Comment by mmooss
10 hours ago
> eInk is the right display tech.
It's interesting and I clicked on the OP, but why? The variable ambient light conditions, refresh rate, etc would seem to favor standard LCD/etc.
Battery capacity isn't much of an issue for a small screen, and weight carried by the bicycle.
In my humble experience the gold standard for bike computer screens was the Wahoo Elemnt Roam 2. It had like 64 colors or so but you could see it everywhere.
That being said, seeing that there are now eink displays capable of 60Hz, I wish they (and projects like this one) could take over in this specific market.
eInk is like a piece of paper, which gets MORE visible in the sun, but standard touchscreen LCDs/OLEDs get harder to see. I am not sure about the physics/reasons for this. Phones also aggressively dim screens to conserve energy and lower temperatures. Phones absorb a lot of sunlight, so a white eInk display is brilliant in that regard.
Refresh rate is a solved problem for eInk as well, but it comes with energy tradeoffs and... might still be proprietary. But 60-120 fps eInk exists AFAIK.
Trying to outbright the sun on a battery-powered device is an approach I've always found questionable.
E-ink, instead just lets the sun reflect off of it, does want some sort of light in the dark, but, perfectly visible in full-bright/direct sunlight.
Transflective LCDs, which most bike computers use, are also reflective but have better contrast than eink making them more visible in sunlight. They are different than phones.
They don't have better contrasts. They have blacker blacks, but eInk has much whiter whites.
3 replies →
LCD screen are pitch black by default. Eink can be white without extra energy
Yes, and there are many other tradeoffs. How do the tradeoffs fit this use case?
Because most people cycle outdoors and when the sun shines, and eInk is much better than any other display type in bright environments.