LTT really needs to look at how they treat e-ink devices. They are not tablets and will never complete as a multimedia device. They are ereaders, note taking devices, and can sometimes do a little more. Instead they should be reviewed for what they are: how good is reading experience for books, PDFs, and comics. How is the note taking, markup, and retrieval process. These are things that matter for ereader. Currently LTT ereader reviews are like watching a bicycle reviewed like it was a car, and found wanting for not being car enough….
@@elias6570 No it isn't. Also that's not the point here. The point is, that LTT and SC-staff think they're reviewing a regular tablet, just with an e-ink screen, which this is not supposed to be.
Tbh this is more like a impressions rather than review. Riley is just another user who would buy an e-ink device thinking it's a tablet and don't know why they exist. But indeed, it would be a nicer if an eink device user did the video
If anything, this review serves as an excellent example of why such an expensive e-reader is such a waste of money. Rather than a faster processor or ways to improve the responsiveness, the markup seems to go towards software development and the custom UI, which the video shows to be unpleasant experiences. Navigation is bad, responsiveness is bad (I've seen *much* better response times from e-ink displays), and the overall experience with even reading books is bad. Could Riley learn the general workflow of e-ink displays a bit better and give much more in-depth looks at reading and writing? Of course, but that isn't going to save this product in the slightest.
I believe the difference between drawing with the pen and resizing the rectangle is that the e-ink display has to do a full refresh to remove the old lines of the rectangle. When drawing with the pen, I believe the display can just "add" ink to the spot of the pen, but if it needs to "remove"/delete the ink, then the entire screen has to refresh. But this is still a bad experience compared to my Supernote A5X
That depends on the exact panel and the firmware - I've certainly seen e-ink devices that can do partial clears without needing a full screen refresh, and they had nearly instantly responsive scrolling. One such case was an older Kobo reader, which even in the browser had highly responsive scrolling, until a firmware updated ruined it... the one tradeoff is that it can leave some 'ghost pixels' sometimes, but that's usually not an issue in practice.
@@kennymorelandiii9406 12:24 the refreshrate must be about 5-10fps. Which is decent. For a e-ink display that is. No refreshing that takes more than half of a second.
Riley's enthusiasm for being the resident e-ink guy is potent. Riley, if you need help and can't say it aloud, just write it down on one of those stylish displays with that 4096 levels of stylus sensitivity.
The thing is a total piece of crap. I love how they're adding more and more surveillance features like fingerprint readers and cameras that aren't necessary at all on an e-reader, but I guess the Xi Dada needs more data.
It kinda soul drains me is that the "unboxing"/"review" never focused on all that matters in glorified book reader - battery life, ability to read heavy pdfs, how good notes are integrated into e-reader app, is it good enough to write hand-written notes, bibliography integration, how comprehensible are a4 format pdfs in color mode, etc. It's like he treats it like a "run of the mill" tablet and wonders why it doesn't really work like one.
I think the issue is the manufacturers keep adding things to the readers that don't need to be in there. WHY IS THERE A WAY TO WATCH VIDEOS ON YOUR E-INK DEVICE.
@@niko1even and? How this fact has anything to do with the aspects he focused on? The problem here is that he skipped all the important parts for that type of device and focused on irrelevant ones. It's like unboxing the vaccuming robot and talking about how bad its wheels are for enduro type use-case, how bad the suspension is, how it has no petrol engine and you can't refuell it at any gas pump, etc. You know, the important parts of your everyday roomba, right? It's not as ridiclous, but you get the point. It has nothing to do with the format, but everything to do with how he has missconceptions about how to use the device.
The drawing probably only updates the e-ink on the points you're drawing, and thus it can show up faster, while drawing shapes requires computation to calculate where on the screen it has to update the e-ink followed by both clearing and drawing the screen at those locations. Just a wild guess, but that's approximately how I did it on an arduino e-ink display.
That, and also drawing a line only involves making white pixels black. Moving a rectangle requires black to white and white to black, and that in more space.
As I understand it (at least with other e-ink styluses, the e-ink is pulled up by the magnetic force exerted by the stylus), so it doesn't need the tablet's graphics processor to do the work. E-inks work by magnetic polarity to change between black and white ink. I would assume something similar is used in color, but I'm not sure.
@@TheCaniblcat I heard so as well. But in this case I would say, that the Tip isn't magnetic because of the coloured Display. For different colours you need a perfect amount of each "pixel". So it probably just tracks the pen.
Both Boox and Bigme devices are primarily note taking and reading devices and the tablet features are secondary. That is the reason their homescreen is either the library or notes and not the app list like other Android tablets. However if you want app list as your home screen, you can do so in the settings atleast in the Boox devices
A note on the refresh rate: e-ink displays have to physically move little colored beads in the panel whenever something changes on screen, so the more movement there is on screen, the more beads have to change position and the longer it will take. There's not much changing on screen as you drag a pen around, so that refreshes a lot quicker.
I super enjoyed Riley losing his mind. Also the e-ink screen is a lot like an etch-a-sketch screen where you're getting particles stuck to the screen. It flashes to re-draw the whole screen and when it doesn't have to re-draw it seems to respond much faster. Because it's a physical system with actual ink (e-ink) response times are naturally slower than other display tech with change-in-place pixels.
To answer Riley's question: the amount of time needed to (reliably, with high contrast) update the state of an e-ink display relates strongly to size of the area being updated. So just updating a tiny area underneath the pen is quick, anything else takes longer
I'm a bit of an e-ink enthousiast and recently bought an Android Color E-Ink ereader - my first in both those categories. I recognized much of what Riley experienced, but experienced it more positively myself because of my lower expectations. I just want to read on it, so even the drawing is more of a curiosity to me.
Why even bothering doing a video if you won't even try to use the devices for the actual purpose they are designed for? ...It's like reviewing a motorcycle but scoring it based on how it works as a ladder, it simply doesn't make any sense!
When you are drawing with your stylus, (I wont get far into how these screens work), it changes the polorization (charge) of the pixels physicaly, so there is no delay to it. When you are drawing a rectangle, all of the pixels need to refresh by modifying their charge via the tablet itself using chemical and different reactions, which is way slower than doing it physicaly.
@@pascha4527 It's still eink, you can see it's still way slower than the stylus drawing which is continuously refreshed. Most of these modern eink displays from what I understand refresh faster if they decrease the colour gamut so it may be using fewer colours on TH-cam than on the drawing app.
That e-ink display is seriously impressive, especially considering the technique involved, this is actual physical particles being moved around, and to hit the different colors, and you can even play video on it, colour me impressed.
when you are dragging an object it has to remove and redraw multiple sections at once. whereas with a single brush stroke or line it works similar to an etch-a-sketch where it only has to add onto the screen where the pen is currently located and drawing.
Why are color e-ink displays still so bad in tablets? I've had a watch with a color e-ink display which had a refresh rate of about 20Hz and had much brighter colors and didn't have to "refresh" the screen so now and then by flashing the whole screen.
That watch isn't a Pebble by any chance, is it? Iirc the Pebble uses a reflective LCD to get a paper like look and low power consumption with decent colours rather than a true eink display.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 I guess the million dollar question, then, is why is that not good enough? What does real e-ink have that transreflective LCDs can't achieve, besides lower power draw?
@@stevethepocket I haven't seen much of transflective LCDs to compare but good eInk displays genuinely look just like paper, there's something different and quite nice about reading on paper that isn't quite captured by LCD.
things should have been tested: reading an actual ebook displaying A4 PDF with more than a text trying out search, annotate, bookmarks PC connectivity, sync, charging battery specs, backlighting things we got thorough review of all the junk in the box complaints about the stylus complaints about the OS complaints about the screen drawing BS crab raving the speakers
11:20 I assume it's because it has nothing to delete, displaying a stroke. Every consecutive frame "adds ink" so to speak since white is e-inks default. Moving something across requires some ink pixels to be "defaulted" which takes more time than inking them. But I'm no e-ink-enthusiast
Got one of these via their Kickstarter - was a lot less than the $700 priced here (even when I paid in £) - good device for my book reading - easy to load up then via the WiFi web interface (so can upload mobi, pdf etc from my laptop to it) - been a number of updates that make it easier still
The reason why E-ink is responsive when writing because when you write using the stylus, ghosting is not a problem as what you have already written will stay on the screen until you erase it. When you move a shape around the screen, the screen needs to deal with ghosting, in thid case, the display have to do a windowed or a full screen refresh which may take longer. When writing, E-ink is not refreshing the screen, it is just changing the state of the pixels following the stylus.
11:20 WHY: Because if you resize a triangle, you have to do 2 things: Disable the pixels at the old position, and add pixels at the new position. That's difficult. If you're drawing, you are only adding black pixels. That can be done instantanuously. e-ink displays don't 'think' in refresh rates naturally. The state of the pixels is just on or off.
E-inks can draw single dots on the screen very fast, this is called a partial update. The only thing that needs to be done is move the pigment capsules towards the surface. When drawing a rectangle the whole display needs to be refreshed since you don't want to see the ghosting of the previous frames that were generated with a different sized rectangle. Wiping the old frame and drawing a new one takes way more time than just a small partial update.
For death of me I cannot understand why companies send their junk to linus team to be mocked by someone who clearly does not give a fuck about the product, and who has obviously zero interest in getting to know a single thing about the product. So disrespectful, so distasteful.
goodereader has involved in shady business practices such as taking pre-order a product that the company hasn't agreed to, writing a fake reviews for a product that doesn't even came out yet, etc etc.
Most e-Ink screens needs a full write when going from black to white, but only a very small part change when going from white to black. If something needs 'deleting' it must redraw the while screen, it is only adding new no-white there is no need to redraw the whole screen. Maybe it is something related to that.
this one seemed kind of low effort and lazy, like your a tech youtuber and you should be able to navigate it. i don't think people use eink tablets for media consumption, it's mainly for reading, writing notes, and marking up documents so anything that helps that goal is welcome and everything else is just bonus fluff
E-Ink uses tiny little capsules, either black or white, suspended in clear fluid. Depending on the charge they receive, the black ones either raise up and draw image, or the other way around and the screen clears. Drawing with a stylus is probably easier to do since you only got to process the capsules under the pen, but when you're dragging a square, it has to redraw at least two sides all the time, depending how its made to process such action. Probably could've been done better, but who knows. Color is created using a filter over the screen, and depending on the density of capsules, certain amount of light passes, with different wavelengths. Since that's all that color is, you get it. Tried to explain in simple terms, its a bit more than just this, there's magic involved but lets not dwell too deep.
E-ink is my like…dark horse technology. It is just so much more pleasant to look at than a screen and I can’t really explain why. If it could play video, then that is like…game changing tech for me. My desk setup would instantly change from one regular monitor and an E-Ink display.
Its cool, but very limited. There was a pretty cool phone (think it was a prototype) that was OLED on one side and E-INK on the other side, so when you flipped it, the sensor just change the veiw to the other screen. Saving power
@@matsv201 Funny story about this. This was not a prototype it was the Yotaphone and they made two versions of it. I owned the Yotaphone 2 and quite frankly it was fucking awesome. I read a lot of books and also like the look of eink. It helped me save a lot of battery as well. Long story short: it was the most fun phone I ever owned. The company was a scam though after 6 months the first phone just stopped working. It just froze up and never worked again. I tried contacting support. Doesn't exist. I try calling them. Their company does not exist. I try to see if I can sue them somehow. Their company appearantly was not registered anymore. This was a crazy weird experience, because the hardware was so good. I can't believe such a shady business was able to create that quality. EDIT: Oh yeah and I bought a second one because I missed that thing so much only for the exact same thing to happen again.
E ink is worse in every way except for power consumption. 30Hz refresh rate (horrible) 720 x 960 pixels only (horrible) Only 36 colors compared to 100 million colors on a modern screen 3x more expensive (horrible) Can keep the screen on without power (good) If you want a low brightness screen, just use a LCD screen
The use case of that thing is not to watch videos on it. It is to add the possibility to read comics in color to the eink space. This one on paper seems to be above the competition by giving a better color resolution. Earlier ones were limited to a fourth of the B&W resolution. And color accuracy was bad at best. To see it still kind of brought forward is enough to keep me interested. If this tech can match at least 30fps screens in the future, that alone is enough to get a device that can play videos without backlight on and without burning your eyes while doing so.
The resident e-ink guy treats an e-ink tablet as just any other android tablet and focuses on the trivial use cases instead of using it to read ebooks.
It's sad that you get your hands on this devices but you don't understand the niche where they belong too. The fact that they are running android, is not for them to be a tablet, but to be a better and more versatile option to something like a kindle, in some cases with note taking capabilities.
First of all i would attribute the choppiness of the drawing of the rectangle to the fact that it is not a continiuos shape. i.e. it has to delete the previous size of the the rectangle and redraw it elsewhere which doesn't happen when you simply draw. which means that not only does the adjusting the size of the rectangle contain tens of microadjustments you also need to delete the previous location of the rectangle.affectively doubling the amount of shapes to be drawn on screen. which means that unlike the seemingly smooth drawing, the refresh rate of the e-ink display struggles to follow the placement of shapes and triangles, the same arguemnt can be made for how slowly Android OS works on e ink display. also another factor which can be atributed to this is that perhaps the algorithm that places the rectangle on the screen inside the app isn't as efficient as it could be.
Stylus nib puller has been around almost as long as there has been consumer graphic tablet. usually they're in the "pen holder" base you have to unscrew to access it (often nibs are stored there too)
for future reference: the feeling like you're going to break the tablet issue can be solved by changing pressure settings in whatever app you're using. everyone has different levels of pressure they're comfortable with putting on a device, so it's normal to need to adjust that to what feels comfortable. i use clip studio on both a galaxy book and wacom one stylus, and an ipad mini 6 with the apple pencil 2, and i have slightly different pressure settings for each device (a lower and more shallow curve for the gb and a higher and more steep curve for the ipad, since a lack of hinge concern reduces my pressure discomfort on that device)
The tip of the stylus activates the display directly and doesn't have to wait for screen refresh. Watch a video on how e-ink works and it'll become clear.
They e-screen can handle in real time the refresh of a line if it's follow your pen, because, the small black dots are caught by the pen (with some static electricity, I think). But, when you resize a rectangle, the screen needs to refresh itself, and that slower.
Someone else probably pointed this out - but the stylus input is not what actually gets sent to the program, because there's general incompabitility issues. E-ink device companies could never get the live input to sync to what gets sent to the device, so they compromised by creating a live input which gets displayed, which periodically gets "sent" to the app to officially get incorporated. That's why that looks very smooth, but the other functions are not smooth.
Editor, that stanky Jazz in the background was amazing when Riley was so confused. I was laughing my ass of the entire time. Give that person a gold star.
Apparently the reason for instant pen rendering is because the pen directly switches the pixels, it actually forms part of the display control system, completely bypassing the normal display control pipeline. The tablet tracks what you're doing with the digitiser and saves the result, but it doesn't have to process and render the resulting lines the same way as generated content like the rectangle.
11:25 in easy words, basically when you drag the rectangle, the tablet itself pushes the "ink" to the front, it can't do that very fast therefore there is low refresh rate or you would get ghosting, with the pen, its the other way around, the pen is the one pulling the ink/pixels or whatever you wanna call it, so it has no latency, is basically drawing with a pencil but the paper is the one that has the ink.
This is incorrect. This is not how EMR stylus technology works. They have simply optimized the software or firmware to make certain partial screen refreshes very fast, like drawing a line.
Since easy words don't cut it, here you have it: First, how the e-ink displays work: It works by using tiny microcapsules that contain black and white particles with opposite electric charges. These particles move up or down when an electric signal is applied, creating different shades on the screen,the pen works by applying an electric signal to the microcapsules on the screen, it also has a small battery inside that generates a negative charge when it touches the display, this charge attracts the black particles to the surface of the microcapsules, creating a dark mark, it can also erase by reversing its polarity and pulling back the black particles. That's why you can't really draw without the pen. As for the colors they can be added in two ways, you can look it up yourself. Second, How EMR stylus work: An EMR stylus is a pen-like device that uses electromagnetic waves to communicate with a tablet or other electronic device the stylus does not need a battery or a wire because it gets its power from the tablet, the pen they use in this video clearly has a battery that needs to be charged. Also yes they could probably make the refresh rate higher, but as I said, it would have ghosting, if you notice when he's playing crab rave, you can see a lot of ghosting, even through youtube compression.
Riley, since eInk screens only refresh the 'pixels' in use, when you move a rectangle or refresh a portion of the screen, it takes way longer. When you're writing with the pen, the only eInk particles that will get charged are the ones directly underneath the pen, lowering the latency considerably. I'm still impressed to see an eInk screen play a video at an acceptable refresh speed!
11:19 drawing only has to update the pixels where you're drawing, resizing a rectangle has to change a lot more pixels at a time, first drawing the rectangle, then undrawing it and redrawing what was under it each step along the way
Eink screens are slow so the devs made it so you see a fake line when you draw for lower latency on a top layer. When you stop writing it sends it to the actual app. When you draw on eink, you’re seeing a sample on a top “sketch” software layer
E-ink screens basically have no true "pixels", but instead each "pixel" is a cluster of tiny micro capsules filled with a special conductive black ink suspended in white ink. To generate lines, the black ink is positively charged witch pushes it in front of the white ink. The reason why E-ink has such low refresh rate is because it needs time to rearrange the ink inside the capsules. So that's why your line lags a little bit behind the pen. It can't rearrange the ink fast enough to make it a more higher refresh rate.
the screen struggles because when you resize the rectangle it refreshes many points at same time, it makes the screen refresh 100% of the image sue to the system software, but when you draw it only changes the color of a specific pixel, but the same could be done to the rectangle, it just is not done by the developer of this software
As noted by others, the delay with a rectangle is likely due to the screen needing to "clear" the pixels where the rectangle was vs just drawing the black/color of a drawn line. Clearing parts of an e-ink display always takes longer than drawing new lines. I cant remember right now but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with physics - pretty sure about that.
They tune the partial refresh to make the drawn lines very clear and don't put as much energy (literally) into things like moving a lot of lines around the screen
I have a Sony dptcp1 and love eInk displays. The colors here look like substantial progress to me. Would love to see a desktop 60hz eInk monitor someday
The issue with all these e ink tablets is that they’re not price competitive with the iPad or similar low end Android offerings. Ultimately unless they can compete there, they’re going to lose, since e ink has so many drawbacks that you can’t convince someone with an e reader to shell out 700 more dollars for the ability to write on it, nor can you convince someone who’s considering an iPad Pro to get an e ink screen instead
e-Ink works by flipping physical dots using either magnetic or electric fields and that takes some time. I'm amazed that its display manages to produce remotely watchable video, that is at least 10X faster than the e-Ink displays I remember seeing.
when you draw it uses wacom library of direct hardware sensing, because when pen touch the screen, the hardware respond to the touch point of the tip, then it saves pixels to memory and draw it later using a background process, what you see as you are drawing, is fake pixels that being filled later from memory. But when you do rectangle, it is actually software defined, it calculate and bring pixels from memory to the screen for a preview, by rendering each pixel while keep deleting pixels from older location because you are resizing, yes it is slow. i worked with these toys of AOSP for some time now.
I personally love this type of review. There are hundreds of channels that will give you the polished sales pitch that reads a spec sheet out to you. Personally I want to see someone interact with a device fairly blind, it’s a genuine interaction. Plus, Riley’s humour is top notch.
I'm sure someone already answered this but the reason it's more responsive when drawing is because it isn't refreshing the screen, instead it is acting essentially the same way one of those swipe away kids toys work where they have a magnet "pen" that makes the black dust stick to the display. That's what's happening with the pen, it's directly interacting with the pixels, turning them on or off, where dragging a rectangle requires the screen to turn this row of pixels on & these ones off over & over, & usually doing that multiple times in the area around it essentially turning a whole section on & off, then just the needed pixels back on, then doing it again & again
My theory on the rectangle is that there is simply no animation for resizing and so it either refreshes on a timer or when you stop resizing, and because it's not constantly animating it runs at a lower refresh rate and has a very obnoxious refresh once it reaches the timer or once you stop moving the edge to resize it.
possibly the screen is broken up into refresh zones. so when you are just drawing a line it only has to compute one zone, which it can do quickly. but changing a shape it overlaps into multiple zones and requires a full screen refresh?
E Ink devices use something to use similar to those magnet drawing pads that use a magnetic pen to draw and then you erase it by giving it an oppositely charged magnet. E inks do the same, when drawing you are pulling tiny pieces of a black magnet type of material which when the pen goes over the surface it pulls it to the surface of the screen. So it can do that smoothly but when it refreshes the screen it just has to get rid of all the black pigments part and then stick it to the screen again. At least that's my understanding.
This is not correct. These tablets use EMR technology to sense the stylus position and then they have the display perform partial refreshes of the area for the stylus input. You may be thinking of a different display such as JustWrite or the boogie board which do have a stylus that directly affects the display. I haven't seen any tablet on the market that uses the JustWrite technology from e ink.
The pen is literally pulling up the e-ink particles. Hence why when you draw, there is very little lag. The pen directly changes the voltage and thus brings the pigments to the front quickly.
Currently, only the Bigme Galy has a device that uses the latest e-ink Gallery 3 display tech (50,000 colors). All other color e-ink devices, including the Bigme Inknote (as seen in this video) are using the previous gen Kaleido e-ink display tech that produces muddy, washed out colors (4,096 colors). If you have been looking at color e-ink displays, then you should wait until later this year when there are more choices using the Gallery 3 e-ink tech. Gallery 3 is supposedly a big enough improvement that even Amazon might also finally jump into color e-ink for Kindle but we'll probably be waiting towards Q4 for that to happen. IMO, this is going to be the most exciting year ever for e-ink displays and devices.
When you are drawing you are just turning Pixels on, when you are resizing you have to turn pixesls off and on. Refreshing on E-ink is slow because the e-ink is persistant. It dose not take power to keep an image on the display it needs power to change the display.
Okay, there are a bunch of half-correct answers here about why e-ink seem to refresh faster when drawing with the pen than with anything else, so let me see if I can clear this up. Please note I'm simplifying many things and skipping others for brevity. The first thing you need to understand is that all these e-ink tablets use Wacom EMR pen technology. This tech is an older tech, unique to Wacom, and that Wacom licenses to Samsung for "S-Pen" devices. This is in contrast to most modern devices (essentially any pen that needs to be charged to work, including Apple and Microsoft) which use AES technology, which is an extension of the capacitive touchscreen tech that those devices have anyway. EMR devices work completely differently: behind the display is an extra layer that emits a weak electromagnetic field which the pen absorbs with its internal antenna, and uses to power it's onboard circitrty, then emits a more focused electromagnetic field back towards the screen right up by the pen tip. Why is this important? Well, the second thing you need to know is that e-ink screens use electromagnetic fields to move the iron-based "ink" particles to the foregrond, where they become visible to the reader, and it turns out that the same electromagnetic field that EMR pens emit to tell the device what part of the screen they're touching can also be used to activate and move those "ink" particles. That is to say, the actual act of drawing on the e-ink screen directly makes the lines appear, so all the normal limitations around e-ink refresh rates simply don't apply, as the screen itself is not involved in the proceess. Now if you watch closely, you'll notice that (at least with some devices) it can take a moment for effects such as the line thickness (due to pressure or tilt) to actually appear in screen, and that's because the pen only directly draws a simple line. Metadata like the line thickness or pen angle is processed in the standard way, with that information being transmitted to the device, processed, and then drawn on-screen during the next refresh cycle. Hopefully this clears things up for folks.
I'm quite sure there's something in the tip of the pen to make it have an actuall effect on the display. I remember this one device that had responsive af trails but would sharpen and correct once you lift the pen, as then the display would actually update what you've drawn and whatever you saw before was just because of (idk? magnets?? in the tip of the pen. (Or it had something to do with only partially updating the screen? Not sure) It makes it feel really responsive!
Eink displays use an electrostatic array to display things - each pixel contains little charged particles that get repositioned by pushing them to the top or bottom of the pixel. The stylus can then be charged to directly interact with the charged particles rather than having to tell the tablet where it went, then have that information flow through the entire display pipeline.
This is wrong. The stylus cannot interact directly with the display. You may be thinking of a different display technology called justwrite from the e ink company but none of these tablets use it.
@@rescueferret8834 Por que no los dos? Yes, they use EMR, because the display pipeline is one way, they can't read back changes to the display state so they need some means of storing the pen strokes. They *also* use electrostatic techniques to update the display directly using the stylus. Users of the reMarkable for instance describe being able to see the pen controlled line get laid down, followed by a screen refresh that replaces it with a subtly different looking line based on the EMR tracking.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 I'm pretty sure what you see there is anti aliasing taking effect. The remarkable stylus does not have any kind of force that moves the particles. Maybe it is somewhere in between like at the chip or driver level and not the OS level but I don't think any display has a purely hardware interaction besides JustWrite.
After seeing this device has a Kaleido Plus screen it is weird that this was just posted 2 weeks ago? Last night I watched a comparison between devices using Kaleido 3 and Gallery 3 which are the newer E-Ink screens announced in April of 2022.
I didn't really know what to think of this until you said it was $700. Like it seemed barely okay and maybe the right person would like it but at that price point I can't even believe their target audience, whatever that may be, would want it.
I'm pretty sure the Good E Reader branding was on there because that's the company that LTT's procurement sourced the device from. They have a TH-cam channel where they do reviews for all kinds of E Ink devices, and they have a store that sells a lot of the Chinese made devices that don't see widespread release in the West. Might be the only place where you can find the Bigme tablet in the US or Canada, but if you find it from another seller, it wouldn't have that case or the Good E Reader apps preloaded
I mean, the DPI for the colour e-ink isn't bad. Still issues with vibrancy. The OS seems a bit of a mess though. Liberal use of machine translation, I figure. We're probably still at least a few years off before we get a colour e-ink display that is actually pretty good for consuming colourful content like comics. It's currently more on the level of cheap newsprint. Faded looking and just generally lacking a broad spectrum of colours.
The reason the pen has lower latency than resizing rectangles is because there is a separate mechanism dedicated specifically to turning on pixels underneath the pen, and nothing else. Other things, like the operating system underneath, the rectangles, etc are controlled by a different process that utilizes a refresh rate to make sure that the right things get cleared off the screen and the right things reappear again. This process can take significantly more time, especially when pixels have to both be added and removed from the screen, and when there's color involved. Put more simply, it's because the pen system can bypass the ui system and turn on pixels directly rather than having to send a request to the software to add the pixels to the next available frame.
The refresh rate of the display is 10 Hz when playing video. How did I measure that? Going frame by frame, there is a new image every three frames, and the video here on TH-cam is 30 Hz.
I have a BigMe color. He is spot on about the software. It's a long learning curve with many backward steps. The major problem with the UI is the total lack of TH-cam videos going over the software, or online manuals or anywhere else to get you through roadblocks. All that being said, I really like my little terror. It does amazing meeting recording and transcription and just about everything else under the sun.
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I was looking for info about e-Ink screens and found this after I watched a video about KALEIDO 3, and that device look almost the same, so what is the diference between KALEIDO 3 and Bigme?
There's a lot of dedicated channels that cover e ink that could probably help you with direct comparison. Short circuit is basically the worst place to go for this kind of cross shopping. Definitionally, the host has never seen the product and did no research on it or it's competitors. It's just an excuse to do really quick low effort content
It's my understanding that the pens themselves make the changes to pixels when you're drawing. Either that or it's just making a one-way change from white pixels to black pixels as you drag the pen, which is a quick change. The rectangles require computing and more complex drawing. It has to compute how you're changing the shape and erase much of the old rectangle then draw the new one.
The pens do not directly affect the display. The stylus and sensing layer are EMR technology developed by Wacom. The developers have simply made a lot of optimizations so the screen can do fast partial refreshes when the stylus input is detected.
@@wx39 I think you may be getting the info from the Tech Altar video. I just commented on it and asked about whether they have a source for it but I doubt it, unless they mixed up EMR technology with e-ink's JustWrite tech (which is not used in these tablets or any consumer device as far as I can tell).
Eink displays are storage devices like Flash drives. They have to rewrite the entire screen to update the data just like updating a page in Flash memory.
to be realistic here, in this kind of tablet you will probably have 1 or 2 apps that you really use, that should be amazing for reading comics and manga and if it someday become cheaper I will probably buy it (or some new version of it)
LTT really needs to look at how they treat e-ink devices. They are not tablets and will never complete as a multimedia device. They are ereaders, note taking devices, and can sometimes do a little more. Instead they should be reviewed for what they are: how good is reading experience for books, PDFs, and comics. How is the note taking, markup, and retrieval process. These are things that matter for ereader. Currently LTT ereader reviews are like watching a bicycle reviewed like it was a car, and found wanting for not being car enough….
I think this thing is like $1,000
@@elias6570 No it isn't. Also that's not the point here. The point is, that LTT and SC-staff think they're reviewing a regular tablet, just with an e-ink screen, which this is not supposed to be.
Tbh this is more like a impressions rather than review. Riley is just another user who would buy an e-ink device thinking it's a tablet and don't know why they exist. But indeed, it would be a nicer if an eink device user did the video
@@nankinink that's a shitty excuse though, this isn't the just another user channel, its a tech channel.
If anything, this review serves as an excellent example of why such an expensive e-reader is such a waste of money. Rather than a faster processor or ways to improve the responsiveness, the markup seems to go towards software development and the custom UI, which the video shows to be unpleasant experiences. Navigation is bad, responsiveness is bad (I've seen *much* better response times from e-ink displays), and the overall experience with even reading books is bad. Could Riley learn the general workflow of e-ink displays a bit better and give much more in-depth looks at reading and writing? Of course, but that isn't going to save this product in the slightest.
I believe the difference between drawing with the pen and resizing the rectangle is that the e-ink display has to do a full refresh to remove the old lines of the rectangle. When drawing with the pen, I believe the display can just "add" ink to the spot of the pen, but if it needs to "remove"/delete the ink, then the entire screen has to refresh.
But this is still a bad experience compared to my Supernote A5X
why is the youtube video completely fine then?
That depends on the exact panel and the firmware - I've certainly seen e-ink devices that can do partial clears without needing a full screen refresh, and they had nearly instantly responsive scrolling. One such case was an older Kobo reader, which even in the browser had highly responsive scrolling, until a firmware updated ruined it... the one tradeoff is that it can leave some 'ghost pixels' sometimes, but that's usually not an issue in practice.
@Pas cha how was it fine?
@@kennymorelandiii9406 12:24 the refreshrate must be about 5-10fps. Which is decent. For a e-ink display that is.
No refreshing that takes more than half of a second.
The simple answer is the pen itself is charged and can pull the eink blobs up to the screen surface where it sticks.
Riley's enthusiasm for being the resident e-ink guy is potent.
Riley, if you need help and can't say it aloud, just write it down on one of those stylish displays with that 4096 levels of stylus sensitivity.
666 likes is the right amount
The thing is a total piece of crap. I love how they're adding more and more surveillance features like fingerprint readers and cameras that aren't necessary at all on an e-reader, but I guess the Xi Dada needs more data.
It kinda soul drains me is that the "unboxing"/"review" never focused on all that matters in glorified book reader - battery life, ability to read heavy pdfs, how good notes are integrated into e-reader app, is it good enough to write hand-written notes, bibliography integration, how comprehensible are a4 format pdfs in color mode, etc.
It's like he treats it like a "run of the mill" tablet and wonders why it doesn't really work like one.
This.
I think the issue is the manufacturers keep adding things to the readers that don't need to be in there. WHY IS THERE A WAY TO WATCH VIDEOS ON YOUR E-INK DEVICE.
Yeah, Its just an unscripted rambling with high production value from a guy pretending to care about the product
It's not a review. Short circuit is unboxing and FIRST IMPRESSIONS. Reviews are mainly on LTT.
@@niko1even and? How this fact has anything to do with the aspects he focused on? The problem here is that he skipped all the important parts for that type of device and focused on irrelevant ones. It's like unboxing the vaccuming robot and talking about how bad its wheels are for enduro type use-case, how bad the suspension is, how it has no petrol engine and you can't refuell it at any gas pump, etc. You know, the important parts of your everyday roomba, right? It's not as ridiclous, but you get the point.
It has nothing to do with the format, but everything to do with how he has missconceptions about how to use the device.
The drawing probably only updates the e-ink on the points you're drawing, and thus it can show up faster, while drawing shapes requires computation to calculate where on the screen it has to update the e-ink followed by both clearing and drawing the screen at those locations. Just a wild guess, but that's approximately how I did it on an arduino e-ink display.
That, and also drawing a line only involves making white pixels black. Moving a rectangle requires black to white and white to black, and that in more space.
As I understand it (at least with other e-ink styluses, the e-ink is pulled up by the magnetic force exerted by the stylus), so it doesn't need the tablet's graphics processor to do the work. E-inks work by magnetic polarity to change between black and white ink. I would assume something similar is used in color, but I'm not sure.
@@TheCaniblcat So in that case, I could draw on e-ink by hovering a strong magnet above the display?
@@TheCaniblcat I heard so as well. But in this case I would say, that the Tip isn't magnetic because of the coloured Display. For different colours you need a perfect amount of each "pixel". So it probably just tracks the pen.
@@TheCaniblcat If this were the case, it should ALWAYS draw a line (electromagnet would consume too much power). Yet there is 10:44, for example.
Both Boox and Bigme devices are primarily note taking and reading devices and the tablet features are secondary. That is the reason their homescreen is either the library or notes and not the app list like other Android tablets. However if you want app list as your home screen, you can do so in the settings atleast in the Boox devices
I'm happy each time the editor ads the little explosion when the host throws the empty box 😊
Ayo you got a heart
A note on the refresh rate: e-ink displays have to physically move little colored beads in the panel whenever something changes on screen, so the more movement there is on screen, the more beads have to change position and the longer it will take. There's not much changing on screen as you drag a pen around, so that refreshes a lot quicker.
it seems that Riley wanted to buy a shoe but he bought a car and has no idea how it works. LOL, the frustration is so funny
If my grandma had wheels she would have become a bike
I super enjoyed Riley losing his mind. Also the e-ink screen is a lot like an etch-a-sketch screen where you're getting particles stuck to the screen. It flashes to re-draw the whole screen and when it doesn't have to re-draw it seems to respond much faster. Because it's a physical system with actual ink (e-ink) response times are naturally slower than other display tech with change-in-place pixels.
To answer Riley's question: the amount of time needed to (reliably, with high contrast) update the state of an e-ink display relates strongly to size of the area being updated. So just updating a tiny area underneath the pen is quick, anything else takes longer
I'm a bit of an e-ink enthousiast and recently bought an Android Color E-Ink ereader - my first in both those categories. I recognized much of what Riley experienced, but experienced it more positively myself because of my lower expectations. I just want to read on it, so even the drawing is more of a curiosity to me.
Why even bothering doing a video if you won't even try to use the devices for the actual purpose they are designed for? ...It's like reviewing a motorcycle but scoring it based on how it works as a ladder, it simply doesn't make any sense!
Agree
When you are drawing with your stylus, (I wont get far into how these screens work), it changes the polorization (charge) of the pixels physicaly, so there is no delay to it. When you are drawing a rectangle, all of the pixels need to refresh by modifying their charge via the tablet itself using chemical and different reactions, which is way slower than doing it physicaly.
how is it working with the crabrave youtube video? is it not eink? The framerate was impressive for eink
@@pascha4527 It's still eink, you can see it's still way slower than the stylus drawing which is continuously refreshed. Most of these modern eink displays from what I understand refresh faster if they decrease the colour gamut so it may be using fewer colours on TH-cam than on the drawing app.
The actually correct answer. Also, the e-ink controller does some magic right away, in-display so to speak.
This is not true. The device detects the placement of the stylus and updated the display. The stylus does not directly change the display state.
@@unvergebeneid this is not correct. The eink displays on these tablets cannot be affected by the stylus directly.
That e-ink display is seriously impressive, especially considering the technique involved, this is actual physical particles being moved around, and to hit the different colors, and you can even play video on it, colour me impressed.
There are way more impressive and bigger ones, there are even pc monitors with e-ink display(though they do cost 1.5-2k$).
when you are dragging an object it has to remove and redraw multiple sections at once. whereas with a single brush stroke or line it works similar to an etch-a-sketch where it only has to add onto the screen where the pen is currently located and drawing.
Why are color e-ink displays still so bad in tablets? I've had a watch with a color e-ink display which had a refresh rate of about 20Hz and had much brighter colors and didn't have to "refresh" the screen so now and then by flashing the whole screen.
Size matters for eink refresh iirc, watch is small so it doesn’t need as much
That watch isn't a Pebble by any chance, is it? Iirc the Pebble uses a reflective LCD to get a paper like look and low power consumption with decent colours rather than a true eink display.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 transflective LCD I think
@@bosstowndynamics5488 I guess the million dollar question, then, is why is that not good enough? What does real e-ink have that transreflective LCDs can't achieve, besides lower power draw?
@@stevethepocket I haven't seen much of transflective LCDs to compare but good eInk displays genuinely look just like paper, there's something different and quite nice about reading on paper that isn't quite captured by LCD.
things should have been tested:
reading an actual ebook
displaying A4 PDF with more than a text
trying out search, annotate, bookmarks
PC connectivity, sync, charging
battery specs, backlighting
things we got
thorough review of all the junk in the box
complaints about the stylus
complaints about the OS
complaints about the screen
drawing BS
crab raving the speakers
11:20 I assume it's because it has nothing to delete, displaying a stroke. Every consecutive frame "adds ink" so to speak since white is e-inks default. Moving something across requires some ink pixels to be "defaulted" which takes more time than inking them. But I'm no e-ink-enthusiast
12:43 Not knowing the actual refresh rate of the screen, really Hertz my feelings.
Got one of these via their Kickstarter - was a lot less than the $700 priced here (even when I paid in £) - good device for my book reading - easy to load up then via the WiFi web interface (so can upload mobi, pdf etc from my laptop to it) - been a number of updates that make it easier still
It's somehow 949.99 USD now.
The reason why E-ink is responsive when writing because when you write using the stylus, ghosting is not a problem as what you have already written will stay on the screen until you erase it. When you move a shape around the screen, the screen needs to deal with ghosting, in thid case, the display have to do a windowed or a full screen refresh which may take longer. When writing, E-ink is not refreshing the screen, it is just changing the state of the pixels following the stylus.
11:20 WHY:
Because if you resize a triangle, you have to do 2 things: Disable the pixels at the old position, and add pixels at the new position. That's difficult.
If you're drawing, you are only adding black pixels. That can be done instantanuously.
e-ink displays don't 'think' in refresh rates naturally. The state of the pixels is just on or off.
I was worried that the drawing would refresh really slowly, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
E-inks can draw single dots on the screen very fast, this is called a partial update. The only thing that needs to be done is move the pigment capsules towards the surface. When drawing a rectangle the whole display needs to be refreshed since you don't want to see the ghosting of the previous frames that were generated with a different sized rectangle. Wiping the old frame and drawing a new one takes way more time than just a small partial update.
For death of me I cannot understand why companies send their junk to linus team to be mocked by someone who clearly does not give a fuck about the product, and who has obviously zero interest in getting to know a single thing about the product.
So disrespectful, so distasteful.
goodereader has involved in shady business practices such as taking pre-order a product that the company hasn't agreed to, writing a fake reviews for a product that doesn't even came out yet, etc etc.
Most e-Ink screens needs a full write when going from black to white, but only a very small part change when going from white to black.
If something needs 'deleting' it must redraw the while screen, it is only adding new no-white there is no need to redraw the whole screen.
Maybe it is something related to that.
this one seemed kind of low effort and lazy, like your a tech youtuber and you should be able to navigate it. i don't think people use eink tablets for media consumption, it's mainly for reading, writing notes, and marking up documents so anything that helps that goal is welcome and everything else is just bonus fluff
E-Ink uses tiny little capsules, either black or white, suspended in clear fluid. Depending on the charge they receive, the black ones either raise up and draw image, or the other way around and the screen clears. Drawing with a stylus is probably easier to do since you only got to process the capsules under the pen, but when you're dragging a square, it has to redraw at least two sides all the time, depending how its made to process such action. Probably could've been done better, but who knows.
Color is created using a filter over the screen, and depending on the density of capsules, certain amount of light passes, with different wavelengths. Since that's all that color is, you get it.
Tried to explain in simple terms, its a bit more than just this, there's magic involved but lets not dwell too deep.
E-ink is my like…dark horse technology.
It is just so much more pleasant to look at than a screen and I can’t really explain why.
If it could play video, then that is like…game changing tech for me. My desk setup would instantly change from one regular monitor and an E-Ink display.
Its cool, but very limited. There was a pretty cool phone (think it was a prototype) that was OLED on one side and E-INK on the other side, so when you flipped it, the sensor just change the veiw to the other screen. Saving power
lol maybe for a tablet but not a pc monitor
@@laupoke 75% of what I do is text.
Code goes on e-ink, application window I am working on goes on the screen
@@matsv201 Funny story about this. This was not a prototype it was the Yotaphone and they made two versions of it. I owned the Yotaphone 2 and quite frankly it was fucking awesome. I read a lot of books and also like the look of eink. It helped me save a lot of battery as well. Long story short: it was the most fun phone I ever owned. The company was a scam though after 6 months the first phone just stopped working. It just froze up and never worked again. I tried contacting support. Doesn't exist. I try calling them. Their company does not exist. I try to see if I can sue them somehow. Their company appearantly was not registered anymore. This was a crazy weird experience, because the hardware was so good. I can't believe such a shady business was able to create that quality. EDIT: Oh yeah and I bought a second one because I missed that thing so much only for the exact same thing to happen again.
E ink is worse in every way except for power consumption.
30Hz refresh rate (horrible)
720 x 960 pixels only (horrible)
Only 36 colors compared to 100 million colors on a modern screen
3x more expensive (horrible)
Can keep the screen on without power (good)
If you want a low brightness screen, just use a LCD screen
The use case of that thing is not to watch videos on it. It is to add the possibility to read comics in color to the eink space. This one on paper seems to be above the competition by giving a better color resolution. Earlier ones were limited to a fourth of the B&W resolution. And color accuracy was bad at best. To see it still kind of brought forward is enough to keep me interested. If this tech can match at least 30fps screens in the future, that alone is enough to get a device that can play videos without backlight on and without burning your eyes while doing so.
i just love the constant frustration that riley felt lol.
11:10 Riley, the reason resize is slow is because the erase takes time. When you draw there is no need to erase
The resident e-ink guy treats an e-ink tablet as just any other android tablet and focuses on the trivial use cases instead of using it to read ebooks.
I'm here just because it's Riley.
The replacement tips and tip puller isn’t that weird. My Samsung Note came with both as well.
Same here with dedicated drawing tablet. Pretty common thing actually
Samsung color eink device needed.
Feel like I'm watching DeeDee from Dexter's Lab just going "what's this button do?"
It's sad that you get your hands on this devices but you don't understand the niche where they belong too. The fact that they are running android, is not for them to be a tablet, but to be a better and more versatile option to something like a kindle, in some cases with note taking capabilities.
First of all i would attribute the choppiness of the drawing of the rectangle to the fact that it is not a continiuos shape. i.e. it has to delete the previous size of the the rectangle and redraw it elsewhere which doesn't happen when you simply draw. which means that not only does the adjusting the size of the rectangle contain tens of microadjustments you also need to delete the previous location of the rectangle.affectively doubling the amount of shapes to be drawn on screen. which means that unlike the seemingly smooth drawing, the refresh rate of the e-ink display struggles to follow the placement of shapes and triangles, the same arguemnt can be made for how slowly Android OS works on e ink display.
also another factor which can be atributed to this is that perhaps the algorithm that places the rectangle on the screen inside the app isn't as efficient as it could be.
Stylus nib puller has been around almost as long as there has been consumer graphic tablet. usually they're in the "pen holder" base you have to unscrew to access it (often nibs are stored there too)
for future reference: the feeling like you're going to break the tablet issue can be solved by changing pressure settings in whatever app you're using. everyone has different levels of pressure they're comfortable with putting on a device, so it's normal to need to adjust that to what feels comfortable. i use clip studio on both a galaxy book and wacom one stylus, and an ipad mini 6 with the apple pencil 2, and i have slightly different pressure settings for each device (a lower and more shallow curve for the gb and a higher and more steep curve for the ipad, since a lack of hinge concern reduces my pressure discomfort on that device)
Why let someone review this who knows nothing about e-ink displays...
I know this is short circuit, but a LITTLE more reasearch into what is what would be apprecieated.
The tip of the stylus activates the display directly and doesn't have to wait for screen refresh. Watch a video on how e-ink works and it'll become clear.
_“It's $700, so that's... too much.”_
- Riley O'Rly, 2023
I love how drained and confused Riley seemed toward the end of this video.
Great energy. Gave me a heckin good chuckle.
10/10 would recommend.
Also android’s stock UI and UX patterns do not work well in a partial-update e-ink system. That’s why they build their own launchers.
They e-screen can handle in real time the refresh of a line if it's follow your pen, because, the small black dots are caught by the pen (with some static electricity, I think). But, when you resize a rectangle, the screen needs to refresh itself, and that slower.
Someone else probably pointed this out - but the stylus input is not what actually gets sent to the program, because there's general incompabitility issues. E-ink device companies could never get the live input to sync to what gets sent to the device, so they compromised by creating a live input which gets displayed, which periodically gets "sent" to the app to officially get incorporated. That's why that looks very smooth, but the other functions are not smooth.
Editor, that stanky Jazz in the background was amazing when Riley was so confused. I was laughing my ass of the entire time. Give that person a gold star.
Thanks for the review :) well done
Apparently the reason for instant pen rendering is because the pen directly switches the pixels, it actually forms part of the display control system, completely bypassing the normal display control pipeline. The tablet tracks what you're doing with the digitiser and saves the result, but it doesn't have to process and render the resulting lines the same way as generated content like the rectangle.
This is not how EMR stylus technology works
11:25 in easy words, basically when you drag the rectangle, the tablet itself pushes the "ink" to the front, it can't do that very fast therefore there is low refresh rate or you would get ghosting, with the pen, its the other way around, the pen is the one pulling the ink/pixels or whatever you wanna call it, so it has no latency, is basically drawing with a pencil but the paper is the one that has the ink.
Finally a correct answer in the comment section><
You explained it in a very simple yet comprehensive way!
Technology Connections made a great video about this th-cam.com/video/dhRgw0HfrYU/w-d-xo.html
This is incorrect. This is not how EMR stylus technology works. They have simply optimized the software or firmware to make certain partial screen refreshes very fast, like drawing a line.
Since easy words don't cut it, here you have it:
First, how the e-ink displays work: It works by using tiny microcapsules that contain black and white particles with opposite electric charges. These particles move up or down when an electric signal is applied, creating different shades on the screen,the pen works by applying an electric signal to the microcapsules on the screen, it also has a small battery inside that generates a negative charge when it touches the display, this charge attracts the black particles to the surface of the microcapsules, creating a dark mark, it can also erase by reversing its polarity and pulling back the black particles.
That's why you can't really draw without the pen.
As for the colors they can be added in two ways, you can look it up yourself.
Second, How EMR stylus work: An EMR stylus is a pen-like device that uses electromagnetic waves to communicate with a tablet or other electronic device the stylus does not need a battery or a wire because it gets its power from the tablet, the pen they use in this video clearly has a battery that needs to be charged.
Also yes they could probably make the refresh rate higher, but as I said, it would have ghosting, if you notice when he's playing crab rave, you can see a lot of ghosting, even through youtube compression.
Riley, since eInk screens only refresh the 'pixels' in use, when you move a rectangle or refresh a portion of the screen, it takes way longer. When you're writing with the pen, the only eInk particles that will get charged are the ones directly underneath the pen, lowering the latency considerably. I'm still impressed to see an eInk screen play a video at an acceptable refresh speed!
Why did they call him the resident e ink guy if he doesn't know how it works?
Clearly noone in LTT is the resident e-ink boy.
11:19 drawing only has to update the pixels where you're drawing, resizing a rectangle has to change a lot more pixels at a time, first drawing the rectangle, then undrawing it and redrawing what was under it each step along the way
Eink screens are slow so the devs made it so you see a fake line when you draw for lower latency on a top layer. When you stop writing it sends it to the actual app. When you draw on eink, you’re seeing a sample on a top “sketch” software layer
E-ink screens basically have no true "pixels", but instead each "pixel" is a cluster of tiny micro capsules filled with a special conductive black ink suspended in white ink. To generate lines, the black ink is positively charged witch pushes it in front of the white ink. The reason why E-ink has such low refresh rate is because it needs time to rearrange the ink inside the capsules. So that's why your line lags a little bit behind the pen. It can't rearrange the ink fast enough to make it a more higher refresh rate.
the screen struggles because when you resize the rectangle it refreshes many points at same time, it makes the screen refresh 100% of the image sue to the system software, but when you draw it only changes the color of a specific pixel, but the same could be done to the rectangle, it just is not done by the developer of this software
As noted by others, the delay with a rectangle is likely due to the screen needing to "clear" the pixels where the rectangle was vs just drawing the black/color of a drawn line. Clearing parts of an e-ink display always takes longer than drawing new lines. I cant remember right now but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with physics - pretty sure about that.
They tune the partial refresh to make the drawn lines very clear and don't put as much energy (literally) into things like moving a lot of lines around the screen
I have a Sony dptcp1 and love eInk displays. The colors here look like substantial progress to me. Would love to see a desktop 60hz eInk monitor someday
The issue with all these e ink tablets is that they’re not price competitive with the iPad or similar low end Android offerings.
Ultimately unless they can compete there, they’re going to lose, since e ink has so many drawbacks that you can’t convince someone with an e reader to shell out 700 more dollars for the ability to write on it, nor can you convince someone who’s considering an iPad Pro to get an e ink screen instead
e-Ink works by flipping physical dots using either magnetic or electric fields and that takes some time. I'm amazed that its display manages to produce remotely watchable video, that is at least 10X faster than the e-Ink displays I remember seeing.
when you draw it uses wacom library of direct hardware sensing, because when pen touch the screen, the hardware respond to the touch point of the tip, then it saves pixels to memory and draw it later using a background process, what you see as you are drawing, is fake pixels that being filled later from memory. But when you do rectangle, it is actually software defined, it calculate and bring pixels from memory to the screen for a preview, by rendering each pixel while keep deleting pixels from older location because you are resizing, yes it is slow. i worked with these toys of AOSP for some time now.
I personally love this type of review. There are hundreds of channels that will give you the polished sales pitch that reads a spec sheet out to you. Personally I want to see someone interact with a device fairly blind, it’s a genuine interaction. Plus, Riley’s humour is top notch.
What kind of a family-friendly show is this talking about mystery holes and tip pullers
I'm sure someone already answered this but the reason it's more responsive when drawing is because it isn't refreshing the screen, instead it is acting essentially the same way one of those swipe away kids toys work where they have a magnet "pen" that makes the black dust stick to the display. That's what's happening with the pen, it's directly interacting with the pixels, turning them on or off, where dragging a rectangle requires the screen to turn this row of pixels on & these ones off over & over, & usually doing that multiple times in the area around it essentially turning a whole section on & off, then just the needed pixels back on, then doing it again & again
My theory on the rectangle is that there is simply no animation for resizing and so it either refreshes on a timer or when you stop resizing, and because it's not constantly animating it runs at a lower refresh rate and has a very obnoxious refresh once it reaches the timer or once you stop moving the edge to resize it.
possibly the screen is broken up into refresh zones. so when you are just drawing a line it only has to compute one zone, which it can do quickly. but changing a shape it overlaps into multiple zones and requires a full screen refresh?
E Ink devices use something to use similar to those magnet drawing pads that use a magnetic pen to draw and then you erase it by giving it an oppositely charged magnet. E inks do the same, when drawing you are pulling tiny pieces of a black magnet type of material which when the pen goes over the surface it pulls it to the surface of the screen. So it can do that smoothly but when it refreshes the screen it just has to get rid of all the black pigments part and then stick it to the screen again. At least that's my understanding.
This is not correct. These tablets use EMR technology to sense the stylus position and then they have the display perform partial refreshes of the area for the stylus input. You may be thinking of a different display such as JustWrite or the boogie board which do have a stylus that directly affects the display. I haven't seen any tablet on the market that uses the JustWrite technology from e ink.
The pen is literally pulling up the e-ink particles. Hence why when you draw, there is very little lag. The pen directly changes the voltage and thus brings the pigments to the front quickly.
i can totally imagine the designer of this thing ripping their hair out while watching this (review? unboxing?)
Currently, only the Bigme Galy has a device that uses the latest e-ink Gallery 3 display tech (50,000 colors). All other color e-ink devices, including the Bigme Inknote (as seen in this video) are using the previous gen Kaleido e-ink display tech that produces muddy, washed out colors (4,096 colors). If you have been looking at color e-ink displays, then you should wait until later this year when there are more choices using the Gallery 3 e-ink tech. Gallery 3 is supposedly a big enough improvement that even Amazon might also finally jump into color e-ink for Kindle but we'll probably be waiting towards Q4 for that to happen. IMO, this is going to be the most exciting year ever for e-ink displays and devices.
When you are drawing you are just turning Pixels on, when you are resizing you have to turn pixesls off and on. Refreshing on E-ink is slow because the e-ink is persistant. It dose not take power to keep an image on the display it needs power to change the display.
Riley's beef with Dbrand will never not be entertaining
Okay, there are a bunch of half-correct answers here about why e-ink seem to refresh faster when drawing with the pen than with anything else, so let me see if I can clear this up. Please note I'm simplifying many things and skipping others for brevity.
The first thing you need to understand is that all these e-ink tablets use Wacom EMR pen technology. This tech is an older tech, unique to Wacom, and that Wacom licenses to Samsung for "S-Pen" devices. This is in contrast to most modern devices (essentially any pen that needs to be charged to work, including Apple and Microsoft) which use AES technology, which is an extension of the capacitive touchscreen tech that those devices have anyway. EMR devices work completely differently: behind the display is an extra layer that emits a weak electromagnetic field which the pen absorbs with its internal antenna, and uses to power it's onboard circitrty, then emits a more focused electromagnetic field back towards the screen right up by the pen tip.
Why is this important? Well, the second thing you need to know is that e-ink screens use electromagnetic fields to move the iron-based "ink" particles to the foregrond, where they become visible to the reader, and it turns out that the same electromagnetic field that EMR pens emit to tell the device what part of the screen they're touching can also be used to activate and move those "ink" particles. That is to say, the actual act of drawing on the e-ink screen directly makes the lines appear, so all the normal limitations around e-ink refresh rates simply don't apply, as the screen itself is not involved in the proceess.
Now if you watch closely, you'll notice that (at least with some devices) it can take a moment for effects such as the line thickness (due to pressure or tilt) to actually appear in screen, and that's because the pen only directly draws a simple line. Metadata like the line thickness or pen angle is processed in the standard way, with that information being transmitted to the device, processed, and then drawn on-screen during the next refresh cycle.
Hopefully this clears things up for folks.
Are you saying the pen directly affects the pigment capsules in the screen? This is not correct.
I'm quite sure there's something in the tip of the pen to make it have an actuall effect on the display.
I remember this one device that had responsive af trails but would sharpen and correct once you lift the pen, as then the display would actually update what you've drawn and whatever you saw before was just because of (idk? magnets?? in the tip of the pen. (Or it had something to do with only partially updating the screen? Not sure)
It makes it feel really responsive!
Eink displays use an electrostatic array to display things - each pixel contains little charged particles that get repositioned by pushing them to the top or bottom of the pixel. The stylus can then be charged to directly interact with the charged particles rather than having to tell the tablet where it went, then have that information flow through the entire display pipeline.
This is wrong. The stylus cannot interact directly with the display. You may be thinking of a different display technology called justwrite from the e ink company but none of these tablets use it.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 these tablets use EMR technology which does not operate the way you describe
@@rescueferret8834 Por que no los dos?
Yes, they use EMR, because the display pipeline is one way, they can't read back changes to the display state so they need some means of storing the pen strokes. They *also* use electrostatic techniques to update the display directly using the stylus. Users of the reMarkable for instance describe being able to see the pen controlled line get laid down, followed by a screen refresh that replaces it with a subtly different looking line based on the EMR tracking.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 I'm pretty sure what you see there is anti aliasing taking effect. The remarkable stylus does not have any kind of force that moves the particles. Maybe it is somewhere in between like at the chip or driver level and not the OS level but I don't think any display has a purely hardware interaction besides JustWrite.
e-ink tablets:
Modern design
10-year-old responsiveness
20-year-old screen quality
30-year-old UI
Current flagship pricing.
Tell me you don't understand what this product is used for without telling me.
Oh this looks cool
(Checks the price)
Nevermind
Honestly it’s really impressive it can refresh fast enough to play videos at all with e-ink.
3:33 I love how Riley made such a bad joke that he told himself to stop
After seeing this device has a Kaleido Plus screen it is weird that this was just posted 2 weeks ago? Last night I watched a comparison between devices using Kaleido 3 and Gallery 3 which are the newer E-Ink screens announced in April of 2022.
Gotta show the Marvel Unlimited app or some full color comics on this.
I didn't really know what to think of this until you said it was $700. Like it seemed barely okay and maybe the right person would like it but at that price point I can't even believe their target audience, whatever that may be, would want it.
I'm pretty sure the Good E Reader branding was on there because that's the company that LTT's procurement sourced the device from. They have a TH-cam channel where they do reviews for all kinds of E Ink devices, and they have a store that sells a lot of the Chinese made devices that don't see widespread release in the West. Might be the only place where you can find the Bigme tablet in the US or Canada, but if you find it from another seller, it wouldn't have that case or the Good E Reader apps preloaded
I mean, the DPI for the colour e-ink isn't bad. Still issues with vibrancy. The OS seems a bit of a mess though. Liberal use of machine translation, I figure. We're probably still at least a few years off before we get a colour e-ink display that is actually pretty good for consuming colourful content like comics. It's currently more on the level of cheap newsprint. Faded looking and just generally lacking a broad spectrum of colours.
The reason the pen has lower latency than resizing rectangles is because there is a separate mechanism dedicated specifically to turning on pixels underneath the pen, and nothing else. Other things, like the operating system underneath, the rectangles, etc are controlled by a different process that utilizes a refresh rate to make sure that the right things get cleared off the screen and the right things reappear again. This process can take significantly more time, especially when pixels have to both be added and removed from the screen, and when there's color involved.
Put more simply, it's because the pen system can bypass the ui system and turn on pixels directly rather than having to send a request to the software to add the pixels to the next available frame.
The refresh rate of the display is 10 Hz when playing video.
How did I measure that? Going frame by frame, there is a new image every three frames, and the video here on TH-cam is 30 Hz.
Look e-ink is an e-reader, not a tablet. Review it as such.
the UI looks like someone was trying to compete with an Apple Newton in the 80s.
I'd like to see a reflective color display for a tablet
Drawing -> put black where pen was
Resize -> erase old one -> put black where new one is
I have a BigMe color. He is spot on about the software. It's a long learning curve with many backward steps. The major problem with the UI is the total lack of TH-cam videos going over the software, or online manuals or anywhere else to get you through roadblocks. All that being said, I really like my little terror. It does amazing meeting recording and transcription and just about everything else under the sun.
I was looking for info about e-Ink screens and found this after I watched a video about KALEIDO 3, and that device look almost the same, so what is the diference between KALEIDO 3 and Bigme?
There's a lot of dedicated channels that cover e ink that could probably help you with direct comparison. Short circuit is basically the worst place to go for this kind of cross shopping. Definitionally, the host has never seen the product and did no research on it or it's competitors. It's just an excuse to do really quick low effort content
It's my understanding that the pens themselves make the changes to pixels when you're drawing. Either that or it's just making a one-way change from white pixels to black pixels as you drag the pen, which is a quick change.
The rectangles require computing and more complex drawing. It has to compute how you're changing the shape and erase much of the old rectangle then draw the new one.
The pens do not directly affect the display. The stylus and sensing layer are EMR technology developed by Wacom. The developers have simply made a lot of optimizations so the screen can do fast partial refreshes when the stylus input is detected.
@@rescueferret8834 that makes sense. Perhaps I was misremembering some info from a video about eink tablets.
@@wx39 I think you may be getting the info from the Tech Altar video. I just commented on it and asked about whether they have a source for it but I doubt it, unless they mixed up EMR technology with e-ink's JustWrite tech (which is not used in these tablets or any consumer device as far as I can tell).
Eink displays are storage devices like Flash drives. They have to rewrite the entire screen to update the data just like updating a page in Flash memory.
Many modern e-ink displays support partial refreshes albeit with a lower contrast ratio of the resulting areas that were partially refreshed
to be realistic here, in this kind of tablet you will probably have 1 or 2 apps that you really use, that should be amazing for reading comics and manga and if it someday become cheaper I will probably buy it (or some new version of it)
The Boox devices are becoming fast enough to browse the web and use productivity apps on it.
"the speakers are bad." Honestly didn't know this had speakers. I was under the impression it came with "horns"
I am just here to see Riley's reaction to this one