• tal
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    18 hours ago

    In another comment response, I linked to some place (DASUNG) out of China that makes eInk monitors.

    They make 25" eInk monitors in both black-and-white and color. That’s $1,500 and up, though.

    Personally, for me, it wouldn’t make sense. The real selling point of eInk for me is:

    • It’s reflective, and eInk is almost the only kind of reflective display out there. That means that it works reasonably outdoors under sunlight and glare, without having to blast enough light to overwhelm the sunlight. But…with a desktop, and especially mixed types of monitors, you’re not going to be lugging those monitors outside under the sun.

    • If you’re looking at mostly static images in a lit area, eInk has extraordinarily low average power use, since it only consumes power when updating the image on the screen. That makes it a great fit for e-readers. But…for a fixed computer monitor, I don’t care much about power consumption.

    And with that, you get drawbacks of having limited refresh rates, limited size, high price, limited or no color (and if you have color, worse contrast) and not being able to display brightly-lit, emissive stuff.

    I mean, yes, eInk does look like paper, and if you’re really set on that particular aesthetic, then it’d have some value there. But for me, that value is just really limited. Yeah, it’d be kind of novel for text to look like it’s on paper, but it’s just not a game-changer.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      17 hours ago

      I get a fair amount of glare, and if it’s low-enough power, I could conceivably bring it with me outside or something. It would be sick if it was powered over USB-C.

      But I’m certainly not willing to pay $1k+ for it, more like $200-300.