Again TCL misrepresenting their NXTPaper display. At least they’ve stopped actually calling it “full colour epaper” which was an outright lie and moved to “paper-like” which is wrong but legally they can get away with that.
These are IPS LCDs, with standard backlighting. they have a highly matte surface and a semi-reflective layer for improved daylight viewing. they are not E-ink or E-Paper or any of those fully reflective technologies.
So it’s basically a transflective display, like those used in the PDAs of old?
as far as I can tell, but since they don’t actually say that it’s either due to a patent on transflective tech (transflexive some branded it) or because it doesnt do as much as that technology did, from the examples i’ve seen of the larger tablets being used in the sun it doesn’t look anywhere near as bright and clear as a good E-ink tablet like a Boox, but in low light or night it looks better but the power usage is significantly higher.
That’s more or less how a transflective LCD is like; it’s just a LCD with a different way of lighting up the pixels.
Hisense was going into the right direction with their A5 pro cc eink smartphones. Did they go any further ?
Don’t know but I always liked them as an all rounder device. I think they are still using a last gen colour tech, but there are dual screen phones with lcd on one side and epaper on the other that are a nifty middle ground.
I don’t think colour eink is quite there though. The kaleido tech has enough speed to be usable, but poor colour and much greyer whites than carta greyscale due to the colour being a translucent pigment layer over the top of a greyscale screen. Eink gallery could be used but currently is much slower to do a full colour draw, too slow for a phone or tablet. Eink spectra 6 looks incredible but is also too slow for anything but signage.
There was one group showing off a prototype transparent OLED layer over a greyscale eink backing which sounds like the best of all worlds, so we will see what that amounts to.
Perhaps the perfect device would be more like a folding phone, with a nice modern oled on the front but a flexible greyscale eink inside. The flexible eink already exists its just not capable of a tight enough bend to work in something the size of a galaxy fold.
Thanks for the clarification! I think there is still some merit to a more paperlike display, I wish Google kept Ambient EQ beyond the Pixel 4 because it’s quite nice on iPhones
They did not show any animations in the keynote, suggesting that it may have similar refresh rate issues to a standard color E-ink display.
The NXTpaper displays are standard LCDs with a highly matte coating and some processing and colour rendering modes to simulate paper, I think they have some transflexive film to make them more sunlight viewable, but still have a backlight.
They are not e-paper, or e-ink, nor are they a fully reflective display.
What the advantage for LED and LCD screen?
the advantage of a traditional LCD display with backlight is high refresh rate, low pixel response times and full colour, so you can watch video on it an scroll around dragging pictures without smear or blur. these require constant power to keep the image on screen. LED just means the image is lit with LED light, this is how pretty much all LCDs work these days. it used to be there were CFL and LED LCDS, early LCD displays were lit with high voltage fluorescent tubes before LEDs became cheap enough and bright enough to be the better option.
E-Ink on the other hand moves physical pigment particles around in an oil to form an image that works by reflecting ambient light, just like print on paper, no power is wasted on bright LEDs to make it viewable in a lit room or daylight, a small light is used for low light viewing. They are perfectly readable in direct sunlight and once the image is formed it requires zero power to maintain and can stay viewable almost indefinitely, so they are extremely power efficient when used properly. their disadvantage is they take a measureable amount of time to form the image so video or smooth scrolling are not possible and they are mostly greyscale.
Idk, seems like just another frosted glass display, seems to me like it’ll just hurt outside visibility, also it’s permanently a blue light filter? No thanks
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this is really cool! is it easier on the battery?
my favorite feature of the nook (was it the nook?) was the e-ink screen and how vastly superior it was for reading. I’m not sure the science behind it (because I read an article on here once that blue light doesn’t actually affect much) but I can’t read for long periods on an led screen, it hurts my eyes and it’s harder for me to focus
no, this is just a more sunlight readable backlit LCD with some colour filtering and processing to appear more paper like.
it requires constant power unlike e-ink and the only way they can claim it saves power is because it requires less backlight brightness to be sunlight viewable.
aw that’s a shame :/ I did read the article but was confused because I felt the kind of implied it was like e ink
waaaait so the sunlight is reflected back as rgb?
There’s a company called Onyx that makes Android e-ink tablets, some of which have color screens. You can check out a review of one here: https://www.androidpolice.com/boox-tab-ultra-c-review/
I haven’t spent much time with the color ones but my understanding is that the display has a slow response time and some ghosting, much like its B&W counterparts. I’ll be interested to see how this phone works with typical smartphone workloads, like live scrolling.
Inside me, there are two wolves. One wants 120+hz refresh rates. The other wants e-ink.
Edit: I see on their specs page they list a 90hz refresh rate. I’m not entirely clear what kind of tech is in here. Perhaps one layer is a traditional LCD with matte coating?
It’s an IPS LCD with a matte glass display and a slightly reflective base layer for improved sunlight view ability with less backlight power required. similar to the “transflexive” displays that were popular some years ago.
this is so interesting!! and I agree haha I hope one day it gets to a nice median where we can have super smooth scrolling and e-ink!
Is this supposed to be a colourful e-ink display?
its poop
Is this an actual reflective display?
oh my god this is incredibly exciting! huge fan of e-ink. I wonder what the refresh rate is and how much impact the tech will have on battery life.
EDIT: should have read top comment 🥲
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