E-ink technology

FabiFr

Hello,

I recently tested E-ink technology with a Boox Palma, but it still hurt my eyes. The discomfort was slightly reduced when the backlight was off, but I could still feel the effects when the device was in my field of vision in daylight.

Among the various technical hypotheses that could explain the hyper digital eyestrain experienced by most people on this forum—such as PWM, temporal dithering, color depth, and possibly ClearType—it seems that none of these are used in E-ink screens. So, I’m wondering what the technical explanation could be for why some of us still struggle with E-ink screens.

jordan

FabiFr I found boox devices for me in the past to not be that comfortable. I know their Boox tab mini C btw uses dithering with no way to turn it off. Supposedly you can turn it off If I remember correctly on the palma but it still felt off for me. It seems different eink devices are tuned differently with their display driver. I find Dasung eink monitors to be much more comfortable. I am currently typing on the dasung hd-f 13.3 (non revo) portable monitor in text mode (non dithering mode). I wonder if android could be bringing on its own OS strain to the eink screen maybe too? for example that 13.3 felt terrible when It was connected to a m1 mba with still color but does not on my win10 20h2 hp spectre x360 laptop.

OldMan

FabiFr

Yeah, the Palma uses BSR (Boox Super Refresh) as do the TAB series. All cause problems for me. The larger TAB devices have a separate GPU to perform the BSR evil magic whereas the Palma being smaller achieves the same with just the CPU.

No problems with the non BSR devices (although I make sure to never use their front-lights). Currently using a Boox Max Lumi and Boox Page with zero issues.

If you're after a Palma sized device then I highly recommend any of the Hisense models. Never had a problem with Hisense and they're still available despite them having exited the e-ink market years ago.

Clokwork

I don't understand how an E-Ink device uses dithering unless you are referring to static dithering. Once an image renders, there is no refresh rate.

jordan

Clokwork thats true with no refresh but when you scroll even the slightest the dithering changes, I just try to avoid it as much as I can. the dithering is used for the gray shades

noigmn

I use purely e-ink these days because traditional monitors aren't compatible with my condition.

I've only used an early Boox model years back which seemed slow, so can't comment on them, but my current devices are:

Phone: Hisense A9

Desktop: Dasung Paperlike HD-F

Tablet: Dasung Not E-Reader

Only limiting thing is colour tasks. I'm not quite as good with colour e-ink due to the traditional grid over the screen, and colour e-ink is lower contrast (needs frontlight) and isn't good enough yet for proper colour tasks like photo editing anyway.