Discussion
Some things about eink screens which make them interesting to design for:
They can hold hold a static screen without using any power & are comfortable to read, but on the flipside they are slow-ish to update (with an inverted flash to avoid burn-in) & they have a highly limited colour palette.
The colour palette used to be pure black & white, but today you also get red & yellow as well.
It is possible for custom firmware to run eink at 60fps, but then you loose the power-savings.
1/2!
So it is for instance possible to ship eink devices with a diagram onscreen asking you to plug them in, then guide you from there.
eink strikes me as an excellent display technology for appliances! There the drawbacks hardly matter & the benefits do.
It should serve phones well, provided they use a custom UI.
Or I appreciate seeing my local bus service include eink signage at their bus stops! I prefer looking at that over my phone.
2/2 Now I'm truly done re-synopsizing my dumbphone design!
P.S. Some eReader firmware came across my feed today, thus showing me how to achieve great bare-metal text-rendering!
https://freeink.org was the one which came across my feed, but I'm more looking towards https://github.com/bigbag/papyrix-reader . That one lacks signs of "agentic dev" & more importantly is more international.
Both use the the same proprietary font format, EPD, which is how I found Papyrix.
So I think I could actually build this given a hardware collaborator...
3/2 Truly fin!
@alcinnz I am very fond of eink tech, but the "better" it gets the worse it is, at least for now, at least for me. High refresh rates mean flicker is back, when flicker is what I went there to avoid. In the interest of "preventing ghosting," things like my Boox Palma do a flickery fade-in unless I go to extremes to disable it, and price tags in stores do a minute long color inversion repeat cycle at a high enough frequency to count as flicker. With thousands of price tags in a store, it's a sure thing one will decide to refresh while I'm in there, and I hate it.
@d_rift Yeah I'm personally more interested in the question of what uses benefit from eink's tradeoffs, than how to overcome those tradeoffs!
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