this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
78 points (90.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
627 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The only eink device I ever owned was a Pebble. It was pretty great in its time though.
Pebble's marketing campaign is so good, I'm still correcting people to this day. xD It's something they call "e-paper", but it's really a transflective LCD (remember those?). Nowhere like e-ink.
Same. Transflective LCDs are great, and I really wish they got used more. Smartwatches are such a perfect application, yet everyone still slaps on energy-hungry oleds that literally degrade from the UV radiation of sunlight.
But they have literally nothing in common with e-ink.
Love my transflective Garmin watch... But they seem to be moving towards oled too...
I have one of theirs too now, got it because great battery life.
Well, shit.
The pebble was "e-paper" which was a marketing term for a transflective LCD. It was not e-ink.
E-ink is a proprietary display tech that uses actual magnetized "ink" suspended in "liquid" cells. By pushing and pulling dark/light ink particles with an array of tiny electromagnets, it physically "paints" an image onto the display surface. Even if you entirely cut power, the image remains indefinitely.
Transflective LCD, is an LCD, and while its an extremely small amount, it does still need power to stay on.
Weird, has nobody made a real e ink watch? That seems like it'd be a no brainer to make as watch displays go. Or is there some reason it wouldn't be good in a watch format?
It makes perfect sense.
But the transflective LCDs which were used by pebble were really fucking good. Especially with color in the Pebble Time, and the display that was going to be in the Time 2 was very promising.
E-Ink watches do exists, they are made by Fossil, and are great. Popping mine in a charger while I shower is enough to keep it going indefinitely.
But e-ink can barely do moving images, there are some tricks which can enable stuff like a small part of the display showing a smoothly animating loading icon, but generally, e-ink can't surpass 1Hz refresh rate.
The UI for Pebble was getting super slick and smoothly animated. That's where the transflective LCD shines, its the best of both worlds, super low power usage while displaying a static image, but when you DO interact with it, it can do 60Hz animations no problem.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy#products
Fossil has an eink hybrid now icymi
I've been using a Garmin these days, very good battery life!
I have one. Been wearing it for years. I like it a lot. I'd still take pebble still being around, over it, but it's a close second.