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The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

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Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#61
post #55
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle it's possible to measure the ambient light and set the emitted light to simulate reflected light from paper so that an OLED looks indistinguishable from paper. Next gen QLED displays might have the brightness to pull this off even in bright sunlight.

If you really want to simulate reflected light you also have to be able to control the angle of the light that you emit, and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular). I suspect that it might be easier to improve reflective displays, but I have no expertise in this field so maybe I'm completely wrong about that.

> If you really want to simulate reflected light you also have to be able to control the angle of the light that you emit

Uniform emission is fine because paper has close to Lambertian reflectance. "The apparent brightness of a Lambertian surface to an observer is the same regardless of the observer's angle of view." [0]

> and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).

Or make sure that the display itself has close to Lambertian reflectance and take into account its color in the emission calculations.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambertian_reflectance

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#62
post #17
post #2

Why the ReMarkable doesn't have a backlight I do not understand.

I would probably buy it if it had one, but I want to read in the dark often without turning the lights on and bothering others.

Boox Note Air has a front light built in.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#63

Has anyone here used a reMarkable 2 and had the chance to compare it to a Supernote or a Note Air? I've had the opportunity to use a reMarkable in person, and it's the first and only digital writing device that I could tolerate to write notes. The MS Surface, iPad Pro and Samsung tablets have never cut it for me. It's difficult to quantify why - a combination of pen-to-display distance, latency and screen texture per…

If the reMarkable could integrate well with other productivity tools, I'd probably ask my employer for one.

Being able to read my emails, manage my calendar, read my RSS feeds, access my documents from Google Drive and optionally annotate them (a copy of it in PDF form) would be what I'd have in mind to justify buying one.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#65
I have reMarkable 2 and I think it is brilliant, however it has one deal breaker that is there is no encryption on the device. If you lose it, you risk your documents landing in a bad actor hands. One may say it's the same with actual paper - sure, but reMarkable 2 can store much more data than a suitcase of documents.

Then I have no idea whether documents on their cloud are encrypted and who has access to it beside myself.

So reMarkable has become an expensive paperweight.

I saw some people tried to get encrypted fs working, don't how well that works though.

I wrote an email to support about this and I never got any reply. Says all...

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#66
post #60

I love eink devices but got turned off by the first couple of generations because they always underdelivered with PDF display, which seemed like a central use case to me. I should be able to open a random graphics-heavy PDF and have it display perfectly (ignoring color) and in a reasonable amount of time for an eink device to be worth it to me. This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want to purch…

The latest kindles are great with pdfs, that was my main use for them in grad school. I haven't tried the newer eink tablets though

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#67
I pre-ordered the Remarkable 1 and ended up returning it due to buggy software and the battery life not performing as advertised (had to recharge literally every day). I pre-ordered the Remarkable 2 when it came out because it was much more affordable.

I've had it since November and have used it virtually every day. It's light and portable and I think I've charged it three times since November. They've definitely improved their software a lot and I love the OSS community around it.

The only feature I wish it had was full text search on my notes. But I and willing toive without it as I want a lower tech solution for note taking that is still portable.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#68

I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device. Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now. Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technica…

Lack of computer features is refreshing to be honest. You can't be distracted just like sitting in front of blank page of paper.

That being said, a deal breaker for me is lack of encryption.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#69
post #60

I love eink devices but got turned off by the first couple of generations because they always underdelivered with PDF display, which seemed like a central use case to me. I should be able to open a random graphics-heavy PDF and have it display perfectly (ignoring color) and in a reasonable amount of time for an eink device to be worth it to me. This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want to purch…

I use the Boox with papers (so almost only PDFs) on the internal reader and on Android readers; it works really well. In the end I keep using the internal reader because it has split view for me to scribble notes next to every page. Disclaimer: I am older with glasses but not reading glasses; I read fine with incredibly small fonts; I prefer it that way. So YMMV but for me and for PDFs it is an ideal device for sure. If the built-in reader is not good enough, you just get one from the Play Store; there are enough very good ones there.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#70
I'm really glad I bought my ReMarkable2 (and Marker "Plus"), as it suits my use case extremely well: replacing stacks of 8.5x11" graph notepads, while adding digitization / sync, undo/redo, select/cut/paste/resize/move, (modest) pan/zoom, etc. Battery life and form factor are great. The writing UX is really something: low-latency, ~perfect hand detection, and the "feel" of writing. Yeah, the software's mediocre, but it's gotten noticeably better since I bought it ~6mo ago. And it's still early days. The OSS community did wonders for the RM1, and I expect RM2 to follow suit. It's not a do-anything kind of device (I absolutely love my Kindle Oasis for reading) but for me it was easily worth the $.
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