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Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

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Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#181
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ..try setting your mouse or keyboard to have even 50-100ms of lag, a lot of people would find that very distracting to use Except that Remarkable 2 has 20ms latency, same as iPad's. [1] That makes pencil behave like a real one; that is a user cannot perceive the difference between writing on eink tablet vs writing on paper. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/remarkables-redesigned-e-p...

While the 20ms latency on the Remarkable 2 is very impressive, let's please not say that users "cannot perceive the difference". At best the latency "does not bother" users. There are whole swaths of professions for which 20ms is a huge amount (professional gamers, musicians, etc), and even personally (And I generally view my lag perception as quite poor) the 20ms on the remarkable was noticeable enough that it did n…

20ms latency is about average for a text editor: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

(Not that that's a good thing...)

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to - watch any kind of media - looks 'laggy' Imagine thinking that the consumer market is only for media consumers. There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support. I wouldn't argue that someone buying this machine would only use only this machine. But I know I am not alon…

Basically every enterprise of a reasonable size is going to require their users to consume multimedia content of some sort - web calls, training materials etc. If the crux is that even you, clearly a passionate eink advocate, wouldn't be able to use it as a sole device then that essentially makes the market tiny . In fact, a secondary eink display sounds like exactly what you need. When the refresh is more capable it…

This sounds more like a usecase for the Pixel Qi screens, transflective LCDs which are sunlight-readable but with normal refresh rates and which have a full-color backlit mode. Still not sure why the tech never took off...

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#183
post #171

I own a Boox Note Air 2. Bought it when I was looking for a large screen eReader for the technical epubs and pdfs I’ve amassed over the years that require a big screen (big pages on the pdfs) pros and cons of this company are pretty clear Pros are that they have large eReaders and support any file format They also run android so if you use an app like Pocket or an RSS feed to read articles, they work well enough Cons…

> insecure

Compared to...running Play Services? Doubt.

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#184
post #171

I own a Boox Note Air 2. Bought it when I was looking for a large screen eReader for the technical epubs and pdfs I’ve amassed over the years that require a big screen (big pages on the pdfs) pros and cons of this company are pretty clear Pros are that they have large eReaders and support any file format They also run android so if you use an app like Pocket or an RSS feed to read articles, they work well enough Cons…

This is the sort of device you either replace the OS, or put on a segregated network.

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is going to sell a device that costs significantly more than any other for the same power to provide what 99% of users would consider a sub par/ unusable display. Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet. This stuff isn't ready to be a 'main' display yet.

> imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to - watch any kind of media - looks 'laggy' Imagine thinking that the consumer market is only for media consumers. There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support. I wouldn't argue that someone buying this machine would only use only this machine. But I know I am not alon…

In this day and age it's pretty hard to imagine a use case for a work laptop that completely excludes multimedia.

No Zoom calls? No online learning videos? I think most workers today would hit a brick wall pretty quick if this was their only display.

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#186
post #13

I couldn't find a video of the display in use, so here it goes (for the 13.3" version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBfWkxOfUfQ seems a little slow and the screen refreshes sometimes excessive, but much better than I expected

I still don't understand how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this? - Longer battery life - easy on the eyes for long sessions reading/writing - Allows me to actually work outside!!! There is a huge market of people out there (Thinking about the typical ThinkPad users) that don't give 2 craps about color accuracy. We literally just want to read and write. Anyone envolved in Product Managem…

I've read previously on HN that there's one company with a stranglehold on the e-ink patent and so the prices are artificially high for the screens. This probably would make a e-ink laptop or tablet more expensive than it should be.

But yes, I agree. I've wanted an e-ink laptop for working outside for years.

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a decent market for rigid (heavy) 20-30" ~100 dpi panels as desktop monitors. Do you have a source for these claims? Looking at what seels well today, and what most average consumers go for, it's bigger screens with high pixel density. Low pixel density displays are mostly found in bottom of the barrel, discount bin products whith poor margins for their manufacturers, so the market has already spoken with t…

> Do you have a source for these claims? No. There are no products in this space that can compete with the midrange LCD displays. > So I think, that market you think of, exists only for you. I'm sure Boox would be happy to be able to sell a 24" 1920x1200 display for $200, if they had an adequate supply of panels. > That's not how yealds work here. If you increase feature size, you, usually, have fewer defects. A 20"…

>No. There are no products in this space that can compete with the midrange LCD displays.

Then how can you make such claims? You're just blowing smoke at this point. My take: The are no such products because nobody would buy them, that's why nobody makes them.

If you think the market is wrong, and there's such a huge demand waiting for a product that doesn't yet exist, why not put your money where your mouth is and go all-in funding such a product? If you're right, you'd get rich. Or you're actually wrong, and it will flop massively. Which one is it?

>Yield for smaller displays works differently - areal density of defects being the same, a smaller panel has a smaller chance of having a defect.

Yeah, that's why cutting the e-ink film into smaller displays gets you better yields, since you can throw away the smaller sections with the defects, instead of discarding larger ones, and lower the costs, which, like I said previously, is why you mostly see smaller e-ink displays based products, and why the ones with large screens are so expensive.

>A 20" 200 dpi panel has 4 times more places where something could go wrong than a 100 dpi one

Genuine question: do you have any industry experience working with e-ink displays, or are you just making uninformed assumptions for the sake of an armchair argument? As, that's not how yields scale in e-ink film. Source: I worked designing devices with e-ink displays.

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#188
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! * Do you use it as your main daily monitor? * I find screen time quite addictive (which is one reason why I am on HN so much). Do you notice any difference from this perspective when using an eink screen? * Has the screen quality degraded over time? * How big a difference has it made to your life?

I can't speak to e-ink but regarding screen time addiction, I used Gray-Switch ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vegardit.g... ) to turn my phone display black and white, and immediately my phone use decreased by 66%.

This is now built in to newer versions of Android (I think 11+, and AppleOS may also have it).

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#189
Here are my problems with such devices. I own an Onyx Boox 3 for a year now, I guess I qualify.

1) these screens still have bad contrast compared to a printed page at the same DPI. They mostly compare to yellowed dog-eared 50-year-old books. The dots are also rather fuzzy, so not really comparable to what you get in a decent LCD at the same density.

2) if it comes to desktop use, no OS/environment except classic MacOS up to version 8 and maybe GEM gives a shit about monochrome displays, especially those where only 1-bit colors look decent (so Windows 3.11 would likely count too). On DEs which you can still theme, themes that look like printed pages (two colors for UI, no gradients, no exceptions to this rule) don't exist at all. There's GTK's "High Contrast" theme, but it renders everything also BIG and FAT, which is cumbersome to look at unless you need it because of eyesight problems.

Also, there should be a way to disable all UI animations and most hover effects, but it either doesn't exist or keeps getting reinvented in any new major version so you're chasing it every once in a while.

3) Have you ever seen how Android renders colors on displays with no colors? God damn it to hell. I tried a terminal emulator. Some text was black, some white, some nigh-invisible, and some was white with a black (fuzzy) outline. I thought a monochrome display couldn't be ever described as garish, but now I've learned the errors of my ways. The only way it can work is if you export TERM=vt100 so it doesn't try to draw you rainbows where there can be none.

4) While the refresh speed got better compared to most Kindles I owned, when you're typing, it's still more annoying than a CRT with big afterburn.

Maybe it's kind of acquired taste, I dunno, but not for me. Yet. I hope.

I wouldn't mind a strictly 2-colored theme on a regular laptop screen as well, mind you.

Re: Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor

#190

What is the lifespan of high refresh e-ink devices such as this monitor? Is it measured in a billion refreshes for example? E-ink displays have been slow to update but like this monitor there are a bunch of e-ink tablets which even allow you to watch videos and play games. In my head it feels like it detoriate the device faster.

It will deteriorate relatively quickly if you're using it primarily to watch video. Of the three vendors of e-ink monitors (Boox, Dasung, Waveshare), I believe only Waveshare is clear about this in their support documents ("The e-Paper display cannot work as common LCD displays, the lifetime of the e-Paper display is short and it is related to the update times. You cannot use e-Paper to display video for a long time, which will shorten the lifetime of the e-Paper display.").

With e-ink, the dots do not fail right away; the contrast deteriorates around the 10 million update mark.

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