We take a look at the TCL 40 NxtPaper 5G with its matte LCD. Oh, the age-old clash of glossy versus matte displays – a topic igniting more late-night forum...
I wish TCL would stop referring to it as electronic paper, it’s a matte LCD with some desaturated modes for eye comfort.
for me, the major selling point of a true e-paper display is sunlight readability, if your “electronic paper” LCD cant match e-ink, then it’s not good enough.
The main E-ink patents are due to expire in 2026, so we should see some rapid development after that.
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It’s not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it’s definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they’ve done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it’s a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won’t be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
I love my Boox Note 3. It’s am older device but still gets updates lots of tweaks for tuning the display on a per app basis, runs Google apps etc. I use it mainly as a reader for books and manga but also for drawing notes and browsing the Web.
Ooh, looks interesting. Though the size would be a disadvantage to me—I can imagine some situations where using an ereader is acceptable where a phone would not be, and other people won’t be able to tell them apart this way.
Colour eink is still very limited, but can’t they make eink (semi-)transparent? Just put eink above the usual LCD/oled and enable/disable them as needed?
Unfortunately, this is not readily done. The displays work by moving pigmented particles closer or further from the surface. Generally the greyscale ones have black and white particles. If one were to swap out the white for transparent, it would just be a bunch of black.
Though, it might be possible to play with particle density. This would likely result in similarly awful refresh rates to color e-ink.
For me the main selling point of epaper is that the device can write to it then turn entirely off, for potentially multiple weeks of battery on a charge.
Nevermind that, an approach like what Sharp and the old PDAs did with transflective displays would be pretty neat too. But I suspect what’ll happen is that they’ll be called out for not providing “rich colours and deep blacks”.
OLED over transflective, do you get all the bright colors but it can go transparent and use the sunlight readable and low power screen when that makes sense
For me the biggest selling point of e-ink is for reading late at night. Since it’s not backlit it’s better for sleep, I think? Easier on the eyes, anyways.
I wish TCL would stop referring to it as electronic paper, it’s a matte LCD with some desaturated modes for eye comfort.
for me, the major selling point of a true e-paper display is sunlight readability, if your “electronic paper” LCD cant match e-ink, then it’s not good enough.
The main E-ink patents are due to expire in 2026, so we should see some rapid development after that.
Yeah, the whole “It behaves like an actual paper page for all relevant purposes” is kinda important to an e-ink display.
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It’s not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it’s definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they’ve done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it’s a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won’t be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
I really wanted YotaPhone to succeed. Both a normal screen and a very very battery friendly e-ink for reading etc for hours…
I love my Boox Note 3. It’s am older device but still gets updates lots of tweaks for tuning the display on a per app basis, runs Google apps etc. I use it mainly as a reader for books and manga but also for drawing notes and browsing the Web.
Ooh, looks interesting. Though the size would be a disadvantage to me—I can imagine some situations where using an ereader is acceptable where a phone would not be, and other people won’t be able to tell them apart this way.
Colour eink is still very limited, but can’t they make eink (semi-)transparent? Just put eink above the usual LCD/oled and enable/disable them as needed?
Unfortunately, this is not readily done. The displays work by moving pigmented particles closer or further from the surface. Generally the greyscale ones have black and white particles. If one were to swap out the white for transparent, it would just be a bunch of black.
Though, it might be possible to play with particle density. This would likely result in similarly awful refresh rates to color e-ink.
Honestly if the Palma would have cellular radio it would check all my phone need boxes.
For me the main selling point of epaper is that the device can write to it then turn entirely off, for potentially multiple weeks of battery on a charge.
Nevermind that, an approach like what Sharp and the old PDAs did with transflective displays would be pretty neat too. But I suspect what’ll happen is that they’ll be called out for not providing “rich colours and deep blacks”.
OLED over transflective, do you get all the bright colors but it can go transparent and use the sunlight readable and low power screen when that makes sense
Transflexive displays can work, but they arent as easy on the eyes as e-paper and they have poor contrast in direct sunlight.
For me the biggest selling point of e-ink is for reading late at night. Since it’s not backlit it’s better for sleep, I think? Easier on the eyes, anyways.