I’ve got an ereader with a color eink display with an identical PPI rating for color display. The fact they call out color PPI specifically gives a clue that this is the same tech which uses a color filter on top of a black and white eink display. In black and white mode it should be able to achieve about 300 PPI which provides a noticeably improved display. 150 PPI is a little chunky and at least for text ends up looking a little aliased and jagged.
The only somewhat impressive metric for this is the refresh rate of 30 hz, although that’s not really groundbreaking either even if it is a higher rating. What’s not mentioned and is very often an issue with those high refresh rates is they tend to both suffer from severe ghosting and reduced display lifespan.
The other major issue at least with all the existing color eink displays is that the colors are just not that impressive looking. Because of the filter they end up looking very muted, more on the pastel side of things rather than the bright vibrant colors we’re used to from traditional displays or even printers.
Doesn’t a high refresh rate kind ruin one of the big benefits of e-ink in the first place?
The reason I liked e-ink is because the screen only refreshed on a page change, so unless you’re using the back light, the main power draw is turning the page.
Yes and no. Even when refreshing rapidly the power draw is still significantly lower than something like an LCD, but not as low obviously as when refreshing slowly. It is nice to have the option of a high refresh rate if needed occasionally, but since every eink display I’ve seen with it to date suffers from absolutely horrendous ghosting when doing so the utility is highly questionable. Lets just say I am very skeptical of that claimed 30 Hz refresh rate and highly suspect it’s impractical marketing BS.
Yeah, that power metric can fluctuate wildly depending on how smart their display controller is. Throw VRR and / or event driven rendering into the mix and you get most of the benefits of both with the added benefit of limiting rendering bursts.
30Hz. That’s actually impressive for e-ink.
Excuse the pun, but colour me interested.
I’ve wanted a viable colour eink display to become a thing for a long time.
I’ve day in the future perhaps eink based digital photo frames will be commonplace. Laptop battery life could be extended a lot as long as you aren’t watching movies or playing games using an eink display.
Interested to see how this tech develops
