mode settings” sounds very useful for things like interactive books, where the static text could be anti-aliased with grayscale, and moving pictures (physics animation, mathematical graphs, etc.) would be 1-bit monochrome and react smoothly to adjustments.
They show something in this direction in their second video, embedded further down in the linked page, where letters being typed are first rendered immediately in 1-bit mode, then after a delay smoothed out.
0: https://cloudconfusing.com/2020/02/07/e-ink-monitors-ready-f...
During the aughts, I got used to saying "Linux is not Windows" --- if you're looking for a Microsoft experience on a Free Software operating system ... you're liable to be disappointed.
If you accept the strengths, and weaknesses, of a platform, you're going to be far happier.
The first computers I used didn't have e-ink displays. They had ink displays. Teletype access to an early Unix system, mostly offering BSD games. No, I didn't do Real Work on those systems....
But I was doing real work on glass-tty VT-200 Wyse terminals about a decade later, also on campus-wide Unix servers. (Benefit: walk into any terminal room, log on, and all my work was Just There.)
As I've noted for a while, E-Ink has features which differ from emissive (OLED / LCD) displays:
- Persistence is free. Once the display is set, it does not change, even with power shut off.
- Pixels are cheap. Current displays tend around 220--300 DPI. That's the effective resolution of most laserprinters (given toner drift and paper coarseness).
- Refreshes are ... slowish. Not seconds, but 4-10 Hz is a typically upper end, rather than 60--120 FPS of an emissive display. Higher-quality refreshes may be slower.
- Colors are nonexistent to few. My monochrome display offers 16 greyscale shades, though with dithering and/or halftoning, that increases. Photographs appear slightly posterised without those. Colour displays exist, though they're limited in size/format, muted in saturation, slower than B&W e-ink, and carry a price premium.
- Paginated navigation is strongly preferred to scrolling. A single whole-screen flush is much better than scrolling a pixel at a time. This is where EInkBro really shines over conventional tablet browsers, in that it supports paginated navigation through a web page.
- Displays are reflective rather than emissive. The brighter the ambient light, the easier the display is to read, with direct sunlight being the optimum. I suspect colour displays will also reflect a mix of ink-vs-light colour design / mixing.
Ultimately, e-ink applications and platforms should play to the medium's strengths. E-Ink does fixed text and graphics exceptionally well. Operating systems, graphical shells, and controls which reflect this should do well. Those that fight these characteristics will deliver disappointing experiences.
It's that e-ink is a viable display, but that it provides a different set of capabilities which must be recognised in the tools (applications, interfaces) which are used on it. Some of those already exist, others might have to be developed or tweaked. And platforms in which the display endpoint is not predefined (e.g., Web content), consideration of e-ink and other alternative display formats and factors will have to be increasingly considered either be designers or by application developers. Again, EinkBro is an examplar of the latter: an e-ink optimised Web browser with a specific design philosophy informed by the characteristics of e-ink displays. (I've had numerous exchanges with the developer, Daniel Kao, and he gets it.)
https://github.com/plateaukao/browser
Text- and static-graphic-centric presentation works well. High-colour and dynamic displays don't. A large set of traditional text-mode tools (e.g., traditional Unix/Linux userland, and tools inspired by these) work quite well, as do many graphical presentations so long as they respect the properties of the display.
I've reflected a fair bit on the MOAD (mother of all demonstrations), now 54 years in our past. MOAD was based on the principles of high-framerate emissive displays, and virtually all elements shown in the demonstration remain the core elements of present-generation graphical displays, despite the migration from CRT to LED to OLED/Plasma displays. All effectively are emissive and low-latency.
Another alternative would be to adopt different display options. LCD (or transflective LCD) is one option; these work fundamentally by light polarisation, which means that they halve whatever ambient or backlight intensity is provided, greatly reducing apparent contrast.
What might be interesting would be a materials advance in which substances or fluid cells transition between primary colour states, giving the ability to directly create static pixels of a given colour, under some influence --- electric or magnetic influence, perhaps some induced pH state change. If that's a durable shift (e.g., there's a stable state that isn't changed until a new stimulus is applied), then we'd have a new display technology. That might even give a true ink-mixing behaviour, if, say, a given fluid cell or particle fibre might include multiple colour elements which would mix as paint or ink pigments do. Any material scientists know of materials which transition between white and CMYK spectra?
Advantages of E-Ink include not only power but readability in high-ambient light situations, or under normal room lighting rather than requiring an independently illuminated display as with LCD screens.
Depending on how displays are specifically addressed, the possibility of arbitrarily large displays at lower costs might also exist. That ... would be interesting. I have the usual present fear: that these would be appropriated principally for advertising and propaganda on wall- or building-sized form factors.