Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

It's not quite what you're looking for, but the Kindle Paperwhite will apparently pair with a Bluetooth keyboard.

EDIT: Better choice: The OLPC lets you turn off the screen backlight and that gets you a grayscale display that works even under direct sunlight.

View on HN

I was discussing monitors with a colleague today, and we speculated that what we wanted was an e-ink monitor - not a laptop, just a monitor. Use a conventional flat panel for the main screen, but have one or two e-ink screens off to the side for documentation etc.

I would love to have an e-ink whiteboard type thing that I could just leave up all the time without worrying about power consumption. I'd say maybe the top third would be for calendar events/digital todo lists that sync automatically, and the bottom 2/3 would be a writing surface that would capture and sync its contents as well. It'd be amazing. I have a 10" Android tablet with Wacom digitizer which I do use a lot for brainstorming so that I have everything digitized, but I'd really like a bigger surface that I can leave on all the time.

You might be interested in the Boogie Board Sync. Kind of ugly looking but might fit your needs for a handy digital whiteboard that syncs up.

That's pretty cool. Learn more about the Kindle Paperwhite at http://www.ereadercomparison.co/

Yeah, I thought about those. The OLPC is just too weird and outdated TBH, and e-paper devices (as much as I love them) are not reactive enough for active use like writing and editing. There's just no real option for now.

So what exactly is your goal? If you don't want anything that has advantages over a typical color LCD, then use driver settings to make it grayscale. Is that a 'fake' option?

sorry, a little late to respond, but no, that doesn't quite fit the bill. A native-monochrome LCD would actually have advantages over color LCDs because you have reduced bits per pixel, need less power per pixel, and actually increase the number of addressable pixels. E-paper displays are great for reading from but not good for interacting with in any active way. Pixel Qi is an interesting medium but I'm not sure it's quite there yet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com