03-03-2010, 01:47 PM
E-ink can have excellent clarity, and it has absolutely no flicker. Just as with paper, it works fine under direct sunlight. Once the image is drawn, it stays on with no power needed and no refresh needed. The problem with e-ink is that it takes about a second to change anything on the screen. While the change happens, the screen flashes. There are plenty of youtube videos that show how this works, but you really need to see it in person.
It's wonderful for reading. You can just press the "page turn" button (or touch gesture) as you get to the last line of the page. The whole page blackout is kind of like flipping a page on a book.
If you type or draw onto the display, or put up menus, it's a huge nuisance to wait for the redraws.
I read a lot of pdf's and so I'm interested in an e-ink reader. For coding, an e-ink screen would be useful for reference manuals but not for a text editor. I guess it could also be useful to redirect stderr to an e-ink screen, since you'd want error messages to stay up while debugging. When I had a tech support job monitoring which store computers had "phoned home" with daily sales data, an e-ink screen would have been great for that.
I don't know of any e-ink screen that can take a live video or text feed. All the ones I know of are standalone devices that led you read documents which have been downloaded into the device. Some of them can run arbitrary Linux code downloaded to the device, but I don't know if anyone has set that up to accept a text stream and update the screen as each complete line is received.
This is why the dual layer idea intrigues me, if it's possible.
It's wonderful for reading. You can just press the "page turn" button (or touch gesture) as you get to the last line of the page. The whole page blackout is kind of like flipping a page on a book.
If you type or draw onto the display, or put up menus, it's a huge nuisance to wait for the redraws.
I read a lot of pdf's and so I'm interested in an e-ink reader. For coding, an e-ink screen would be useful for reference manuals but not for a text editor. I guess it could also be useful to redirect stderr to an e-ink screen, since you'd want error messages to stay up while debugging. When I had a tech support job monitoring which store computers had "phoned home" with daily sales data, an e-ink screen would have been great for that.
I don't know of any e-ink screen that can take a live video or text feed. All the ones I know of are standalone devices that led you read documents which have been downloaded into the device. Some of them can run arbitrary Linux code downloaded to the device, but I don't know if anyone has set that up to accept a text stream and update the screen as each complete line is received.
This is why the dual layer idea intrigues me, if it's possible.