hybrid e ink lcd display for sale

Got a netbook? Specifically, got a Samsung N130 or a Lenovo S10-2? Even more specifically, do you use it in and outdoors, but find it hard to read in the sun? We have good news! The Maker Shed will sell you one of Pixel Qi"s dual-mode displays as a straight swap-in for your existing LCD-panel.

The 10.1-inch screen runs in one of two modes. When indoors, or watching video, you use the regular LCD display, which will look pretty much the same as the one you already have. When you"re in to mood for some reading, or you are outside in bright sunlight, or you"re just running low on battery power, you can switch to the e-ink mode.

This disables the backlight and shows you hi-res, grayscale pixels, much like you"d see on the screen of the Amazon Kindle. Because it only uses power when updating the screen, it sips power.

There is also a hybrid mode, which lets the sun reflect off the back of the display assembly and back out through the color LCD. This both saves battery power and lets you view a normal color display outdoors.

The panel will cost you $275, which puts it out of the "merely curious" bracket but is still cheap enough for people who do a lot of outdoor computing. The Maker Shed store page also says that the panel will likely work in any netbook: the Lenovo and the Samsung are just the only ones so far tested and guaranteed.

And according to the Pixel Qi blog, which first described the plan to sell these panels separately from the company"s own notebooks, the swap-operation (swaperation?) is easy:It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting [sic] the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.

Apple has shown interest in creating a new iPad with a hybrid display that could dynamically switch all or just part of the full-color screen to low-power black-and-white e-ink for text and other static content.

The new dynamic, hybrid system described by Apple could have sections of the screen operate as a traditional LCD screen for displaying video, while other parts with static content would be served up in e-ink. Rather than depending on the user to switch between e-ink and LCD, Apple"s system would handle the work and provide content in the ideal context.

Apple"s interest in the technology was revealed this week in a new patent application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and first discovered by AppleInsider. The filing, entitled "Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display," describes hardware that can selectively switch between the two types of screens.

E-ink displays, or "electronic paper" as Apple refers to it throughout the filing, are advantageous because they do not require a backlight to operate, and they can be read more easily in direct sunlight. E-reader devices focused on delivering books, like the Amazon Kindle, use e-ink displays.

Of course, Apple is also involved in the sale of digital books through its own iBookstore. The iBooks application is available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, but it cannot be utilized on a device with an e-ink display.

Apple"s patent application notes that display types on a device are typically based on an assumption about the visual content that will most often be displayed on the screen. An LCD or OLED display is ideal for high-resolution content with colors, while e-ink is ideal for static black-and-white content, like text.

The solution is to offer a screen with "multiple composite display regions," where content could be shown in both the "electronic paper" mode and "video display" format at the same time. Such a screen would also include independently activated backlights, illuminating panels when necessary.

Apple could accomplish this by having a translucent e-ink display that would be placed on top of the traditional LCD or OLED screen on an iPad. The top screen would allow users to see past it, so that video content in full color could be displayed on the screen below. And of course, atop all that would be a touch panel, allowing users to interact with the device.

The patent application, made public this week, was first filed by Apple in October of 2009. The proposed invention is credited to Gloria Lin and Andrew Hodge.

The Apple iPad 3 may have a hybrid LCD E Ink display, if a patent filed in October 2009 and revealed publicly today, goes into production. The system will automatically recognise what it’s displaying and change the screen display to suit. So when reading a book the E Ink display will be activated, with a backlight if needed.

It doesn’t stop there – the device will even be able to layer LCD and E Ink at the same time using multiple composite display regions. The translucent E Ink display will sit atop the LCD and below the touchscreen. This is just the kind of groundbreaking development Apple needs to get people queuing for its next release, tipped to ring in significant changes for Apple’s tablet. Even if it doesn’t need that to stir up a queue.

When we think of e-ink, our minds usually turn to e-readers. When Amazon released its first Kindle in 2007, many other companies jumped aboard, creating their own e-readers and e-ink displays.

E-ink was designed as an electronic screen that acts like paper, which is why e-ink technology is also referred to as e-paper: electronic paper. In the age of vibrant LED, LCD, plasma, or other modern displays, do we really need another type of display?

Where e-ink technology really stands out is its low use of power. Simple e-ink displays can last years on one charge. The more complex ones that use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth still last months.

Secondly, e-ink users prefer a display that isn’t backlit. We stare at backlit screens all day; they’ve lost their novelty. People want something different to look at instead of the computers we’ve been stuck in front of since the 1990s. Plus, e-ink offers non-glare displays, which are easier on the eyes than other displays on the market.

Next, some people still prefer that classic look of pen and paper or chalk and a chalkboard. Today, most companies and businesses want a touch of class with their modern style. Rather than making your office resemble a walk down the Star Trek Enterprise, add some class with paperlike displays instead of blazing LCD screens.

Thirdly, e-ink displays are getting larger. Originally, the biggest e-ink displays on the market were no bigger than a book. The largest e-ink display today is a whopping 42 inches across: not bad for a technology that’s not even a decade and a half old.

Whatever you can do with paper, imagine doing it with an e-ink display. Most of the uses for e-ink today originate from someone dreaming how to make a paper experience better. Here are some examples.

At the end of 2020, Visionect announced Joan 32, a 32-inch e-ink display. It can be placed wherever it’s needed the most, whether that be an office building, an airport in a shopping mall, or anywhere else where information needs to be displayed. It’s most often used for corporate communication, digital menus, airport signage or to provide wayfinding information.

Joan’s battery lasts for weeks and can be recharged overnight. There’s no need for a constant power source, drilling, or wiring, which is a huge advantage over LCD screens.

Launched in 2017, reMarkable recreates the pen and paper look and feel that a backlit screen simply can’t. The device is listed as a “tablet” with one very notable difference to the popular tablets on the market: it uses e-ink.

In 2020, IONNYK came up with the idea to use e-ink in place of black and white photos. IONNYK’s 31-inch display is encased in a frame, which cycles through a galley of images. The result is lifelike photography that convinces viewers they’re looking at real photo prints. IONNYK’s frames are based on Visionect’s 32-inch screens.

E Ink is the first company to offer a 42-inch e-ink display. Their large e-ink displays can be used for food menus, floor plans, interactive whiteboard simulations, and more. Whatever its use, the large e-ink display is sure to add a touch of class to any environment.

Although it’s come a long way, e-ink technology is not as responsive as LCD, LED, and other mainstream displays. Users report e-ink displays taking “15 to 20 seconds to power on completely,” not to mention seconds to simply wake them from sleep mode.

While Amazon was the first to release an e-reader, Sony was the first to make their e-reader usable in the dark. Since then, it’s been commonplace for e-readers to have front lighting for users to read in the dark.

Because e-ink uses capsules with different colored particles that rise and sink to change the screen’s color, the devices are limited to greyscale displays. While some e-ink displays are breaching this barrier, it’ll take a while for others to add more colors to their e-ink technology.

Considering e-ink displays are composed of millions of minuscule capsules in a thin film, it will take a lot of investment for the displays to get much larger than 42 inches. Although progress is coming, it won’t be as rapid as Samsung’s Wall and its 292-inch screen.

As mentioned, it takes a lot of investment to get e-ink displays to be larger and colorful. Therefore, the displays aren’t cheap. With only a few e-ink manufacturers releasing e-ink displays, there aren’t really less-pricey alternatives.

Are they worth it? If you’re a classicist, pragmatist, or innovator, e-ink displays are for you. The devices are classy and low-maintenance with endless uses. If your room isn’t too dark to read a piece of paper, you’ll love integrating e-ink displays in your space.

It"s been far, far too long (read: four months) since we"ve heard a peep from the gentle souls over at Pixel Qi, but it looks like the long, heart-wrenching wait for the hybrid display that"s bound to revolutionize Western civilization is nearing an end. According to the startup"s CEO herself, Mary Lou Jepsen, the primetime-ready 3Qi display should make its glorious debut on an undisclosed tablet to be announced next month. For those out of the loop, this transflective display contains both e-ink and LCD properties, one for outdoor reading scenarios and the other for multimedia viewing. The amazing part is that toggling between the two is as simple as flipping a switch, which obviously means great things for battery life on whatever device it"s shoved into. We"ll be keeping our eyes peeled for more, but do us a favor and cross your fingers for good luck. Toes too, por favor.

At CES 2023, TCL dropped a whole bag of gadgets — including new phones, a Windows convertible, and a new tablet with its own take on the color e-ink tech. Say hello to the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro tablet, which aims to beat the likes of Apple and Samsung with a palatable price, a screen that feels like paper, and a large canvas, too.

Unlike regular LCD panels that alter the screen temperature and give it a yellowish tint, TCL’s Nxtpaper tech relies on a built-in multi-layer filter system. This not only cuts down on the blue light exposure but also keeps the color profile as close to natural as possible and reduces the glare effect.

TCL ships a dedicated reading mode with its Nxtpaper line of tablets that turns the screen output into a grayscale mode for an e-ink experience. As for the paper part in the marketing material, TCL claims “a tactile feeling just like touching real paper,” adding that the actual display surface has a paper-like finish to the touch.

On the software side, you get a dedicated PC mode for effortless file management, plus a floating window mode to handle multiple app windows with ease. Take that, iPadOS 16. Disappointingly, the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro still runs Android 12 out of the box.

In 2023, TCL claims to have upgraded the Nxtpaper display tech, doubling the brightness output for a more comfortable outdoor viewing experience. However, the company assures that despite the bump in brightness figures, the screen is still capable of reducing the blue light output by up to 61 percent.

Delving into the technical side of things, the Nxtpaper 12 Pro tablet offers a fairly sharp 12.2-inch 2K (2160 x 1440 pixels) display with 370 nits of peak brightness and a 3:2 aspect ratio, somewhat like the iPad Pro. The stylus-ready screen, however, still doesn’t offer any high-refresh-rate magic.

The tablet draws power from the MediaTek MT8771 chipset, the same as the TCL 10S 5G tablet. It will be available in a single configuration packing 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. Thankfully, you can pop in an SDHC or SDXC card to boost the memory.

The 8,000mAh battery is claimed to last up to 13 hours, beating the figures Apple touts for the iPad Pro. The TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro supports 18W fast charging, and thankfully, the power brick comes bundled in the retail package. Notably, TCL bundles the standard e-pen stylus that can recognize over 8,192 pressure levels in the retail package, just like Samsung.

TCL also sells a detachable keyboard and a stand case, but you’ll need to fork over extra cash for that. There are a couple of 8-megapixel cameras on the front and a 13-megapixel camera at the back. The tablet is already up for grabs, priced at $499. There’s a 5G-ready version that will hit the shelves “later this year,” carrying a price tag of $549.

At its current asking price, the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro definitely offers a superior screen experience compared to the 10th Gen iPad and undercuts the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8. However, it does so at the cost of a significantly weaker processor. Plus, TCL’s software update record isn’t as good as Samsung’s or Apple’s.

Watches do not just serve to remind the wearer of the time. These custom accessories also make an essential part of your outfit. A e ink watch takes the whole fashion meaning to a different level, thanks to their exquisite and bold looks. If you want a collection that suits your taste, then Alibaba.com is the place to shop. Whether you buy retail or wholesale to resell, the affordable prices on China"s largest wholesale platform will prove meaningful. From the men"s and women"s collections and even watches for kids, you can find it all at affordableibib...

Alibaba.com stocks a variety of electronic, analog, and automatic watches. Therefore, users can benefit from the bipolar liquid and quartz crystals plus enjoy electronic components" functionalities. Alternatively, you can choose to go fully analog with your watch. Besides that, you can select the automatic e ink watch that combines the goodness of the regular automatic mechanical watch and that of a pure quartz watch. Since watches will be here for the foreseeable future, you can start a venture by sourcing supplies from reputable manufacturers and suppliers across China.

Following the expansion of industrial printing, the market for e ink watch has expanded, and Alibaba.com helps you cater to this market gap by connecting you to sellers and suppliers in the industry. Whether you are working on glass, textile, metal, paper, or packaging, you can find the parts you want at Alibaba.com. You can also shop for customized tools, high-speed parts that are compatible with your printing equipment. From precision tuning to engraving components on your printer, motors to gears for your machine, or even circuit boards and pumps, Alibaba has got it all.

Sure, it"d look like badly-registered offset printing, but that only matters for small up-close displays, not large far-away displays. (And you could fix the registration with a precisely-cast diffuser layer, convolving each subpixel-cluster.)

If this was for reading rather than imagery, and you wanted to have true blacks, you could also just step one level forward in e-ink technology, and have the colored micro-capsule groups be just dual-tone (the capsule"s color plus black), giving you {C+K, Y+K, M+K, K} bitplanes.

Are e-ink display manufacturers just imprecise in the way they deposit the capsules into the panel, making it impossible to address individual capsules? (If so, that seems like something that could be solved pretty easily with modern photolithography processes, e.g. etching onto the backing electrode a grid of "buckets" for individual micro-capsules to fall into.)

This is part of what ends up giving the appearance of a higher-resolution display when rendering text, as you get some softer edges "for free." (And it"s what makes the display look "blurry" for some viewers.)

So, to your question, there"s currently no attempt with the technology to precisely place the colors on the display. The capsules are just spread all over, and the grid does the work.

Rods in eyes aren"t on a regular grid anyway, why should it matter how the pixels are distributed as long as they cover the plane and are mostly uniform?

And the upshot of that is listed in the specifications from the linked page: The refresh time on this display is 15 seconds. Which is far, far away from where it would need to be in order to be a practical option for color e-readers.

It’s fun to imagine Jesus returning in 30xx AD but this time instead of absolving the world of its accumulated sin he wipes away the accumulated technical debt of 1.5 millennia worth of corporate IT

Hell, since the writer was omnipotent and omniscient, the code was even built with the ability to perfectly modify itself when the company changed the DB on September 12, 2011 at 3:24 in the morning.

If you have 12 years" notice to make some changes, I don"t consider that technical debt: that"s the normal price of maintaining software in a changing world. It"s not "debt" that costs "extra interest" to pay back for questionable choices made previously.

Of course, you could simply make a matrix of tri-tone capsules, with white, black and colour. Then you have the contrast ratio and the colour space advantages. I don"t know why this hasn"t been done, I"m not an expert on e-Ink!

The microcapsules are not individually wired up to anything, so I don"t think it"s feasible to make each color channel independently addressable. Instead, a grid of wires behind the capsules are either positively or negatively charged, in order to attract or repel the charged colored particles in each capsule. There are only 2 charges, but by using different sizes of particles for different colors, you can finagle it so that the color you want ends up on top.

If they could address capsules individually, that would also increase the possible resolution of a black-and-white display; they"d do it if they could. But since the mechanism is about attracting and repelling charged particles, there"s probably a pretty hard limit on how much you can increase the resolution before there is interference between neighboring pixels.

OTOH I did see a 30 something inch e-ink development board for sale once and wondered if I could hack one together. It was expensive, but that didn"t particularly matter because the company made it clear they wouldn"t sell to consumers or hobbyists.

1) The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer. I don"t have evidence to verify this, though.

2) There aren"t a lot of displays that exist _at all_ outside of the small/eReader/Big Sign categories. So there probably just aren"t the production lines out there to push those out.

3) Since refresh rates in even the best cases aren"t great, it"s unlikely to get a lot of traction in most markets, so I don"t think anyone is pursuing it heavily.

4) eInk (the company) seems very uninterested in the hobby market at all. They seem to want a few big contracts, and that"s all they"re interested in.

They were founded in 1997, so their earliest patents have probably expired. I wonder when the clones will arrive. Maybe they’ll have a better marketing and sales strategy.

As for the marketing, just don"t do any. Let the hobby market find it on their own and then just set a minimum order for anyone that wants to work directly with the company for their small project.

I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.

If you want someone to invent something that uses them, you"ll have to have them in the hands of people that invent stuff. Maybe you only break even on your small scale sales to hobbyists, but eventually one of those hobbyists will be the one to invent the next big thing.

1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don"t seem to attract that engineering crowd.

2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.

Let"s say XYZ software is only available to businesses. As a professional software engineer, if I asked to buy XYZ, it"d get bought. But since I can"t use XYZ in my personal life, I"ve never even heard of it, and as a result when we"re deciding on software to buy at the company I have no familiarity with it and it doesn"t get bought.

Perhaps somewhere out there there are some 100x hardware developers, but every hardware developer I"ve met likes what they know, and a lot of what they know from a combination of personal tinkering and university. It"s hard to explain how powerful familiarity is with designing hardware. So if you"re sitting down and designing something and you need component A or B, and B uses less power and looks cool and all kinds of stuff, but you have experience with A and it works fine, well, you"ll go with A. And for good reason! Things have weird quirks and spec sheets lie and all kinds of stuff happens.

So yeah, I think that having some kind of community connection can pay absolutely massive dividends. At the end of the day, if it"s only accessible to large corporations, then it"s not even accessible to those large corporations - because the engineers at them won"t have familiarity with your thing and they"ll just pick what they know.

Furthermore, it"s not even that hard to sell to hobbyists. You make the spec sheet public, you make some example code public, you mail some units to Digikey and you"re done. You wanna go REALLY crazy, you can mail a few free units to some well known tinkerers. It"s not like you"re personally offering 24 hour phone support to everyone with an Arduino. The investment of a couple of hours to deign to mail Digikey a box is quickly recovered by the first engineer that plays with your widget at home and then suggests it at $bigco.

As an engineer whose project proposal (with proof of feasibility in the form of working and one-at-a-time manufacturable fully functional prototypes) was rejected by Kickstarter back in 2017, maybe their selection criteria are the reason.

Now then, with the linked screen"s 15 second refresh time, this is obviously not the case. But it (naively) seems like a compromise to keep the cost low, since the added tech and software to enable partial refreshes would add to both price and complexity.

I don"t need 30, 60, 120, or 144 Hz refresh rates to work with text. It would probably be impossible to see the difference. What I need is contrast and brightness settings to limit eye fatigue, and that"s where e-ink would be great.

Or even simpler -- a mouse cursor is essentially unusable on an e-ink display. Much like an old passive-matrix LCD, you"d need to implement nasty workarounds like cursor trails to restore any semblance of usability.

Even if my need for it dries up eventually, I"d still probably keep it around. Single greatest benefit of having it is ease of access to the commercial and industrial supply chain and slipping through these sorts of "no consumer or hobbyists allowed" sales positions.

The big thing is not depending on the screen keeping in perfect sync with your typing. I know this causes an issue for me when it"s related to talking - an echo off by a hundred or more milliseconds will absolutely throw me off the rails - but it doesn"t bother me so much when typing. A mental relic of writing code in terminals connected to distant servers, I"m sure.

• In monochrome panels, you can get 16 shades, and a full refresh in under a second (with partial refresh much faster, as tight as very few milliseconds for small areas, or commonly 30fps full-screen update if you’re willing to compromise a bit on image quality).

• In colour panels, you don’t seem to get shades or rapid refresh: seven colours means you get a seven colour palette, so you’ll have to use dithering to get any in-between colours; and you don’t get partial updates at all: even the fastest coloured panels take a couple of seconds to update the image, and the more colours you add the slower it is.

If I’m wrong about these and there are colour panels with more interesting colour or partial refresh, I’m interested to hear. I just haven’t seen any, and have done some looking.

The long and the short of it is that colour e-ink displays are only useful for display use, not for individual devices like ebook readers or computer displays.

They"re significantly easier on the eyes and they"re a joy to use. I don"t particularly care about color. One thing I"m wondering though, is what are the technical challenges behind building such a display?

Ideally, I"d like to be able to use an Android device that renders onto e-ink. I don"t particularly care for watching videos and such - most of my time on my phone is spent sending and reading IM"s (Signal, text, e-mail) rather than viewing media, so lower refresh rates is not something I really care about.

Where are the shortcomings causing e-ink displays to have very low refresh rate? Does it have to do with modern rendering technology being so well optimized for color displays that they simply are not performant for e-ink?

5) Now, using some clever AC patterns, you can address any "pixel" on your grid, and apply a charge there, that will attract or repel the little balls.

The trick is that moving the balls back and forth (6/7) is a physical process, and requires time. They _have_ to move a physical distance, and if that fluid lets them move too easily then they won"t keep their color. The balls will move and they"ll just drift back to some middle ground.

Also, if you"re not careful with your approach, you can mess with the charge of the balls, and they"ll no longer respond to the field the way you want. This is burn-in. (And it"s why displays do full-black-to-full-white refreshes from time to time)

So until we can figure out how to move those balls faster in the fluid, we really aren"t going to dramatically improve refresh rates with this technology.

If you want a volumetric display, maybe it will work, but the display itself will need to be the same size as the total volume of depth you want to create, e.g. digital objects can not appear outside the screen.

They"re 13.3" displays, work with Android and you can use them as an external HDMI display. However, the refresh rate is still poor, not nearly 20-30Hz. The Technology Connections Youtube channel has made two very interesting videos, showing the many caveats of the device (it"s an older model, but I"d guess most of it still applies). The main issues are poor software and slow CPU:

It didn"t look that much better (or distinguishable, for the matter) than one of those reflective LCDs (e.g. Pebble"s). And reflective "memory" LCDs also have almost negligible -- though not zero -- power consumption. Except for maybe signage products most people don"t care about this difference, and LCD is way cheaper and mainstream, so...

It"s no surprise that many manufacturers just put an LCD and try to get away by calling it "ePaper". There is a lot of geek appeal here, but I"m not really sure if we really need any new technology for "mainstream".

By the way, one thing I don"t get is why the pictures have such low saturation but the "demo" view shows really excellent saturation. Are there constraints when mixing colours perhaps?

I don"t miss color syntax highlighting, and it"s much more relaxing on the eyes. I could imagine others using it as their main monitor in a joint display setup, code in e-ink, browser in color.

Also, since the refresh rates are limited it"s not like we can build ourselves a nice external large e-ink display for our reading pleasure and for the sake of our eyes.

There"s a need gap for "Affordable E-Ink large external displays"[1], last time we discussed about it here it was pointed out that the likely reason for we not having such displays are due to IP.

More generally, I believe that the extreme minimalism, "tranquility" (or blandness) and simplicity of more contemporary styles may some day become unpopular.

So I expect that we will see trends in the opposite direction eventually. More colors. Maybe a changing facade with e-ink. Rather than simple, boxy shapes, more intricate and more organic shapes. Large-scale 3d printing could make the use of such forms more practical.

I also expect to see architecture that is more dynamic in that it will automatically reconfigure itself in response to weather changes or the day/night cycle, winter/summer, etc.

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_All_ the colors are in the capsule, but you can only truly pull a single one at a time, a true pigment-like mixing isn"t possible. If you pull the Cyan up, you"re necessarily losing the Magenta, for example.

If you had a high enough resolution addressable grid, you might be able to put the pixels close enough that you couldn"t tell, but you"d still be basically doing sub-pixel color at that point, not truly mixing the various colors at the base level.

Here"s a fascinating video on how these displays work, and how you can modify the firmware of the driver to get faster refresh rates (with an increased risk of burn-in). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

My understanding is that modern printers actually mix those four different inks together on the page to achieve a wide range of colors. That isn"t possible with a display where colors have to remain within their own separate (sub)pixels and can"t actually mix together.

With a high enough resolution that might not matter, as your eyes would be unable to discern individual subpixels, but this display is only 600×448, and that"s with only one subpixel per pixel. (A CMYK display would need 4; maybe slightly less depending on subpixel layout.)

Furthermore, modern sRGB displays can output 255 different brightness values for each subpixel. This display can only output 7 values for each pixel. That further reduces the number of possible colors which would be possible in a CMYK subpixel-based display.

Provided all those issues could be solved though; maybe it would work? There could be other considerations I"m missing. (E.g. Can subtractive color mixing even work with subpixels in the first place?)

EDIT: 15 SECONDS PER FRAME, not 15fps. Thanks everyone for pointing that out. Still, amazingly cheap ... and almost no standby current after programming.

That refresh rate is fine if you"re using it to show the price of a rack of clothing, or various sensors - but you"re not going to get smooth-scrolling text with it. The low-power interface is for those same battery-backed retail signage applications, where you"re driving this, the microcontroller, and the wireless receiver with 3.7v from a coin cell.

I am really looking forward to the day when high refresh rate e-ink displays are common. The B&N Nook from about 8 years ago could be modified to successfully play flappy bird at about 10hz, but it was pretty ugly to use, requiring a black/white full clear of the screen to zero out the image every 30 frames or so.

Maybe it"s just me, but this seems quite expensive for a price tag. It also seems quite large for a name tag. I get that eink is useful in general for these cases, but this doesn"t seem to be the best example.

- Go the opposite route, why hide your cable? Make it stand out. Like those wall lamps with a brightly coloured / patterned cable hanging in loops down the wall. Turn it into wall art.

If so, then you, my friend, are in luck. That’s precisely what the hybrid smart watches from Fossil and Skagen (related brands, if you didn’t know that) are offering you. So, why might you be looking for this?

Well, for starters, any number of smart watches are bringing heart rate sensors to your wrist, whether you’re looking to have it track that just throughout your day, while you’re working out, or even as part of a more comprehensive sleep analysis. Many of those rely on large digital screens, and that’s fine in certain situations. Myself, I like those digital displays when I’m jogging, but maybe you want to be able to track your day with a more discrete look?

That’s where the Fossil Hybrid HR and Skagen Jorn Hybrid HR come in. First off, they’re considered hybrid because they’ve got traditional analog hands spinning over a dial that’s actually the display of the various smartwatch info (and for hybrids, I prefer this much more than hands trying to indicate things on the dial). To help keep the watch flying under the radar, they incorporate e-ink, rather than relying on an LCD or OLED display lighting up. Along with giving you a simpler monochrome backdrop, it also means you’ve got pretty low power consumption (sort of how like your Kindle can last weeks upon weeks, while a tablet needs charging every few days). That’s going to depend in large part on how much your phone is talking to the watch, but they’re estimating you can around 2 weeks between charges.

And yes, both of these watches are truly smart watches – you can get notifications on your wrist, control your music, and all the normal things you’d expect (even have it give you up-to-date weather), including changing the look of the display.

This seems like an interesting option for those who want some HR tracking and modern “smarts” in a watch without going to a full-blown mini computer. The Fossil Hybrid HR range comes in between $175 and $215, while the Skagen versions are all $195. In the coming weeks, be on the lookout for a more in-depth review, as we’ve got a Fossil Hybrid HR Collider coming in for a more in-depth review.

There are two main types of eReader display technology: E-Ink (electronic ink) and LCD (liquid crystal display). In general, E-Ink readers are considered to be easier to read, with higher contrast, no glare and a more natural reading experience. LCD screens, on the other hand,are both more dynamic and more affordable. Each display technology has its own inherent pros and cons which should be considered before investing in an electronic reader.

E-Ink, or electronic ink, is used in the Amazon Kindle. E-Ink screens use a special type of electronic paper where characters and images are created by arranging pixels on a screen. The mechanism is similar to that of an Etch-a-Sketch. In this way, power is only needed to arrange the pixels. The image remains on the screen even if the unit is powered down.

In terms of reading, E-Ink screens are more like physical books printed on paper. They are not backlit, thus they need a light source to be read, just like a book. The benefits of this is that it produces less strain on the eyes and is a more natural reading experience. Furthermore, you won’t experience glare in bright lights and direct sunlight. E-Ink also holds its charge for a very long time.

The drawbacks of E-Ink is that it cannot display moving images, such as video or cursors, nor can it display color. E-Ink, for now, can only be displayed in shades of grey.

An LCD screen is on an eReader is the same as the screen on your laptop computer, flat screen TV or smartphone. The screen is backlit, thus requiring more battery power. Furthermore, the glass screen creates a glare. LCD screens are also notoriously difficult to read in direct sunlight. Viewing an LCD screen over long periods of time is also less enjoyable than reading a book or an E-Ink screen.

The pros of an LCD screen is that it can display full color and video. LCD screens are also very affordable and can be outfitted with touchscreens for easy navigation. In fact, many smartphones and tablets double as eReaders, such as the iPod Touch, iPad and BlackBerry Storm.

When deciding which type of eReader screen is best for you, there are two things you should consider: your usage and your needs. If you plan on reading outdoors or in brightly lit areas or for long periods of time, an E-Ink eReader makes sense because of its lack of a glare and its long battery life. But if you’d like to read in the dark—such as in bed or on a red eye flight—an LCD screen may be better. Furthermore, eReaders with LCD screens can offer other functionality, such as video or web browsing, bringing it closer to a smartphone experience.

Bottom-line: For those who intend to use your eReader strictly for books and strictly in well-lit areas, the E-Ink models are likely the best for you. If you are looking for an eReader that can do a bit more than simply read books and magazines, and LCD smartphone, tablet or reader could give you more bang for your buck.

Regardless of its naming convention, Fossil’s latest smartwatch doesn’t have much in common with the Gen 6 or the Gen 6 Wellness edition. For starters, it won’t run on Wear OS and it will be equipped with an e-ink display, in typical Fossil Hybrid fashion.

From the images which have been released, we can see that the showcased watchface is indeed similar to that of the Gen 6 Wellness edition, but monochromatic due to the e-ink display; Fossil seems to have abandoned the staple circular widgets, which were features on the regular Gen 6 Hybrid.

Unlike its vibrant brothers, the Fossil Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness Edition — a mouthful of a name, which manages to contain two separate models within itself for extra confusion — is equipped with two physical hands to tell the time. Regardless of that, the presented watchface also shows it in a digital format for some reason.

As to the stainless steel body itself, we can observe three physical buttons, most likely a Home button and two customizable shortcut buttons, as is tradition with Fossil Hybrid models. Those are positioned on the right of the 1.1", 170p e-ink display. Oh, and by the way, it is water resistant up to 3ATM.

Fossil have gone on record to share that the watch will have a microphone and is confirmed to be capable of accepting calls and accessing Alexa. It has a haptic motor for feedback, and of course — has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities.

Fossil fans won’t be shocked by the battery life expectancy of two weeks, as that is also rather typical for the Hybrid series. The watch will be able to charge back to 80% for about 60 minutes via a magnetic charging cradle.

Naturally, the selling point here is the Wellness part. As such, the smartwatch will communicate its biometric readings through the Fossil Wellness app, which provides a ton of info for fitness enthusiasts.

The Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness Edition will be available for purchase starting January 5 over on Fossil’s official store. The body will be offered in Black, Silver or Bronze, and those can be combined with 8 different colors of 20mm bands, so you are sure to find a combination that matches your favorite tracksuit.

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Paper reflects light from the Sun (and from artificial light sources such as light bulbs). Because paper reflects light of all wavelengths, it normally appears white (see left diagram below). In order to form an image on paper, we need to add a layer of ink in the relevant places. This layer of ink is non-reflective (this region appears black as black is the absence of light; see right diagram below). By selectively adding ink to a piece of paper, we can form the desired image.

In electronic paper, we are able to electrically move ink particles across the surface of the screen (using something called electrophoretic technology). Power will be consumed in moving the ink particles. However, once the image has formed no further power is required to keep the image on the screen. This means e-ink readers such as the Amazon Kindle are very efficient as they only use power during “page turns”.

E-Ink: Paper reflects light from the Sun (left diagram). By adding a non-reflective ink layer onto the paper, we create a dark region on the paper (right diagram). E-ink displays are based on this principle.

An LCD display consists of lots of small light emitting crystals. The crystals come in sets of three colours (red, green and blue). A combination of these three colours is used to produce all other colours (see left diagram below). By changing the intensities of the red, green and blue crystals, we are able to change the colour which is displayed on the screen. In this case, the screen is backlit (the source of the light is the screen itself). For this reason, LCD displays consume power whenever they are turned on.

Aside from power consumption, one downside of LCD displays is that they’re hard to view outdoors in direct sunlight. The surface of the screen is reflective and so the light emitted from the LCD display needs to compete with the reflected sunlight (see right diagram below). In order for text on the screen to be legible, the light from the LCD must be brighter than the reflected sunlight. In bright sunlight, the reflected sunlight is often stronger than the light from the LCD display making it difficult to read what’s on the screen. To compensate for this, smartphones such as the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy contain an ambient light sensor which will automatically increase the brightness of the display when you’re outside to compete with the reflected sunlight. LCD displays can also have an anti-reflection coating to reduce reflected sunlight.

LCD Display: An LCD display consists of lots of red, green and blue light emitting crystals (left diagram). One of the problems with LCD displays are that they’re hard to view outdoors due to reflections (right diagram).

Better visibility outdoors. E-ink displays make use of ambient sunlight unlike LCD displays which must compete with it. If you’re looking to read on the beach, e-ink is a must.

Less eye-strain with e-ink.E-ink displays should give less eye-strain. The experience of using an e-ink display for an extended period of time should be similar to spending an extended amount of time reading a paper book. Reading from a LCD display is more similar to reading from a computer monitor or watching TV for an extended amount of time.

Lower power consumption. E-ink displays only consume power during “page turns”, whereas LCD displays consume power whenever they are used. This is why e-book readers such as the Kindle can last several weeks between charges whereas tablet devices and smartphones need charging on a daily basis.

Full colour with the ability to view multimedia. Unlike e-ink, LCD displays are more versatile and are able to produce a full colour image. They respond much faster than e-ink (e-ink displays take a long time for the screen to redraw) so it’s also possible to enjoy rich multimedia experiences such as movies on an LCD display. Whilst colour e-ink displays are on the way, the colour still isn’t great and they’re still too slow for video. With an LCD display, you’re able to enjoy all kinds of multimedia – with an e-ink display you’re really limited to books.

More intuitive user interfaces. LCD displays are often coupled with a capacitive touchscreen in many phones and tablets. This means it is possible to build much richer and more intuitive touch screen interfaces.

Can be used in the dark. As LCD displays are backlit (they produce their own light), it is possible to view them even in low light conditions. This means you can watch movies in the dark, etc.

Display technology is an important consideration when choosing a new mobile device. The “better” technology really depends on what you’re looking for.

If you’re looking for an all-round multimedia device, you’re better off with an LCD display device such as the Apple iPad, Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. These devices give you a rich multimedia experience: they’ll allow you to consume text, pictures and video with vibrant colours and fast response times from the display.

If you’re looking for a great device specifically for books and text, the Kindle and its e-ink screen will give you much better visibility outdoors and lower power consumption.

In the future, we envision the “ideal” tablet device could have an e-ink display overlaid on top of an LCD display. Text would be displayed using the e-ink layer whereas graphical elements would be displayed using the LCD layer. Such a device really would give the best of both worlds: great readability outdoors as well as a full multimedia experience.