And then the e paper panel costs a bunch so what would be a $1000 laptop becomes $4000 and is strictly worse for the vast majority of users.
Of course I remember how difficult was to properly illuminate my notebooks when I was a kid. I guess I'd end up with two lamps on my sides and they are difficult to move as easily as a laptop.
For dynamic content, eg ls -la, scrolling through a file, watching to a video, doing a video call, it's no contest.
Professor Michael Young, Michael Rosbash and Jeffrey C. Hall won a Nobel Prize for research in this area in 2017.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2017/press-releas...
"If you are a night owl, you might be better off with a tablet, but if you are a daytime reader who prefers reading outside in the Sun, then a reflective e-reader or a physical book is a better option.
Other than that, there is no difference between the two screens."
That's not actually true. I have glasses explicitly to prevent eye-strain for when I'm working on the computer, even when it is an IPS/retina display with 2X pixel scaling. However I don't need glasses at all when reading books on a kindle or kobo.
P.S I'm not affiliated in any way
0: gmg-performance.com
Personally, I'm very sensitive to light and get frequent debilitating headaches. Blue light filter changes very little for me. Making the whole screen just red with something like flux (together with my glasses that also block blue light) might help around 5-10%, but the migraine still comes full force (maybe 10-15m later).
However, there do seem to be no studies proving efficacy, indeed.
I would guess it's the opposite--because I'm extremely sensitive to light in general, I'd think if blue-light filters were effective, they'd be even more effective on me, which they aren't.
> Also, flux is aimed at sleep regulation
People seem to equate "less blue light" with "better" and yet when I make my screen dark orange/red, it does nothing.
Also note that I said something like Flux.
Last but not least, my glasses also have blue-light filter in them. So I'm reducing blue light with both HW and SW and it has very minuscule effect on me, personally.
Of course, it's anecdotal experience and nothing more. But I get an eye twitch when I see stuff like "blue filter is a game changer". Sounds like placebo to me.
IMO, this is fundamentally a niche object. But that nicheness means that if it did exist, it would have several options without worrying about pissing off the mainstream.
#1 on that list is that you don't need to seamlessly emulate an LCD screen with an e-ink screen - instead of having a single multiplexed screen, have 2-3 80-char-wide separate e-ink screens and have text on each of them.
This has two advantages: one, it's cheaper because e-ink screen costs scale geometrically with size, not linearly. And two, AIUI partial-refresh doesn't work well when you're literally refreshing a third or half of your screen, but two completely independent screens can obviously refresh independently of each other. I'm assuming partial refreshes are faster due to taking a smaller absolute number of pixels, and not due to being a smaller proportion of the screen, so e.g. a quarter of a 4" screen will refresh the same speed as a full 2" screen refresh but faster than a full 4" screen refresh.
Ideally, you'd want to split the e-ink screen into as many smaller screens as possible anywhere it makes sense (and design the UI in hardware), simply to reduce costs.
Sadly, large cheap single screens have made the concept of software controlled UIs so obvious that people don't even consider the alternative.