Comment by adolph
1 day ago
It isn't clear to me that eink's underlying display technology isn't good at the interactive computing use case so much as the implementations aren't optimized for it. There could be a position where more power than an eink reader is used but still far less than traditional active displays since unchanged pixels aren't driven.
That's how I think about it too.
E-readers are vertically integrated devices: the hardware, software, UI, and refresh behavior are all tailored around reading. E-ink tablets like reMarkable are similar, but optimized around writing and annotation.
A traditional monitor is much more general-purpose, so it doesn't get the same kind of end-to-end optimization for the display medium. I think there's room for an in-between category: a more interactive e-ink device where both the hardware and software are designed around the strengths and limits of the panel.
There's some related work happening in this direction:
https://nlnet.nl/project/epd-wayland/
It should be good enough for interactive use, but not for watching movies.
In TFA it is said that for these new faster panels the transition time of a pixel is around 50 ms. This is comparable with some old LCDs.