evthelegend It's not exactly like a book, more like reading particles of black sand through a couple of layers of glass. The background is gray instead of white, and instead of the ink appearing completely flat on paper, the black content hovers very slightly over the gray background, similar to the "simple segmented LCDs in" digital clocks or calculators. (However, the depth does not vary, meaning that all black content is still essentially at the same depth.)
Also, when not using the super slow "HD" mode, there is only black and white and no gray, so it does use dithering patterns to simulate gray. Some people are sensitive to this, but to me this doesn't really cause strain per se, it just makes the image appear noticeably more grainy and "sand-like" compared to paper.
E-ink flickers slightly when scrolling, but is still when there is no motion happening. For me though, I still find scrolling on e-ink wayyy more comfortable compared to a bad device, especially if the frontlight is off, although some others here have more problems with the flicker so your mileage may vary.
However, recent e-ink devices like the Palma have an annoying "auto-clean" mode enabled by default that continues flickering even when still (in order to clear out the ghosting…).
This auto-clean feature actually does bother me, but fortunately you can turn it off by disabling "Display Enhancement" in optimization settings and setting "Anti-Flicker" to the lowest value (counterintuitively, setting anti-flicker to the highest value actually causes more flicker!) Note that you must change that setting for each app -- it will sometimes reset on a new app that's installed, and you have to set it again for that app.
Currently, Boox Palma (and Tab Ultra… but I prefer the Palma as its screen is crisper and the touchscreen is much more accurate) are some of my most comfortable screens, and the only comfortable "modern devices" I have, so despite the flaws I'd still say it's a good starting point and definitely something that will give you a totally new experience compared to what you're familiar with. If e-ink works for you, you'll start noticing some visual patterns that you never even knew you could see before 🙂 ꩜
It's awesome that we're around the same age, I previously felt so alone on this forum until now, in my opinion our generation is even more impacted by this because we weren't lucky enough to have already finished school/college before these bad screens started taking over everything.
Would you be interested in chatting more on e.g. discord or instagram DMs? I have a lot of knowledge and strategies I can share about how I was finally able to get my life back after getting totally messed up by bad screens
P.S. By the way, I just found one rather unique battery-powered portable 12" monitor I have (that I literally forgot I even owned until yesterday!) that is strangely comfortable so far.
I'll use it for a week before making any real claims, to see if I can actually be consistently productive on this, but so far in the first 2 days it's the only monitor I've used that even comes CLOSE to feeling similar to the one "perfect laptop" I have and "already working pretty well out of the box without weird tweaks".
It is already more comfortable than all of my other [external monitors] -- even my ancient 2000s era ones that still cause brain fog for me -- and is also PWM-free at max brightness. Unsure if it has FRC or not. (If it does, it's probably a more primitive type of FRC since I don't immediately notice flickering).
I wrote this whole post on it and it felt "similar to my one good laptop", nothing else has made me feel this way before! I am really hoping it stays like this!
Will update more about this later, if it works for me, I will post about the monitor and it could possibly be a great option since it can be connected to any computer of course. Well, maybe not M1 Macs, since they're known to generate weird HDMI output… but the 8th gen i5 UHD 620 system I'm trying it with seems to output a clean signal. Cautiously optimistic.