Posted by rbanffy 3 days ago
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.
[1] https://www.good-display.com/product/452.html
[2] https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-showcases-color-e-pa...
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…
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...
Curious.
Compared to LCD, oled or what have you, my understanding is that it uses significantly less.
See the microwatts of power that Sharps MemoryLCD displays have. They often beat comparable EInk screens in power draw.
The parts of the screen that doesn't update, courtesy of being e-ink, don't use any power at all. LCD will use power if you're looking at a static image, eink won't. And a lot of the time, 95% of the screen is a static image and only 5 percent actually updates. One of Modos' biggest innovations is successfully taking advantage of that.
That's unfortunate.
I'm imagining a fast scrolling game with complex backgrounds where most of the pixels are changing values every frame, I assume it completely breaks down in that case.
Or that's how I understand it anyway.
I saw that Alex Soto himself is in this comment thread, he'll know a lot more than me, I'm just spreading what little knowledge I've gathered from his blog posts and some of the discussions in the modos mastodon server.
I've probably misunderstood a lot of that too, I'm not a hardware engineer, just a lowly java dev with a strong but hobby level interest in eink.
Modos is my dream laptop, but it's currently unclear when that'll become reality.
Again, Alex Soto will know more.
This would be amazing
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!
[1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor