Ask HN: Will e-ink laptops be a thing soon, or ever?

Chromebook is the first thing to pop into my head; small panel, battery and inverter would be be able to keep one charged no problem. I dunno how small you can go, but since most chromebook's AC adapters aren't more than 40w, should be able to find something that would fit in a backpack.

About me: I have spent nearly a decade researching a display technology (Qualcomm's mirasol) more capable than E-ink in terms of colors and refresh speed.

Both an e-ink screen and an emissive display like an LCD is basically sending light to your eyes. If the brightness, viewing angle, surface reflection, contrast, etc. match between the two, then one cannot be better than the other.

The most practical solution at least for now is to use emissive displays with wide viewing angle, anti-reflective coatings, matte finish, and with appropriately adjusted brightness, contrast, and also font sizes. All of these seemingly small factors matter.

Try this experiment: Apply a white background on the emissive screen, and now put a blank printer paper in the front of half of the screen. If the screen looks too bright as compared to the paper (good chance it will), you need to get its brightness down still more!

I cannot find anymore, but there was a post on Hacker News of someone making an LCD image look indistinguishable from a printed photo in a frame.

I was thinking about that also, and mentioned it to a friend who has some experience with them. She said that they're terrific as long as you have internet access; as soon as you're offline they're holy pain in the ass.

When I'm writing I want to be offline pretty often, either because I've gone someplace where there's no wifi or because I want to eliminate distractions. For simple word processing, will a Chromebook make my life difficult if I'm offline?