Startup rattles tin for e-paper monitor with display fast enough to play video E-paper display startup Modos wants to make laptops, but is starting out with a standalone high-refresh-rate monitor first. The initial plan is for the "Modos Paper Monitor," which the company describes as: "An open-hardware standalone portable monitor made for reading and writing, especially for people who need to stare at …
They are. I suspect most e-paper goes into much smaller displays.
But it is getting there, perhaps more so than people realise. There are also working colour e-paper displays now, although it's usually black and white plus one or two other colours rather than *full* colour.
Three colours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A5w0z3vVRQ
Seven colours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JAB45vpQlk
So right now, you can either have colour, or speed, but not both.
Yield must be awful - I'd love to get a few A3/A2 displays - heck, if they were reasonably borderless I could patch them together with a raspi behind each one.
But they are multiple thousands of pounds each...
Digital signage is such an obvious use case, and doesn't require high refresh rates - doesn't necessarily need colour (though that could be a nice to have).
I have the Dasung display, so if its the same hardware then popping a different frame round it is not a big step forward.
To use it requires pissing about with display settings to turn on high contrast mode etc. The resolution is not quite good enough to make out buttons like close/minimise, but is *just* about good enough to work with code, but there are some problems. Typing code in a modern IDE has a lot of contextual information like underlines/colours that you miss, so basically back to notepad; a fair trade for being outside, perhaps. The main issue is OS support for greyscale is not good, everybody has a colour monitor and even in high contrast mode, using ubuntu is hard at times as menus are contextual and fonts are thin.
Plus the biggest issue, which these guys might actually solve, is I'm plugging an external monitor into a laptop, so the awkwardness of moving outside requires a table and power cords and faffing about. Good luck, cant wait for this to be easier! sun + code, yes please
I’ll be watching this closely as I love working outside. My current arrangement is to use a Boox 13.3 inch e reader in HDMI mode. It works but it is a rats nest of cables.
A purpose built laptop with a e paper screen is a dream I never thought would come true because the market is so niche. I don’t even need video playback. Fingers crossed. Only 1241 responders on a 50,000 target market survey, I won’t get my hopes up.
I'd like an e-ink monitor on a stand to replace printed sheet music. It's a great shame that the monitors currently cost so much. A Kindle paper white gets you 22.5 square inches of e-ink for £130 whereas a Dasung monitor gets you 85 square inches for £1000. That's twice the cost per square inch, ignoring all the other gubbins in a Kindle.
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