Eink always could be driven quickly. The issue is that LCDs are more powerful efficient at high refresh rates

EInk needs a lot of power to move the heavier ink particles around. If you are doing that more and more rapidly, then even more power is drawn.

By 75Hz, I'm almost certain that LCD is far more power efficient. The LCD pixel (aka the liquid crystal) is a glorified capacitor, it takes some power to charge but it's exceptionally 'light' compared to eink.

That's why LCDs can go faster and faster. It's just physics. A capacitor / twisted crystal uses less power to turn on or off than EInk.

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EInks advantage is that if you turn off power, the ink stays put. So you spend a ton of power moving the ink around and then save lots and lots of power over the next seconds, minutes or more.

That's why EInk is ideal for once-a-day updates of prices (or other retailer tasks). The less you update, the less power used.

I've seen (in kobo documentation) statements that e-ink displays are good for up to about a million refreshes overall. At 75Hz that means a display might last about 4 hours total. Other displays claim up to 10 million, so that would be about a week's worth of regular work.

Is there anything mitigating that issue?

> says Modos cofounder Wenting Zhang

I am absolutely not surprised to see his name behind this startup. I've been following his work for years at this point; his YouTube channel has always deeply impressed me, and he's done wonderful open source work in the realm of E-paper for quite some time now.

Kudos to him, and I wish him all the best.

I've been praying for a good e ink phone and laptop for years.

I'd love something similar to the Lightphone but a bit smarter.

And a laptop or device I can code with outdoors at a picnic table in broad daylight.

Congrats to Alex and Wenting on the reaching your funding goals for the Modos Developer Kit! I'm a backer and soon to be hacker.

[1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor

I love my e-ink tablet.

Regardless of manufacturer (remarkable, boox, supernote…), all e-paper tablets have one major performance problem: quickly scrolling through multiple pages of notes. No idea if the display is the limiting factor, or the cpu, but I’ve hit this issue on all tablets I’ve used. If you like riffling through pages in you paper notebook, you will hit the limit too. I know at least 2 people who stopped using their tablets over time because of this issue.

If this tech helps solve that problem, it’s more important to me than an eink monitor.

Edit: this is mainly important for notes, because sketches, scribbled diagrams and quick notes half-taken in meetings are not really searchable. PDFs and ebooks don’t have this problem.

The article is oddly written. It's not the e-ink display panels that are different; they're off-the-shelf modules from E-Ink that their controller is driving at 75 Hz. Presumably E-Ink themselves know that the panel can be driven at that rate.

And pixel-level addressing isn't innovative either. If you've written on an e-ink tablet and observed that the screen doesn't refresh with every pixel change under the stylus, that is surely because pixels are being toggled individually instead of doing a full screen refresh.

So perhaps the only difference is that it's an open source controller that's competitive with commercial e-ink display controllers? That's no small achievement and worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's not at all made clear by the article.

I play chess on a e-ink smartphone and it is a nice break for my eyes in the evening. I can not wait for the moment when I would be able to code on a nice colored e-ink desktop screen

Refresh rate is imperceptible on the Daylight. https://daylightcomputer.com/product

A few thoughts: it would be cool if the controller could do targeted refreshes to conserve power, only flipping pixels that changed.

It would be cool to see a Linux distribution with a gui and windowing system specifically designed for e-ink displays.

Not sure what optimizations would even be needed…

This looks too cool not to mess with - looking forward to some fun projects in the new year.

Why does everyone seem to think straight away of portable devices. I would get this for my main desktop monitor. Seems like a great way to be able to do work and only work.

I made a e-ink newspaper display: https://github.com/pathikrit/newswall

This would be amazing

I would love to see the performance trade-offs. I don't mind more battery draw, but how many shades of grey does it support? How bad is the ghosting? How white is the background? Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black? How often does it need a full screen refresh?

I would love to have an eInk tablet that I can watch videos on (color not required). I frequently watch educational YouTube videos before bed, but I’d prefer to have something that isn’t beaming light into my eyes. Does something like this exist on the market today, or do I need to wait until this product gets released?

Did anyone tested Viwoods AiPaper ? Forgetting about the AI part, the screen is Carta 1300 + Mobius which is rare. It’s really thin and light as well and software is updated regularly to match the competition, it has Android to install apps. While not perfect it looks quite good !

I just wish there were more e-ink Android devices. Most of the devices available today are expensive, and they suck.

> instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce

I enjoyed that quote.

Not really knowledgeable enough about the tech, to comment further, but I like EInk, and look forward to seeing it be more useful.

Thanks!

FPGA and e-ink at 75Hz? It sounds like it will have a high power draw.

I want color!

The thought of high response high resolution passive lit screens appeals.

I always think refresh rate and color aren't the problem, eink vendors need to find the right customer crowd.

For color e-ink displays, instead of competing with LCDs, target a niche market: 8-color terminals for programmers.

What's the best e-paper/e-ink display on the market with a good price-performance ratio that I can use to tinker around with?

I basically want to build a custom e-reader with a RasPi Zero for learning/home use, 8-10inches would be great.

Don't care much about it being touchscreen.

I'm ok with E-paper's capabilities, the problem is cost. Even though it can't display all the content TFT & LCD can, it costs a LOT more. I'm not a hardware person, I just looked into the cost of working on an E-paper based wall-spanning display and just stacking LCD's and doing something ugly was much cheaper. I suspect it has to do with the wholesale economics and its demand.

What about cheaper, bigger displays? I want something that's ~16" but doesn't cost an arm and a leg, for displaying sheet music. Still haven't found anything that's suitable. Plenty of people I know use the 13" iPad Pro, but between the glare (stage lights can be intense) and the roughly-letter-paper size, I still prefer sheets of paper.

I've been using a Kobo Libra color lately, and man E-ink has gotten SO GOOD.

It's high resolution, snappy, and the whole package is light as a feather and with batteries that last for ages.

I know some people prefer paper, but I love modern e-readers. They're amazingly tuned.

>Modos, a two-person startup with open-hardware roots, thinks it has cracked part of that problem with a development kit capable of driving an e-paper display at refresh rates up to a record 75 hertz.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather see these guys get a couple million than yet another chatgpt wrapper.

This is great, but I see lots of ghosting and apparently low contrast. Sad to see no mention of it in the article.

does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.

Can you stick it into type-c of macbook air and work on a sunny outside environment?

Nice, they have a video of playing Return of the Obra Dinn on the screen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw

I suppose if we are at comparable refresh rates to LCDs, next metric to compare against is response time? I see significant amount of trailing while scrolling.

It is a bit difficult to tell what is compression artifacts and what is real here, but there's still a fair bit of "tailing" in the image.

So, it is comparable to LCD sure, but to an oldd LCD of CSTN tech or such.

This still uses a classic electrophoresis panel, perhaps even one that is produced by E Ink. These work by moving solid particles (pigment) through a liquid. Which is inherently a physically slow process. At high refresh rates there will be significant amounts of ghosting.

To get past that, we would need a different panel technology, a type of reflective ("e-paper") panel that is not based on electrophoresis.

Years ago there were many such display types in development. One option is electrowetting displays. Liquavista was a company that had a screen where tiny oil droplets were switched between being either round and small or flat and large, using high voltage. The flat droplets would cover the background of a pixel and make it dark, while the small ones would "hide" in the corner of the pixel to make most of the background visible. This is pretty fast because the oil droplets are surrounded by air, which doesn't resist the movement of the oil, in contrast to moving solid pigment through a liquid.

Another option was to to have microscopic mechanical (MEMS) plates inside a pixel, which produce color by creating light interference. Qualcomm's Mirasol tried to do that. The wavelength of the reflected light depends on the gap between the plates.

The cool thing with interference e-paper is that you can theoretically make a color display which doesn't need RGB subpixels. Colors could be created by continuously adjusting the gap rather than doing binary switching between black (UV or IR) and either red, green or blue. Not having RGB subpixels greatly increases contrast on colored screens because it can reflect much more light. An issue is that shades of white and magenta can't be straightforwardly created with interference, because those are not monochromatic colors with a single wavelength. Anyway, Qualcomm closed Mirasol just as they tried to make these subpixel-free screens viable.

“I would say instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce,” says cofounder Alexander Soto. “You don’t even need to use the panel we’re offering. You could use a different panel and still get [75 Hz].”

Fun that this is getting the attention it deserves. I order the kit and am excited to get it.

Don't want 75Hz or even 10Hz from my Epaper. Want a maximum battery life, 1Hz is plenty

I wish e-paper would soon reach the realm of my wallet.

Sick and tired of seeing really neat announcements with pricing out-of-bounds for hobbyists.

(At least those who aren’t prepared to spend thousands just to experiment with a new toy screen)

Also, new battery tech quadruples energy density, and new discovery brings us 10 years closer to fusion energy. More news at 10.