ReMarkable Paper Pro

Probably for visibility. It looks like only 5 star reviews get shown unless you specifically filter for fewer stars.

So according to the "deep guide" video review, this uses E Ink's "Gallery 3" e-paper screen. Which, unlike conventional displays, doesn't use additive subpixel color mixing.

Instead it uses subtractive color mixing inside each pixel: It layers transparent cyan, magenta and yellow, and opaque white pigments, over each other. Which creates cyan, magenta, yellow and white as primary colors, and red, green, blue and black as secondary colors. Other shades are then created via dithering those eight base colors. So it works very similar to an inkjet printer.

Since it doesn't use subpixels, the screen seems to have a similar brightness to greyscale E Ink displays, which is reasonably close to printed paper. However, the color saturation is clearly still not quite on the level of actual printed paper.

Here is a comparison shot between Gallery 3 and Kaleido 3 (the latter uses conventional subpixels to create colors): https://assets.goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2023/03/2...

And of course the reaction times are not as fast as LCD/OLED. As is well known, E Ink uses electrophoresis e-paper screens, where solid electrically charged pigments are moved around in a liquid, which is a slow process. It also still requires a "deghosting" refresh once the screen changes, but interestingly those refreshs are now only applied to the parts of the screen which actually have changed pixel values, which looks significantly less distracting in my opinion.

Every time I see this device pop up, I really struggle to find out what exactly this has over something like an iPad with an Apple Pencil?

With this one being $579 including the basic marker. The iPad Air with an 11" screen with the cheaper pencil is $678. iPad with an 11" screen and the cheaper pencil is $428.

If it is the screen feel, how does that compare to the paperlike screen protectors for iPad?

Some say a lack of distractions, but you can turn on do not disturb?

I am just really curious what this solves vs other tablets that I am missing here, especially at this price point. Or is there something I am really missing here?

Every single update has made my reMarkable tablet worse. I’ve stopped using it as a result.

I have absolutely no idea why they went all in on keyboard input, when the whole freaking point of the tablet was that you could write on it like paper.

Reminds me of my old livescribe pen i had as an undergrad. It was a ballpoint-pen with a little computer inside and a camera pointing down the tip of the pen. You'd use it with special notebooks that had very small dot-patterns printed on the paper, and the computer could decode that to get its position on the page. Then you'd plug it into your PC's USB port to upload a digital copy of your notes. There was surprisingly-good OCR to make it searchable and also the pen had a microphone that recorded what your professor was saying during any given penstroke. And that's in addition to having the physical notebook the ballpoint pen wrote on.

Looks like they still exist but they haven't done much in the last 15 years. They used to make these high-quality leather-bound notebooks but now it seems they only have cheap spiral-bound ones. Worse, the pen still costs about $200 so it's not in anyway competitive with remarkable.

I'm contemplating going to grad school and I might try to dig up my old livescribe pen if I can find it (I think I saw it a year or two ago in some box of assorted odds and ends) but the lack of high-quality journals is a disappointment and if I can't find my old livescribe pen I'd rather try out remarkable than spend 10x as much on a nearly-dead product that had far more potential but seems to be on life-support.

Wish livescribe would at least open-source their software if they no longer care about it.