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Comment by Cd00d | Hacker News Reader

> I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding

I've seen this sentiment a lot when eink displays are discussed here. But, I'm not quite sure I get it.

I've typed in platforms with significant lag between a keystroke and the character showing. It's horrible! So often, you think maybe you made a typo, but have to wait to see it and fix it, instead of a quick few backspaces and ONWARD! I find it really disruptive to my train of thought and it breaks the brain-interface link.

Maybe the eink displays refresh fast enough to make this be a minimal issue, but my few years old Kindle Paperwhite doesn't have me confident that's true.

Or, maybe I just type way worse than those of you that want an eink dev environment.

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An eink display doesn't handle the same as a regular framebuffer, and the speed of the update depends a lot of what operation you want to do on it and how you want it to look like.

With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)

For regular typing, I have no doubts it can work without disruption. What is harder is modifying blocks of text. Scrolling quickly. It can be done, but would eventually require a full screen refresh to get good quality due to ghosting again.

(Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)

In a sense, it's like working remotely with a slow modem. The latency is not high, but you need to be smart on what you display (the original vi editor would actually be a _perfect_ fit for this ;))

The question is why I would put up with all this effort and limitations with eink. For me, it's because eink is MUCH easier on the eyes. It's pretty much the only display which is truly readable outdoors. So far I wasn't able to use any single tablet/phone/laptop outside, despite owning devices with pretty bright 500nit screens.

> (Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)

When you say "high refresh rate video playback", you're referring to A2 mode at 8fps right? Because that's the only demonstration ever seen, and I wouldn't call it vapourware because that's what you're using when you use a Dasung panel.

> With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)

I would be interested to see some proof of above, I haven't myself seen a usable implementation that successfully controls all those behaviors and latency. People will often point to Dasung but I've used it and I feel it is unusable.

Displaying a character on an e-ink display can be low latency, it's deleting a character that takes time (or vice versa, depending on the chemistry and fore/background inversion).

Eink displays no longer have that problem. Look at Boox and Dasung displays.

> Eink displays no longer have that problem. Look at Boox and Dasung displays.

Just curious, have you actually sat down and used and looked at a Boox or a Dasung display? I think you'll find that A2 mode is not really what the marketing videos make it out to be, at least in my usage of it.

i use two daily and they are wonderful. definitely not as fast as an l c d but you can watch video and read and scroll and write very well in my opinion. well worth the trade off for the view ability and eases on the eyes

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