Eink is amazing but it always feels like that tipping point is just another year away.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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E-Ink is cool, and I could see this being nice for certain applications.
The latency with VNC is very little. The main bottleneck is the low refresh rate and the lag of my old E-ink tablet. This can be a much better experience with a newer tablet with higher refresh rate.
What refresh would we need to hit with e-ink monitors for this to be a viable alternative?
Depends entirely what you're doing. There's no reason you can't read/write at 10-15 fps, but it's going to start to be very frustrating to scroll through websites, as a negative example.
Low refresh rate is already enough for writing and similar tasks. It can be strange to adapt, but the relief in the eyes makes it much smoother than one can expect.
But if you mean replacing as becoming the main monitor for general tasks, that's more complex, and goes beyond refresh rate. There are issues with contrast, shadowing artifacts, and other stuff that also needs to be addressed. (maybe they're already addressed in newer, more expensive screens, I have no Idea, I'm poor)
60hz is coming which would be fine, but author is saying "old" tablet so that could be anywhere from 1hz to 20hz and that's not going to fly for a monitor.
I'm in once they hit 120Hz minimum. I'm too used to HFR now. 60hz looks like a slideshow.
Looking through reviews and official specs, they are infuriatingly vague about what the refresh rate actually is.
It's all "super refresh technology" and "four different modes", which is about as meaningful as "natural flavors" on food packaging.
Modos is promising 60hz but on an eInk monitor, not a tablet. I don't see a tablet hitting that spec any time soon.
Having experimented with this a lot, I'd say it depends :P
Keyboard only you can get by with 5fps or so, but there's no real feedback at that point.
15fps is ok and quite usable. Artifacts are the more annoying thing at that rate. 30fps is really more then necessary (though I agree higher is nice on lcd displays).
What bothered me most is the limited contrast, pixel density and limited amount of colors on color eink display.
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