YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Your mirror doesn't seem to work either

I just want a B/W 3

I wonder how white balance is handled across these products.

I recently bought the InkJoy frame which is similar to what's sold at your link and the white balance is _awful_ and grey.

I naively expect these to reflect light like paper photos and be nearly identical in that regard when mounted beside each other on a wall, but I've been disappointed with the results so far.

Colour depth is not _as_ big a deal to me as the image simply looking natural among printed photos.

It’s requiring all my willpower not to take out a second mortgage and build a gallery wall filled with these. That image transition is gross but I guess it takes a lot more steps to move all those pigment layers around.

You can buy a 13" color e-ink display for ~$250, or a 7" e-ink display for ~$60. These can be placed in a frame for a couple bucks more [2].

Two things that I did not anticipate:

1: Refresh time is a lot longer for color displays (~20s) as compared to black and white displays (~0.5s).

2: Stock images tend to use cartoons. There is a reason for that. These displays require dithering which seems to work a lot better with a limited color palette, flat areas, and bold edges.

[1] https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-e.htm

[2] https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-photopainter.htm

I would also try going the other way, and build transreflective color LCDs - those don't have latency or refresh issues, like these weird hybrids.

They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.

I'm in the exact same situation, still rocking an Aura One with KOReader and can't find anything with that form factor in black/white that satisfies me.

There's something to be said with a device that has a single purpose and supports custom firmware: other than the micro-USB port and the slightly shorter battery charge I don't think I will be changing it soon.

Once I saw that Kobo was going all in on the color e-readers I decided I'm going to sit this whole trend out and bought another Aura One. Between it and the one I currently own they should carry me for a long, long time.

The Aura One is essentially perfect. The only gripes I have are the USB port and non-removable battery. It is a bit slow with the stock OS but with KOreader it runs amazingly well.

I also have a kobo aura one and was just recently researching potential upgrades and was shocked even looking outside of strictly kobo that I couldn't find anything that was a clear upgrade or equivalent on various features against it. For a product almost ten years old it's so weird.

Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.

I Started with an Aura One, it was my very first eink device. When it died about a year ago, I bought a Kindle Scribe thinking I was getting an Aura, but with a larger screen.

B/W only, thin in the hand, simple interface, PDF transfer via USB.

Its a luxury, but not a gimmick IMHO. My last real use case for my color laser is printing out papers with lots of graphs/diagrams that use color. The kindle scribe color looks cool but needs to at least halve in price before I start really considering it. I might even give textbooks a go on it, I prefer paper, but they are often so heavy, it might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

I think most go this route for comics, graphic novels and some read magazines on it. Niche, but not a gimmick.

Me too. But it’s better than wanting a megayacht or some other more ridiculous affliction, isn’t it?

I find e-ink screens infinitely more pleasant to look at than *LED

I know that’s the point, but I also know some people care more than others. I happen to be one of those who cares a lot.

I justified one to myself to read papers that have colored plots. Eink performance is still so marginal that the experience is too frustrating to rely on, and I would rather use a tablet.

Maybe if you wanted to read comics that only ever had mediocre artwork?

What do you mean - the color part? That is for information density.

Do you mean the e-ink part? That is for natural-light readability w/o requiring backlight, and for power-efficiency w/o requiring a heavy battery/frequent charging.

I have one but wish I'd bought a monochrome one. I barely use the colors, but the whites aren't as white as on a monochrome one.

In theory they should be amazing. Full color, looks like paper, basically an interactive magazine!

In practice the color isn't great, the screens are slow to refresh in an annoying way, and the resolution is a noticeably worse than an iPad. I also find that apps not explicitly made for e-ink are generally garbage when used on an e-ink device.

So far I have personally been incredibly disappointed with e-ink devices outside of e-readers. I want them to be good but the experience is just so much worse than an iPad.

I have one and I read mostly magazines, papers and books on them. Its great to be able to read in direct sunlight without having to strain my eyes. I have wired it up to the laptop sometimes to use it as an external monitor for coding (slow but doable).

50% contrast improvement is significant, but it’s from a base of only around 1:10, so will still be fairly low in absolute terms.

If you don't want colour then any discussion about the shortcomings of this tech are moot, as you will use a display with much higher contrast.

Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.

I use a black and white Boox tablet, I absolutely love it. I've had it for almost four years. My workflow includes reviewing documents, I annotate heavily. I wish I had just some yellow or orange for highlighting.

A colleague has the colour version of the same tablet, with a Kaleido 3 screen. It's terrible. It's unusable indoors without the backlight.

  > That's not great for battery life.

> Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.

A photo frame in your home that rotates through a set of photos. My grandmother had one to help her remember her family, but it was an LCD. A color e-ink one would be so much nicer.

Any sort of information panel/dashboard or even just graphs inside education books. There are e-ink screens with only a couple colors (like black, white, red, and yellow), which lets you do things like "make this graph red when my waterheater is broken" but a full-color display opens up the possibilities considerably! For example, having line graphs with multiple lines.

If it was high refresh rate, I would consider it for a computer display for coding. I could never give up syntax highlighting so I need color.

I am regularly reading comics and colored PDFs; the value of color e-ink is definitely not up for debate for me.

There's no question that there's room for improvement! But if you're only reading prose or black & white documents, you'd be better served by a black & white screen. Which is not cause to say that a useful, functional technology is "fundamentally flawed".

I'd love to have a color e-ink reader and have been looking for one for years. Every year some company markets their great new breakthrough display tech. Every year the improvements turn out to be minimal when you actually hold the device in your hands. So I've given up waiting and being excited about announcements. If a decent color e-ink exists one day I'll hear about it by word of mouth.

I would love this as well. I dream of a clean dashboard for things like a shared calendar in my home.

TRMNL made one of these, 31.5” spectra 6. will start selling in a few weeks. fully hackable

    TRMNL e-ink 

I have a Kobo Clara Color. I like the product but colors are mostly a gimmick. Useful for the occasional chart and for books cover and that’s pretty much it.

Don’t expect iPad quality color, they’re very washed out.

I think a dedicated e-reader is a great choice (I only read books, not comics or other graphics heavy documents) but for that grayscale would be more than enough and color is an extra.

I would recommend you to go to a store and have a look live at a color eink screen to get a feel for what they offer.

I have a b/w page-sized Kobo, but I can tell you one nice thing vs the iPad is the weight. I don’t think the color (at lower resolution) is worth it for me.

> is it better than ipad?

Only you can answer that, “better” is a personal choice. A dedicated e-ink reader does less than an iPad (some see that as a bonus, others as a disadvantage). E-ink colours aren’t as vibrant and devices are slower, but the battery life, weight, cost, and reduced eye strain can more than make up for it.

If possible, I recommend grabbing one at a store nearby and playing with it a bit. You’ll soon understand if the weight, speed, and colours are enough for you.

Personally no. I've been reading a lot on LCD screens (PDAs if you know what those were), way back before eInk existed.

First, eInk used to be glossy, and not backlit which sucked, since you needed a light source to illuminate it well enough, but not so much that it shone on the screen and caused weird reflections.

After they added backlight, it became much better, but I'm not sure how it's better than an LCD (I dont think it is).

The only thing that sucks both about the iPad and most ereaders is the lack of physical buttons to flip pages, which makes 1 handed operation clumsy at best.

Kindle's color tablets look a bit better than Kobo's, by my estimation. But neither is anywhere near iPad-level color saturation or contrast.

I think Amazon does some special stuff with the backplane or something. Seems like it's not 100% marketing gimmicks if it actually looks better.

Why is iPad even mentioned here? This is better than iPad in the same way as a printed book is better than an oled TV.

They're two different things for different uses, one blasts light and colour in your eyes, other has a paperly look.

Colors are as vibrant as late 90s cheap laptops.

I have a color eInk Android tablet and I greatly prefer my Kobo Clara BW for general readability. I ended up disabling color in the accessibility settings.

The contrast is terrible compared to b/w eInk. The front light is necessary under anything but bright sunlight. But the front light washes out the colors, so much so that it’s a readability problem. So I only take it out of black and white mode when I’m using it outdoors.

It sounds like this new version of color eInk might be better. But I think it really would have to be an enormous difference for me to prefer it over B&W eInk.

I had one of the colored Boox models, and I actually liked it less than the b/w ones. It doesn't reflect enough light, and so I felt like I needed to use the backlight on it most of the time. I sold it and went back to b/w e-ink.

Not really if you want to read color content. If your usecase is pure B/W, it's better.

This comes from someone using color eink table.

I had one and sold it. All Kaleido color displays are really really dark, even outdoors, with the exception of in direct sunlight. Monochrome eInk displays are much brighter and better, especially for reading.

It is not. I just got a Boox Go 7 Color Gen 2 and it's slower than a turtle. Returning after 5 days.

I like the form factor with turn page buttons on the side, but the lag/latency is insane. It's ok for books only, but I got the Boox for Android under the hood so that I could scan my email and RSS. I wish there was an OLED or an LCD version of the same device.

I feel like amazon tends to wait a couple of years before using whatever the latest e-ink screen is and claim to do a lot of customization and calibration as compared to their competitors.

Yes, although the original patent expired in 2017 so it's a little less clear-cut nowadays. They do have hundreds of patents and bought up basically all non-Chinese competitors though.

Regular old trade secrecy is also a big factor I think. I look for interesting new EPD papers on scholar.google from time to time, and they tend to be about stuff an undergrad would think of in the first twenty minutes, which suggests to me that everyone is trying to keep their tech very much under wraps.

I’d say no. Not long ago I saw an HN user who debunked the theory that E Ink is holding the industry at gunpoint with “the patent.” Forgot his name, but he seemed to work in the monitor/display industry. It seems like it’s just a myth; nobody who claims the theory is true has been able to provide substantial evidence.

Patent holding E Ink is a myth

You're using Kaleido 3 then.

Compared to the previous generation, E Ink Kaleido 4 doubles its color gamut volume to more than 40K, increases white reflectance by 15%, and improves contrast by 50%. Additionally, with the introduction of new algorithms, E Ink Kaleido 4 is capable of video playback at up to 18 frames per second (FPS).