
Dasung Paperlike Pro: E-Ink Monitor with HDMI connector [video] - abledon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj2Lvuc28k0
======
agentultra
A purpose-built laptop that just runs emacs at init and uses one of these as
the display. I would buy one so hard.

Hoping the ReMarkable will be simple enough hack that I could hook it up to my
own cloud and use it as a terminal device. Would be nice to sketch lemmas in
my handwriting and have a gesture recognition system pick it up and run it
past a theorem prover, get back results. etc.

I'm awaiting the arrival of e-ink displays on laptops.

~~~
Numberwang
You speak my language. Another thing I want is an e-ink only phone. I think
for sure there is a market for that type of device.

~~~
speps
I loved my Motofone[0], it was dirt cheap (paid £10 for it without contract or
SIM) and lasted ages (~2 weeks) on battery.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone)

------
mrmondo
I was an early backer of their last USB based monitor, it is truly useless -
very poor refresh rate, highly overpriced, poorly written drivers, clunky
construction and the list goes on and on.... it ended up as quite a large
waste of money.

However, I do hope that the new version will succeed, I love reading on eink
screens and I truly wish I had a decent, high resolution / DPI, fast
refreshing eink display that would take DisplayPort and 'just work'.

~~~
cordite
Hey a sibling backer!

I agree, it quickly became a gimmick, and such has been face down on a counter
top since I got it.

It is slow, it seems to use more CPU, and the stand that came with it is a
joke. At least they had VESA mounts on it, that kept me interested another
week.

One problem is that it gets this greasy look after an hour or so and you have
to manually interact with it to clear it up with the buttons.

It would be nice to use an existing display cable, HDMI, DP, whatever, and
plug it in without a further thought. Let the GPU shuffle the bits around the
wire.

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Animats
Is this for real? "1233% funded on July 2, 2016", and they're not shipping 11
months later. They're not making e-ink panels; they just add a bezel and
controller. The actual display may be an E-Ink Mobius.[1] That's 1600x1200
pixels on a 13.3" panel. The prototype they're showing may come from the dev
kit for E-Ink. They'd just need to add an HDMI interface and repurpose a case
from some other display.

E-Ink is a neat technology, but it still costs far too much per unit area
compared to competing technologies. That's why big E-Ink displays are so rare.

[1]
[http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html](http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html)

~~~
dogma1138
I think they have more problems to solve. I'm not sure how well eInk will
survive the relatively extreme refresh rates that a PC interface would require
even if you cap it at 30hz/fps it would still be orders of magnitude more than
what any eInk display currently on the market will experience.

Early LCDs had similar problems with pixels getting stuck and dying, from the
data sheets which are available (they are quite old) for eInk displays their
life span simply cannot coexist with a PC UI interface.

Even if the life span improved I'm guessing these guys had to optimize a lot
of things including adding a scaled and a composer that would only refresh the
pixels that absolutely must be refreshed in order to get any reasonable
lifespan from these.

And I'm still not sure these would last anywhere near the time frame one would
expect from a 1000$+ monitor with daily use.

------
akavel
I wonder why Pixel Qi didn't become popular enough to fit this niche and not
die as a company - seems to have many benefits over e-ink, including refresh
rate and some colors:

[https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/12/reports-death-pixe...](https://the-
digital-reader.com/2015/01/12/reports-death-pixel-qi-somewhat-exaggerated/)

~~~
seltzered_
I tried to follow pixel qi closely, my guess is that they were focused more on
the portables market and not getting enough traction in that area. Outside of
being sold in the OLPC, they were sold at small volumes on sparkfun as diy
panels to install into netbooks and in the nearly failed notion ink tablet,
they were also in some ruggedized windows tablets made for industrial/military
use.

I'd have to find the old videos with Mary-Lou Jepsen, but before they went out
of business it was around when the iPad retina came out and they were focusing
on retina screens. As far as the screen itself, while it seemingly had some
trans reflective properties it was also doing it on a TN, not IPS, panel, so
it had that problem where holding it vertically would introduce that odd
gradient across the screen.

Today I'm more curious about clearink which showed up out of nowhere at the
society for information display conference this year with a new outdoor
readable technology:
[https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo](https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo)

------
jlpom
If you wish to use an e-ink screen to avoid eyes strain, I've recently learned
that a video projector does have the avantages of a classic monitor (colors,
good refresh rate) without having to watch directly at the source of light,
thus avoiding eyes fatigue. I consider it to be a better tradeoff than working
with an annoying delay as if you were using a 10 years old computer.

~~~
anotheryou
How does backlit of reflected make a difference? Light comes of the
screen/projection and hits the eye. I don't see how the light would change
with that bounce by projection.

~~~
jlpom
It's notre direct light - starring at the sun (extreme example) severly hurt
your eyes while watching at shadows is not a problem.

~~~
mrob
For a non-PWMed high DPI monitor adjusted to match the e-ink's brightness and
contrast, the only difference in the light hitting your eye is the spectrum
and the polarization. It's not completely impossible for these to matter,
because of interactions with optical imperfections of the eye, but I've never
seen any evidence that it actually does matter.

~~~
bobajeff
What about blue light? I've been hearing about that being a problem lately.

~~~
mrob
Blue light stimulates intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells,
which influence sleep. Visually identical white lights can have different
spectra and different effect on these cells. Eg. "warm white" made from RGB
with the blue channel turned down, eg. as with f.lux, will probably stimulate
those cells more than sharply long-pass filtered (eg. with a dichroic filter)
broad spectrum light of the same color temperature.

These cells are also responsible for light aversion, at least in animal
models, eg:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23078956](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23078956)
, so it could theoretically make a difference to eye strain, especially at
high brightness levels.

However, if you read the e-ink under fluorescent or LED based lighting it's
probably going to have a similar peaked spectrum to the LCD screen and there
will be no difference if the brightness and color temperature is the same.

------
carlob
A review from one year ago

[https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/16/second-gen-dasung-...](https://the-
digital-reader.com/2016/05/16/second-gen-dasung-paperlike-e-ink-monitor-ships-
now-available-at-retail/)

the price tag seems to be $1300

~~~
fragmede
For an older model, which didn't have HDMI. The linked blog actually discusses
Dasung's third-generation product at [https://the-digital-
reader.com/2017/06/02/dasung-paperlike-p...](https://the-digital-
reader.com/2017/06/02/dasung-paperlike-pro-monitor-features-faster-response-
times-video-carta-e-ink-scren/) and mentions that the previous gen's product
price was $700 on Indiegogo, and says they don't know what this unit's price
will be.

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johnhattan
Seems like it'd be a good screen for a system that's intended for use
outdoors. A lot of surveying hardware hooks up to a conventional laptop, but
it's difficult to see laptop screens in full sunlight, and you either have to
put a shade over the screen or leave the laptop in the cab of the truck.

How does E-Ink compare to LCD in temperature range?

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keehun
Here's their real website:
[http://www.dasung.com/english/](http://www.dasung.com/english/)

I cannot wait for the day when large e-ink displays are cheap, or as cheap as
normal screens, and have faster refresh rates.

~~~
gravypod
I just want an 8.5" x 11" version that is portable, runs Linux, and can open
PDFs. For reading papers you wouldn't be able to beat it.

~~~
fragmede
Sony makes one, [https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-
notepad](https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-notepad) for $700 but
it's a product being sold to consumers, so tinkering with the underlying OS
(reputed to be Linux, in the form of Android) isn't supported.

(There are a number of other 8.5"x11" eink PDF readers out there.)

~~~
gravypod
The Digital Paper Notepad is a discontinued product. What other 8.5"x11" eink
readers are there?

~~~
0x45696e6172
13.3", 2200x1650﻿ pixels [http://ereader-store.de/en/77-onyx-boox-max-
carta.html](http://ereader-store.de/en/77-onyx-boox-max-carta.html)

------
mojomark
Anyone interested in e-ink displays may also the PrintLess Plans product of
interest:

[https://www.printlessplans.com](https://www.printlessplans.com)

------
upofadown
> "No blue light"

Well no light of any type really. If your room light source has blue light
then you get blue light. The difference here is that you normally can't adjust
the colour balance of your room light. You usually can dim down the blue light
on a light emitting display.

~~~
jpindar
BTW, Phillips Hue lights, which do let you adjust the color balance of your
room light, are great. Even if you don't go for obviously colored light, just
being able to change the color temperature of white light is nice.

------
hultner
Does anyone know if there's a hack for Kobos or Kindles that allows for
similar? Or connect a keyboard.

I'd love to be able to attach a tmux session on my Kobo Glo HD and write with
a bluetooth keyboard outside in the summer.

~~~
Crespyl
Kobos have proven to be pretty hackable, IIRC someone on the mobileread
developers forum got Debian running on one, so ssh/tmux should be possible.

The refresh rate is pretty low though, even for a text based terminal, I
suspect interactive use would suffer.

------
TurboHaskal
This is an ACME's user wet dream.

------
rrggrr
Gosh. I would buy this in a second if the price was a bit less and I was sure
the durability/lifespan was good. The reduced eye strain benefits. I really
want this.

~~~
mrob
What's the mechanism of action behind the reduced eye strain, and why is e-ink
needed to achieve it?

Lack of flicker? True of any non-PWMed monitor.

Reduced brightness or contrast? Conventional displays can be turned down to
match e-ink.

Lack of subpixels? High DPI displays make subpixels invisible under normal
circumstances.

Smoother spectrum white? I doubt this makes a difference, but it's not
completely implausible, because the eye does have some chromatic aberration.
But greyscale LCDs are available.

Lack of polarization? Polarization is visible (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush)
), but it's a very minor effect. It seems unlikely that something so difficult
to see could cause eye strain. OLED displays don't show this effect.

~~~
tinco
Reduced brightness at maintained contrast.

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c517402
One place I worked had indirect solar spectrum light that bounced light off
the ceiling. That really seemed to keep my eyes from getting tired.

~~~
bicubic
Can you describe that in a bit more detail? Links? I'd love something like
that.

~~~
c517402
This was a very old workspace. About every two cubicles there was a 15"x15"x8"
box that sat on top of the cubicle wall and took about a minute to come up to
full brightness. The top of the box was open and light reflected off the
ceiling tiles down to the work area. I don't know who made them. They
generated a fair amount of heat, but not enough to be uncomfortable. Twenty
years ago they were probably twenty years old. In the five years I was there I
never saw one burn out.

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singularity2001
The new Onyx book will get HDMI too at the end of the year. Plus you can use
it as an android tablet with pen.

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jlebrech
Perfect for an xlib based window manager.

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m-p-3
I wished they made bigger versions for digital signage.

------
jlebrech
DIY Alphasmart clone here I come.

