Waaaaaaaaay too expensive, but I'd love it if big eink displays became a thing, even with shit refresh rates, mostly because I want some for displaying Home Assistant dashboards.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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There's this range of Philips signage displays in up to 32" (~$1800 USD): https://www.ppds.com/display-solutions/digital-signage/philips-tableaux
They even run Android, so should be able to install the Home Assistant app natively. Being intended as a signage solution, there's also PoE (although it is 45W 802.3bt class5), and even room for four 18650 batteries.
Notably though, they use the newer E-Ink "Spectra" (16 bit, 65,536 colour) panel which offers its full 2560x1600 resolution in both greyscale and colour, not the "Kaleido" one (12 bit, 4096 colour) of this Boox monitor that only has half of its 3200x1800 resolution in colour (Boox recommend using 1400x1050).
I don't know which of the two panels offers better refresh rates, however.
I bought a trmnl and it's pricey but works pretty good. I've mostly been using a few out-of-the-box plugins for it.
There is a selfhosted/offline version of the server you can run for it, so it can be 'offline' in theory. I keep meaning to mess with it more but haven't put the time aside.
Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.
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If I could get a laptop with a screen like this, I could finally sit outside in a park and code like nature intended.
Also a lap desk. And a coffee thermos. And headphones. Second screen.
God, I'm too spoiled for nature, ain't I
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I’m thinking at those prices this is probably intended for corporations that absolutely need a readable display in bright sunlight areas but don’t really care about refresh rate or color depth.
I can see how this would be very attractive to a writer.
Not necessarily just corporations, but certainly text-based workflows. I can see this being great if your day job is writing code, working on spreadsheets, editing documents, etc. In those use cases, framerate hardly matters. Would be great for reducing eye strain.
How many seconds per frame does it get?
Not sure yet, we're still waiting for the first frame to finish.
If the answer matters then your use case isn’t this monitor’s use case. If you spend all day in Excel, or an IDE, something like that, then it could be awesome for eye strain reduction.
Isn't eye strain mostly due to distance?
I’m no optometrist, but I would love to hear the opinion of one.
I checked and while it seems to certainly have an influence, it doesn't seem to be the main thing making a difference.
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Wow, relive the early days of really fucking terrible LCD displays for just under $2000.
What a time to be alive...
Why, for the love of all the gods, do people keep saying and writing "LCD display".
Tell me what the "D" in "LCD" means!
What does the "D" mean, hmmm!?
The same as the M in ATM machine and N in PIN number, V in HIV virus and C in UPC code!
Oh, the dreaded RAS syndrome!.
I'm off to read some DC comics.
I will be reporting this to the American Association Against Acronym Abuse!
Also known as: The Fonz
I'll remember that the next time I enter my PIN number at an ATM machine.
You really need to learn about RAS syndrome.
it means peDantic
Ok, so what's up with that LC display.
This kind of redundancy creates semantic resilience, thats why we take the type name out of acronyms.
Instead, when designing acronyms leave the type name out of it.
Diode?
Display
Dichotomy of humanities ego and id and how it affects the standards of morality and self expression in a pre post scarcity world?
For a work machine with a lot of text and little graphics, this is great. Less eye strain for long periods.
In theory yes. But after seeing a review yesterday I am fully disappointed. Even text looks like shit on this monitor.
I'm really keen on one of these displays eventually, as I can set aside the issues with refresh rate and colour accuracy, but the price needs to drop way down. It needs to be competitive with regular LCD monitors.
I look at terminals all day for work, this would make it so much more comfortable.
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I'm good.
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.
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Maybe it’d be useful as a low powered interactive kiosk display? Price needs to come down tremendously before this thing becomes competitive.
I remember when OLED was that extensive...
Obligatory Linus video for a similar, but not identical, monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUxxn53mBE
This Dasung model is mentioned at the bottom of the article. TL;DW: These things have the exact list of drawbacks you think they do including miserable contrast, color accuracy so bad it's fallen off the bottom of the chart, a low refresh rate, and quite a bit of ghosting. So it's awful, but surprisingly not as awful as you'd think if your primary experience is an e-reader form the first couple of generations. Linus being Linus he does attempt to game on it and gets... a result... but this is a display technology with niche applications and still best suited to displaying mostly static content.
I own this. It is horrible. If the specs were real it would be great, but the specs are not real. It is a 3k black and white monitor with a fixed color filter over it. That means you need 3x3 pixels to resemble a color.
I consider it a scam from Dasung.
Boox on the other hand made a sane black and white display. Much better. I own a Max 2 Pro. Sadly they fail to understand that when you report a display as 20px smaller than it really is over an HDMI port and then rescale the image of the computer display on that, that it becomes really uncrisp. Their suggestion is to use the display with 200% scaling (so you don't notice as much I suppose).
Epaper is really promising and nice. However both of these companies should either get some real competition or lawsuits.
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Looks awesome on the photo, but I guess I have better uses for such money and night sky and trees for enjoying what I see.
Also lower refresh rates are not such a terrible problem when it's not a CRT blinking in front of you.
Grainy look is kinda fine. That's about the "compromises" part.
So a cheaper one I'd probably use. Being part of some dream computer to be useful in transport, while walking, at home, with battery life longer than nuclear fallout effects and unbreakable box and EOL date of the kind castles in Europe have. Otherwise nah, many other things to break my eyes against.
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