this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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What is the refresh time? They carefully avoid mentioning that. There's a comparable Pimoroni monitor whose refresh takes 14 seconds so I'd call it a static display rather than a computer monitor.
The article mentions another display with a 33 Hz refresh rate. But be aware that there would be significant ghosting even just scrolling a page of text, more so than even a measly 33 Hz refresh rate would lead you to believe.
I'm happy with say 3 hz, fast enough to not be too annoying when flipping pages while reading. It's fine to not be good for video. What I really want is a 16 inch or so e-reader though.
I'd really like a 20" or so e-ink screen as a second/third monitor. I'd have one for video and whatnot, and the other for text.
In another comment response, I linked to some place (DASUNG) out of China that makes eInk monitors.
They make 25" eInk monitors in both black-and-white and color. That's $1,500 and up, though.
Personally, for me, it wouldn't make sense. The real selling point of eInk for me is:
It's reflective, and eInk is almost the only kind of reflective display out there. That means that it works reasonably outdoors under sunlight and glare, without having to blast enough light to overwhelm the sunlight. But...with a desktop, and especially mixed types of monitors, you're not going to be lugging those monitors outside under the sun.
If you're looking at mostly static images in a lit area, eInk has extraordinarily low average power use, since it only consumes power when updating the image on the screen. That makes it a great fit for e-readers. But...for a fixed computer monitor, I don't care much about power consumption.
And with that, you get drawbacks of having limited refresh rates, limited size, high price, limited or no color (and if you have color, worse contrast) and not being able to display brightly-lit, emissive stuff.
I mean, yes, eInk does look like paper, and if you're really set on that particular aesthetic, then it'd have some value there. But for me, that value is just really limited. Yeah, it'd be kind of novel for text to look like it's on paper, but it's just not a game-changer.
I get a fair amount of glare, and if it's low-enough power, I could conceivably bring it with me outside or something. It would be sick if it was powered over USB-C.
But I'm certainly not willing to pay $1k+ for it, more like $200-300.
Boox Tab Ultra C aint half bad
These guys make eInk monitors:
https://shop.dasung.com/
if you can live with a black-and-white eInk monitor, they say that their fastest model can do 60 Hz.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwwKuvCPKya/
(Not an advertisement - just first google result)
That is a video of a much smaller monitor. It does show reasonably responsive refresh. Do you have one of the 25.3 inch monitor described in the article?