I have a classmate who can no longer look at standard electronic screens due to a concussion and can only look at e-ink screens without pain. I showed her this and she was in awe. Very glad to see this on the market, even if it’s not for most consumers.
@@seigeengine Light sensitivity is an extremely common symptom of a concussion. Her concussion was so bad that it caused permanent brain damage. Electronic screens emit blue light which can be harsh on the eyes and brain, plus they flicker extremely quickly, which can cause strain. While these barely affect most people, her injury has damaged her brain enough to the point where it can’t take in that amount of light/information at one time. Because of this, she experiences very strong head and eye pain after looking at a screen. I suggest you educate yourself before discounting the effects of a condition which you do not have to live with.
@@seigeengine I’ll let you lecture me as soon as you have experienced, know somebody firsthand who has experienced this, or have made any effort into understanding how e-ink vs standard monitors work and why one would be more beneficial for somebody prone to light sensitivity. Otherwise, there’s nothing more to say.
The only thing i could think of is advertisements in a storefront. But like… just hang posters for 0.5% of the price. Its a typical example of „this is really cool. But why tho?“
If you have eye strain and are an avid reader, it's extraordinarily useful. I love manga, I would LOVE to have one of these specific for colored manga.
They use RGB pixels? I thought they'd use CMYK, not only it's more "print-like" (so quite fitting for e-ink), but also brighter since more light comes through CMYK rather than RGB
I came here to say this too. RGB is meant for transmissive displays that produce light, whereas CMYK is best for something that is 'reflective'. So why on earth wasn't CMYK used for this? It would also have given each 'pixel' an even 4 sub-pixels - one of each colour.
E Ink Kaleido uses RGB color filters (black and white pigments reflect light, and it comes out via filter layer, just like in regular monitor) E Ink Gallery uses CMYK pigments (they are reflect the light like the paper does). Former is faster, but has lesser resolution when in color (1/3x), and colors are "pastel" (because of this color filter layer the light passes twice) Latter is slower (4x), but resolution is as good as in b/w mode. And it has more colors, and they are way brighter.
@@shaunbowen It's not transmissive vs reflective, it's additive vs subtractive. CMYK only works when you can stack transparent layers. E-ink is opaque.
Most computer coding is designed around the RGB color space (because most monitors are RGB). Using CMYK on the display end requires extra processing (read as: more expensive) to convert from RGB values.
Also, CMYK and RGB have incompatible color values in certain ranges. You'd have color values that would have to be rounded off to fit into the color space in real time.
E-Ink has so many great uses.. Our supermarket price labels here are all 3 color (Black, White and Red) E-ink.. They all update over an IR broadcast system.. And they're great
That's a bit different E-ink type, it has 3 natural pigments (black, white and red (or yellow)). But it's slow asf. So it's only good when image doesn't change for long time, like in ads or price labels.
The Sun Vision display works well in rooms with windows, it's just very expensive. I daily drive one in my office and it's been working great for over a year.
@@The_Horizon transflective displays are like the same tech like inside of a Gameboy, just newer. So imagine the difference between a Gameboy and a book. A Gameboy needs alot of light, but a book can get by with ambient light. Additionally, a Gameboy needs constant power to show a picture, but a book can keep its image indefinitely. A similar scenario occurs with EInk and Transflective displays. Transflective displays (as of today) basically need sunlight to be visible, and require a moderate amount of power to stay functioning, but have higher refresh rates and clarity. EInk Displays have the benefit of being easier to light up, and are able to keep an image on screen with no power, but are very slow to update. Both have theirs reasons ro exist, and both have their own strengths and weaknesses.
You have to be careful about other factors though, such as clarity, sharpness, contrast, and overall readability. Transflective screens generates less light, but it could create eye strain from the lack of the other qualities. E-ink tends to be pretty good with all of these qualities, with the con of ghosting, full refresh cycles, and poor frame rate.
My cousin with an internet addiction bought the black & white one off my recommendation after your last video. It REALLY helped him, since videos, games and all the other shit that addicted him was basically unusable but things like job applications, academic stuff and what not were still accessible to him. With that said, the color one is NEAT and I almost want it just for the novelty.
@@Unknown_Genius yeah I have a BOOX tablet exactly for this. When I need to read PDFs or Google something without overstimulating my brain or blasting my eyes out at night time. Plus it holds a charge for literal months if you use it lightly.
Yeah, I'm thinking of making my kids use it when I become a parent :p Also will use it for myself because of the same issues. Concentration, eye strain, lessened RU-vid consumption.. etc. Got addicted to sudoku on my E-ink tablet though. Some inherent issues like lack of discipline aren't resolved XD.
@@yensteel Some addictive games like Ogame (space war simulator) would probably work just fine. I quit that game after noticing I was scheduling my life around that game instead of the other way around.
This feels like the latest monitor technology in the world of fallout where they don’t have transistors.. except that even CRT’s don’t use transistors and make way more sense
Actually they have transistors in the Fallout. They just were invented significantly later and integrated circuits even later. Don't expect Pip-Boy and these robots to actually world exclusively on vacuum tubes.
@@pavuk357 yeah, people dont realize you couldnt make what is essentially wrist mounted game boy with just vaccum tubes for compute... power, heat dispersion, etc would be significantly worse than what we're shown if that was the case.
the fact that most of the popular comments on this video say either how it's terrible at gaming, or how nobody would use this, proves that this audience doesn't do much READING. READING, people, that's what this is for!
@xGOKOPx he said the text was not very sharp, then they changed the mode to text or smth and it was obviously much better. The problem i have with his test is that he's using the monitor for text editing, and e-ink technology doesn't really excel at that right now due to its slowness. Using a combination of settings, i was able to make my e-ink android tablet be acceptable for text editing, but the slowness means it's really just not ideal. But what it really is ideal for is reading. He should have loaded an ebook, and checked that out, first thing. And of course, the font wouldn't be very small, why would you wanna squint when reading? Just use the full screen ( not just the middle like he does with editing text) and it'll be great for reading. I am not a fan of dasung, haven't even tried their products, but i am a fan of e-ink displays. It just feels entirely different reading from them, compared to normal monitors. I would still use normal monitors, and have an additional eink display for reading, and i would make sure i would use it ina way that would get me the most out of it, like setting it to change a full page instead of scrolling
@xGOKOPx they did, watch the full video again. They change the mode to text and test further. The video is cut short in places. Anyway, at minute 10:00 they even say "to be fair, we are in text mode". They were talking about the weird way that the monitor is displaying the text editor UI like page lines, etc. Linus does make a good point that " text mode" should be what you would expect to use for editing text(due to the name), but what he doesn't mention is that you can't use text mode when editing if you want the display to be responsive so it doesn't feel sluggish when you type. On my eink android tablet, I use a mode that is faster when editing text/typing, and when reading, I use the "text mode" or normal mode, as mine is called, so just use whatever mode your eink device has that is the slowest mode, which is fine when you are reading books page by page ( not by scrolling! but by "turning" the pages , like with a book)
The old pebble watch with e-ink display was such a gamechanger for outdoor use I’m honestly surprised its taken this long for companies to make full sized monitors. With continued investment it could be just as good as regular screens. You should compare this screen outside in direct sunlight.
My Garmin Instinct Solar is fantastic for this reason too. I hope there's more of them honestly. For spreadsheet and word processing I can't imagine anything better.
Likewise I have a couple Raspberry Pis doing mundane tasks like ad blocking and ADSB receiving. They don't need all-the-time displays but a passive e-ink would be perfect. It would likely cost too much to be worth doing but it would still be better than a couple bright LCD panels.
I could also see these being used in public facing spaces. If you have a display that doesn't change too frequently. Something like menus out front of a restaurant
@@banksy215 not quite a lot of buildings use monitors for directories and some restaurants use them for seating ques and/or other restaurant info, considering how little power e ink monitors use in comparison this could be a interesting alternative especially if the economy of scale catches up as a similar size e ink costs less to manufacture than a regular monitor
@@banksy215 Depends on how cheap they are. Paying $300-$1000 or even more a piece for a half dozen big TVs or displays to show menus or promotional material isn't very cost effective, especially if you've got multiple locations. If these were available for under $100, they'd be a worthy investment for many small businesses or chains. But at $1000, I can't imagine a market ever existing for them.
You can use LED backlit picture frames. 1W of power usage. Also this monitor is expensive as fuck and at that point electricity cost is certainly not the issue.
eink is already used in some places kinda like that, for example media markt (a german electronics retailer) uses red/white/black eink displays for their price tags
you guys should add a code editor test for these kinds of things. Normal text editors are black on a white background with weird fonts, vscode is colors on black with a monospace font.
This is perfect for my husband who writes and edits legal documents all day every day. Anyone who works with text documents for long periods of time could benefit from this.
As a musician, E-Ink tablets are preferred for sheet music, particularly when performing out doors in bright sunlight. I think this would also make a great dash board for a boat.
Yes, I was thinking that bud. Thanks to you! That should make text clearer through all the modes though. But, to be fair, Dasung need to have that in their quick start guide. 🙂
I don't believe Windows knows about offset triangular staggered pixel layouts as far as text rendering goes. ClearType is all about subpixel layout, and these aren't subpixels.
@@aaronmdjones I'm pretty sure they should disable ClearType and disable text smoothing (Smooth edges of screen fonts), since there are no subpixels here.
I think that is pretty much what's going on there, they are just calling the subpixels as full pixels so they can market it as higher resolution if I understand correctly.
@@VertexPlaysMC yeah linus explained there's two ways to do it. either you have multi-color beads inside each cell, or you have three "types" of cells each with a different color, which is what we see on this monitor. yeah i guess size is the biggest limitation here but i don't know
It's definitely the lack of a strong lighting source that limits the size of the pixels, similar to the limitation of R-LCD. Light needs to go in, hit the E-ink cells, then go back through the color filter. LMG here has a nice video on that. If color E-ink gets more saturation, the whites would be even duller like for transparent color folders. Kaleido plus, the previous version was said to be whiter and brighter than Kaleido 3.
@@VertexPlaysMCYep, there's two sets of DPI. Color DPI is 150 and B/W is 300 DPI for 10 inch devices, although that's only true for b, not w. (YT alg, please don't misinterpret this)
This is why I wish RLCDs / Transflective displays would make a comeback. You could get them up to like 120hz and they had incredible contrast for black and white content, especially in sunlight, with the downside being slightly washed out colors and viewing angles being equivalent to VA panels.
LTT made a video about Sun Vision Display's RLCD monitor. I have one myself, and it fits my needs perfectly. Sun Vision is the best Western RLCD manufacturer right now IMO, though they don't have 120hz like you mentioned.
Yeah, T-LCD isn't a new technology since pixel-qi made them pre 2010. It's nice to see at least one company take the torch. Eye care and Outdoor friendliness are the new arenas for all devices, whether it's in high nits and high pwm for OLED or an alternative technology like T-LCD or E-ink. There's some other techs too. Forgot their names. Edit: EFD/EFPD display from Hannstar was the other tech, and CH-LCD. The first looks dark like Kaleido 3 but without ghosting, the other is super slow in refresh rate, slower than e-ink, but the colors pop out like LCD.
I have a Kobo Libra Color, and I find the 150 dpi is fine for most comics. And then when I go to read black and white text, it returns to 300 dpi. The biggest problem is the colors look faded. But if I'm reading a comic where that matters, I can use my tablet.
150ppi is plenty for comics reading. Saying it'e not is like claiming the iPad 1-2 couldn't read comics. Your standards are either ridiculous or you haven't seen the latest panel tech. 🤷 As someone said above color saturation is a WAAAAAY bigger issue at this point than raw resolution.
@@Cooe. Color saturation, and the variety of problems introduced by the color filter that Linus pointed out. Greyscale performance, text clarity, and darkness all make it difficult to get behind buying a Kaleido 3 device unless you are an avid reader of almost nothing but western comics.
Right now, color E-ink isn't ready to fully replace B/W. So it's a matter of preference. It's a transition period. Kaleido 3 nor Gallery 3 have a lot of compromises. Kaleido 4 hasn't been described yet. Gallery 3 is ACEP technology, the usage of 4 different sets of particles in a single cell. But the only product that had it got reliability issues then switched to kaleido 3 in a new launch. I'm hoping they can merge the two together. 3 particles instead of 4 to be faster, and then use only 1 color filter, like green so it's not so much darker. They could do some sort of CMY technique too.
I thought of an interesting use case for e-ink recently. You know those signboards that Epcot has (had?) that post the wait times for every ride in the park, cycling between two or three screens worth every few seconds? Imagine being able to build a sign like that but it's designed to look like a printed sign. It would be on a slat with a screen on both sides, inset into a box so you can only see the front side, and every few seconds the slats all flip over like an old-school billboard to show the next "page" of attractions. Except while it's showing those, the ones on the back side secretly slow-refresh to update the wait times or, if there are more than two "pages", cue up the next page. The best part is, you wouldn't even need a color display. Just customize the two colors to whatever color scheme you want your sign to be. Black and yellow, green and white, brown and beige, etc. It's perfectly readable in direct sunlight, and it can fit in with any theming.
12:25 guess what Linus. Some places don't have practices as sane as LMG and just expect you to stare at a computer for an email all day until lunch, then again after it. I feel quite lucky that there's a window right where my screen is, so I can just look outside at the nice brick wall and see what the weather is like. But still. I wish they'd encourage 5-10 minute breaks every hour or two. Where you should stretch and talk to someone at a distant corner of the office.
@@jamesphillips2285 well okay I may of been a little melodramatic with it. Can get up and walk around whenever there's no meetings, but it's the fact that no 9-5 desk job highlights health in computing these days. That's old news now already. 😅
I still really, really want an e-ink monitor. I want it for reading pdfs, ebooks, and SHEET MUSIC! It's just a matter of price. I'm just waiting for the ~$300 price point. Way too expensive right now.
Buy one of those large e-books. They are better in every way and you can put them anywhere. Like, what's the point of sheet music if you have to plug it into wall in the computer room?
@@l4kr 1:1 sized e-ink tablets are, unfortunately, very expensive. I know you can get 10 inch tablets at a somewhat affordable price point, but if you want ones the size of actual sheets of paper (e.g. A4, or around 13 inch), you have to shell out a lot or get shit products. I personally have an Onyx Tab X which I'm quite happy with, but it's far from affordable.
Frankly, the cheapo microscope was good enough for the testing done on this monitor... it's not like measuring the color gamut on this one would really help anyone make a buying decision. We already know it's crap just from looking at it for three seconds.
@@RuslanIvanyuk-ub8fj Forgot which video or comment under a video it was, but they mentioned that yellow was used to "watermark" a picture to identify which printer it came from. That's why it'd always run out of yellow so much.
You can say what you want about digital eye strain, but when I had a concussion, I could barely interact with screens in stores, but my ereader was fine for hours on end
10:46 "Do you realize? DO YOU REALIZE? DO YOU REALIZE something? Let me tell you, if the Health Department of Greene County sees those videos that you put on the damn Internet. They could condemn our house, and we would have to move out of it?"- Bob Chandler
There is pretty decent info the blue light might trick your brain into thinking it's morning. So if you are on your PC late at night this can have a real effect. Using software like f.lux works well. And if you actively use it you'll actually find it probably makes you tired as it gets progressively more orange. This would fall in line with the same way plants work where different wave lengths or light help the plant do different things.
I believe the research said something among the lines of it's not really blue that does this, it's just light in general and blue just marginally more because it's stronger compared to red (per photon). Also part of the gains are from cutting UV that many monitors don't filter out properly
i would assume it draws more power than a lcd while watching videos. but barely draws anything if anything at all with still images. can't be sure until its tested though.
(A) They're the only company making E-Ink monitors so, unfortunately they can charge whatever they want. (B) It's probably not a product you have a strong want/need for.
The problem is that they need a whole production chain for this thing, and they know almost nobody is gonna buy it. They have a really high margin on it, at least 400% , but that's probably still just barely enough to make a profit.
I mean We talked about PC enthusiast that keep dreaming weird enterprise stuff to make their setup bit more hipster, yet they ask with fraction of price
@@eddythefool unlikely. these e-ink screens are manufactured by one company (e-ink holdings based in taiwan). they have a complete monopoly over the entire e-ink market. the tech/innovation moves incredibly slow for the same reason.
@@seigeengine Cost was never mentioned in my comment, and for static images it looked fine. Not to mention the e-ink nature gives a bit of nostalgia to when these games were pencil and paper only.
@@seigeengine And to a lot of people and monitor types they looks like garbage when laid flat and looking from bad angles. Lets also see you argue around the fact that some people need to use displays like this or none at all, so what do we do then? I also never claimed that this would be a good/perfect idea right now, simply a possibility. Why cant we just appreciate the good qualities of a product and where they can take us in the future? Or do we just watch a review to hate on a product even though there could be perfectly valid use case's for it, now or in the future? Or did I miss the entire point of this channel for the last 15 years?
@@nikoraasu6929 Again, costs were never considered in my comment. When I started playing Dungeons and Dragons 25 years ago we also had the idea to put a computer monitor into our table to use for digital maps, unfortunately at the time the technology was far too expensive and cumbersome to consider "at the time". Now that is more than an available option. In time, I think it would also be feasible for this to work and combine digital with a pen and paper type aesthetic
Colored E-ink monitors seem like the perfect display to view classic comic books. If I was a fan of reading comic books, I would definitely own one of these monitors
12:10 I don't think a lit display is the problem, but I definitely get eyestrain if I look at a screen that's TOO bright for extended periods of time. Calibrating to ~100 nits on desktop use and using minimum legible brightness when reading on a phone definitely helps.
Awesome video and explanation! Glad to see Color E-Ink is getting more recognition lately. I suspect we'll see a Kindle Color sooner than many realize, but not with the color filter approach, but with colored E-Ink particles (=E-Ink Gallery 3).
WARNING ANY BUYER GETTING FOR EYESTRAIN : watch at 14:33 there appears to be alarming ammounts of flicker coming from this monitor (I'm guessing either from the frontlight or pixel refresh). Regarding digital eyestrain I've spent time around people with this issue and one of the predominant causes is flicker, e.g. from PWM backlighting. This a reason there's so many complaints about eyestrain with newer smartphones and monitors that use OLED as it relies on high frequency switching (PWM) on all pixels, which is why I'll never support that technology as it risks harm to many people. The most important things you need to test in a review for eye health focused monitors is across the full range of backlight intensities (all the way from lowest to highest) record the screen at a high framerate (~1Khz) to detect flickering behaviour. You'll also need to see how low down the brightness goes while retaining good image contrast, as people with significant eye strain issues generally stay in low brightness environments and limit high brightness exposure. High nits for them it bad nits for them, so saying this monitor is dim - that's fine, great even, as long it's legible in low light.
Ok text editing might be much more doable if you have it in portrait. You could have the text larger and more readable and not lose out on how much is on your screen. That being said, I could see this being moved into a more commercial use for signage and displays on food trucks. They don't need to refresh often, it would be cheaper than custom printing signage when you need to alter it, and it wouldn't need to push out a significant amount of power to accommodate the brightness of the sun.
Say what you will about its usefulness, but the refresh rate and the reduced ghosting are ASTONISHING compared to just a few years ago. The tech is still in the early adopter stage, sure, but I am already blown away by the progress
While I absolutely love this technology, the low refresh rate and image retention would irk me so much that it's pretty much unusable. Would love to hear thoughts from someone that actually uses this or a similar display because a normal display doesn't work for them.
I would really like an e-ink e-reader... it's just that e-readers like the Kobo Aura and Clara Colour get normal e-reader sized screens, which is just working for normal comics. Especially since you want to zoom in more and the screens are quite slow. But I don't think an e-in monitor is the best solution... Sure, lots of people are saying why don't you use a tablet instead... but me for that's just way too tiring for my eyes.
There's E-ink tablets like the Boox lineups. They're great for comic and manga reading. They now have a new refresh rate tech that makes them refresh faster with less ghosting too.
@seigeengine ummm, where are you getting that e-ink isn't better for your eyes? There are multiple studies showing less visual fatigue when using e-ink.
Unfortunately those are the limitations of the technology. For resolution, you can only make the particles so small. For the refresh rate, it takes time for the old particles to fall off the screen and the new particles to rise up. You can slightly speed this up, but you'll end up with ghosting until you do a slow full refresh.
@@TheRavenCoder I mean, the video phone was a terrible idea and now we have FaceTime. Maybe this particular approach to this idea sucks, but the idea itself I personally think is great.
@@Jeebus-un6zz Don't get me wrong, I love e-ink displays. I've owned various e-ink readers for the past 14 years, with my most recent one being the new Kobo Libra Color. But e-ink will never be a good replacement for computer monitors (except in very specific cases). High resolution and high refresh rates are at odds with how the technology works at what makes it good as an e-reader.
That's definitely a physical limitation that's hard to fully resolve. If it gets to 60hz, it would likely use more power than OLED and wear out within a year. EFD (Eco-Friendly Display) or EFPD by Hannstar is an alternative technology that has a great balance.
I really like my boox Nova C. I just got my Dasung color monitor and it's basically useless. Have the OG black and white one from them and really liked it- really unfortunate this one isn't able to bring together settings for any meaningful use case.
What I would really like is a gameboy light style implementation of this tech. Where the monitor has 2 layers. Standard LED, but you could mode-switch it to E-ink for a "night mode" style of use. That plus an auto-refresh feature built in. E-ink has a place as a mode, but not a place as a replacement for standardized LEDs.
I have just general eye strain. The best advice I can give is to always adjust the brightness to roughly match the environment. Blue light glasses also help a ton, they literally make the difference between blood-shot eyes and NOT for me.
As a person who uses a colored e-ink tablet daily (and loves it, for both reading and writing), I can't event imagine why anyone would buy an e-ink monitor for their PC. Those are designed for still or nearly still image situations. Not to mention that their color reproduction is horrible and on my tablet I can't probably distinguish between max distinct colors, as in all red look the same, there's virtually no orange etc...
When Linus has finished re-painting his motorcycle (it will be pink with a sparkle undercoat), he can't wear his respirator with a beard. Yvonne declared herself Team Beard early on, so it will be back.
I feel like the only way to get decent colour out of e-ink that doesn't kill the brightness would be using the fluorescent pigments they use in q-led/ "quantum dot" displays, so it's not just filtering out 2/3rds of the light.
He often tries to explain relatively foreign tech like that. LMG is mainstream oriented, to appeal to a large audience, including non-techies. They have been educational in many ways imo.
Also, it is important to consider that not everyone is a subject matter expert in every topic. Let's say I design processors for a living. I am an expert with CPU architecture, but not with E-INK display tech. I don't want the video to assume I am an expert and use acronyms and terms that I would have to constantly pause to look up. LTT makes videos for a large variety of topics, and nobody is going to be a subject matter expert for all of them, so their videos have to be easy to understand. This is different than channels that focus on a specific topic, like HDTVTest.
This monitor is perfect for working outside in bright sunshine a situation where a standard monitor fails miserably. I'd love this as a *second* monitor to work in my garden in the summer
I feel that the best use case for E-Ink is for things that show the same information for long periods, billboards, posters, store price tags, restaurant menus, road signs etc.
This monitor would work great for me when I was doing my PhD. I was reading papers and writing. I had some graphs to check. And due to crappiness of video performance, there is less temptation for procrastination. I can't think a downside to this screen. I love that it decreases distraction.
I think its a cool tech, but the limitations on tech and perspective turned me down. Imo the people behind this types of monitors should focus on achieving a higher refresh speed and once it gets figured out, introduce colors.
One slightly sad thing is that you forget to test and talk about the primary use case, with the back to a window or in conservatories and even on the balcony etc. If one do-sent want to be a basement dweller and work in a harmoniums setting this is the only tool at once disposal. That is why I am hopping for this to just get better and better.
The colour aspect of digital camera sensors works basically the same way that this display does, just in reverse. They don't have sub pixels so 50% of your pixels are green, 25% are red and 25% are blue. That means that in order for a picture to look nice on a 1080p monitor you'd need to shoot in at least 4 times the resolution. So with 24MP being kind of the standard of "good enough" for many cameras you won't be able to get the full benefits of 4k recording. You'd need about 33MP for that with a 16:9 sensor, but cameras don't tend to use those, meaning you'll have to crop in slightly, requiring even more sensor resolution. All that is to say that pixels are not as clearly defined as I'd like.
A monitor is the least useful application of e-ink tech. I know there are people who find it useful for writing, and that's about it as far as I know. Signage is what's really driving the tech. They still haven't made color ready for e-readers, as far as I'm concerned (your choice is between really washed out colors and really low resolution but almost fast enough for a page turn or merely kinda washed out colors but the next page takes most of a minute to load). The only really impressive color displays I've seen are for use with maker projects and take like two minutes to change because they're sorting out seven colors. And that would be totally fine for a sign or picture frame, but not for a comic book. Also they're still pretty small. On the enterprise scale, you can get some very big e-ink displays for use in stores and bus stops and whatever, but they cost hundreds per square inch because they're for businesses.
Something that’s being heavily discounted as a use case is small scale businesses that aren’t buying e ink displays in massive bulk. It has the same exact use case as commercial e ink signage, just for people that don’t need 200 of them. Think smaller but well off restaurants that want a digital menu.
Dark mode is a very very very very big game changer. Since switching to forcing most everything I can be terminally online without eyestrain for like 4-8 hours, and much more with a small break every other hour
So they basically pulled an OLED with their fake resolution. If they were just as cheap as the most premium portable monitors, I’d probably buy one. I need it for only needs to refresh every 15 seconds anyways. But non-accurate color is also a must.