It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!
swinglock•1h ago
It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment.
Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.
porridgeraisin•1h ago
What about syntax highlighting?
3abiton•1h ago
That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
swinglock•1h ago
I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
balou23•32m ago
There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better.
Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already.
Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.
swinglock•26m ago
I like your idea better.
OJFord•31m ago
I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on.
Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
dspillett•1m ago
You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light. That should be enough for the essentials, though it will feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than liking it being pretty.
bbarnett•1h ago
There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though.
The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit?
If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same.
(One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
swinglock•27m ago
Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
dspillett•6m ago
Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).
sandos•1h ago
swinglock•1h ago
Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.
porridgeraisin•1h ago
3abiton•1h ago
swinglock•1h ago
balou23•32m ago
Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already.
Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.
swinglock•26m ago
OJFord•31m ago
Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
dspillett•1m ago
bbarnett•1h ago
The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit?
If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same.
(One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
swinglock•27m ago
dspillett•6m ago