Why I've been moving over to e-ink and OLED on all of my devices.
In recent years I’ve developed pretty strong preferences for a couple of display technologies. For the time being at least, I’ll probably only buy devices that use these technologies (OLED and E-Ink).
My preferences are bound to environmental factors, so I should point out that:
While using electronic devices I usually work in a relatively dimly-lit environment
For most of the year I live off solar power so try to limit my power usage
I spend a lot of time looking at screens and want to be as comfortable as possible. I like the screen to be dim, without sacrificing too much clarity or colour accuracy. The darker the room, the dimmer the screen can be and still appear bright. I don’t want to live in complete darkness, so the best balance for me ends up being a relatively dim room where I can still see clearly enough to read a book (for example).
Once I got used to my first OLED display, I really stopped enjoying the way LCD looks. Insipid blacks are inherent to LCDs; they use an evenly-lit screen, then block out pixels (sub-pixels, more accurately) when they are supposed to be black. The effect is like covering a torch with a piece of paper. Better quality displays might block out more of the light, but they always let some through, and the blacks end up as some form of grey. LCD viewing angles (even the better ones) mean images look weird once you move off-axis. It all just feels so… digital.
OLED
OLEDs are far more interesting in that each pixel is like its own little light source, which can be turned off independently of the other pixels. Black is truly the absence of light. In a dark room, black parts of an OLED display completely disappear into the darkness.
Truly black pixels (ie rgb(0, 0, 0)), don’t use any power, so dark mode UIs can use a little less power than alternative colours. I don’t know how significant this is, probably not very but I like dark themes anyway so it’s nice to use them by default and have a feeling that I’m at least steering battery life in the right direction.
At full brightness OLEDs are apparently less efficient than some other displays, but as I’ve already said I tend to use mine at pretty low brightness (usually the bottom 25% but even when the room is bright I still rarely go over 50-60% on my devices).
OLED Disadvantages
Some common criticisms of OLED are:
Lack of brightness compared to some other displays
Burn-in (image retention), where if the same image appears on-screen too much of the time, a kind of ghost of it can be ‘burnt in’ to the display
The lack of brightness is not a concern for me. I don’t use my main computing devices outdoors. I don’t go out as often as I should as it is, so when I do I don’t want to spend time looking at screens. I have a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus (with a transflective memory-in-pixel display) watch for the time and GPS tracking/maps if I need it. If I expect to sit waiting for something (like a bus), I take an old Kobo Mini with an e-ink screen. My phone will be in my bag or pocket and probably stay there.
Burn-in has also not affected my use. I still use my Galaxy Note 3 (phone) daily as a mini tablet for podcasts and videos. The Note 3 is just over 10 years old at time of writing. I think technically there is some burn-in, as when I look at a pure black screen, at its dimmest setting, in the dark, I can see some slight scratchy artefacts. But I never noticed them in real usage, ie they have never stood out when I’m watching videos or browsing the web. (I wrote this from memory, but I just turned the lights off and got my camera out to get a pic of this but I can’t even see it, so it can’t be that bad. I’ll update if I see it again!)
I don’t have always-visible taskbars and status bars, so there aren’t really any elements which always appear on my screen and would attract burn-in. I also notice I’ve unintentionally mostly used Samsung AMOLED panels, which have a pretty good reputation. So my experience may not be typical, although from what I hear this does generally seem to be less of an issue than it used to be. Modern OLED devices also use some tricks such as ‘moving the screen around’ by a few pixels periodically, and even detecting static logos and reducing their brightness.
E-Ink
E-paper/e-ink (Wikipedia: Electronic paper) also really appeals to me… a display made of tiny capsules containing an actual ink-like substance, in white and black, with each colour being either repelled or attracted by opposing electrical charges. It’s like electrically moving ink around. The capsules/pixels retain their colour (tone, really) even if there is no power at all (I’ve bought a few old broken e-ink readers from eBay, they often have an ancient image from the last-read book on their screen, even if the battery is removed or the screen is cracked).
Although lots of e-ink devices do have a light for their display, it’s a front light, with a very different quality to backlights, and is optional. For me, e-ink looks its best when viewed under reflective light (ie the ambient light of the room you’re in) although the frontlight is definitely handy for when you’re in a darker environment.
Something about this technology feels really warm and comfortable. I particularly like it on cheaper devices, they feel like some kind of future commodity tech, unlike the common contemporary fragile glass/metal slabs, which need babying, feeling like a responsibility more than a tool. So much modern tech is all about being the brightest and flashiest, shouting for attention.
My OLED and E-ink Devices
Generally, I prefer my computing devices in a tablet format. A display, with all the gubbins inside, which allows me to connect my input devices of choice without redundancy. It means I can position the display at an appropriate height. If I have a keyboard I like, I can use it with all of my devices, rather than it being glued inergonomically to a particular screen. The same applies to pointing devices (I like trackballs).
Almost all of my e-ink and OLED devices have a Wacom layer, so I can use the same stylus for all of them.
In compiling this article I’ve come to realise I’ve built up a little collection. I don’t need all of these but find a certain comfort in using different devices for different purposes, they take up very little space and I get a lot of enjoyment from them. I bought them all second-hand and am a pretty keen shopper so got some great deals, rarely paying more than half the retail price. In some cases I bought broken ones and Frankensteined them into a single working unit. I guess there are worse ways to spend money.
Onyx, Linux and GPLv2
Onyx (the manufacturers of a couple of my e-ink devices detailed below) seem to be wilfully breaking the licensing terms of the Linux kernel, by refusing to release their modified version of this GPLv2-licensed work. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth as I love the concept of open source software. It’s a shame because although I have 2 of their devices, I kind of begrudge it, don’t really want to buy another in future, and it makes me not want to speak highly of them as a company.
I do think it’s a complex issue and may be just as likely to have roots in genuine cultural differences, as much as it might just be about greed. The Wired documentary Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware really affected my thinking on this, it’s an entertaining watch if you have any interest in modern technology, and touches on some different viewpoints on intellectual property.
It would be nice if Onyx at least spoke openly about it, at the moment their attitude just feels like a middle finger to OSS.
Samsung Tab S8 Ultra
My main device, I use this for most of my coding work and it’s gorgeous for media consumption.
I run Termux X11 with proot-distro allowing me to use a relatively complete Linux (Ubuntu 20.04), including full desktop (aarch64) versions of Firefox and Chromium.
If I need more power, or to access a Windows VM, I use this same device via AVNC to VNC into my small form factor PC.
Samsung Tab S4
I daily drove this for a couple of years as my main device. Although the screen is only 10.5" it’s a very capable device and can do pretty much everything the S8 Ultra can, just smaller and a bit slower (I find it to be quite usable).
Samsung Note 3
This is like the baby version of the above 2 devices, I use it without a SIM as a mini tablet.
Again, it can pretty much do the same things that they can, only smaller and noticeably slower. It’s a 10 year old device at time of writing (was released in September 2013). It was a flagship device and actually holds its own quite well despite its age. It’s still perfectly usable.
I’ve even used it for (small) paid jobs a couple of times when I first started to live off solar and was adjusting to the low power situation. I attached it to an arm to hold it up close to my eyes, and with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Blackberry Q10
I stopped using my Note 3 as a phone and ‘downgraded’ to this, to use as a dumb-ish phone. It has good call quality and reception and a hardware QWERTY keyboard which I wanted for texting. It’s small and well-built.
reMarkable
I use this for notes and sketching. Also sometimes as an e-reader (with KOReader) as the screen size is really nice and it’s a very light device.
I find that the act of writing with a pen feels good and believe it helps me with thinking. My thoughts seem to work in a different pattern somehow when I’m using a pen vs a keyboard — especially when I’m planning an app or trying to work through a problem that I’m going around in circles with in my head. I find visualising on ‘paper’ often helps me to crack a problem. Different senses, muscles in use, different groups of neurons firing.
None of this is exclusive to reMarkable, paper and pen would work just as well. The reasons I prefer the reMarkable are:
It feels nice. When I use real paper I prefer it to be good paper. But then I feel precious about it, and it makes me reluctant to write or draw (I had a lovely little Moleskine notebook but rarely used it as I didn’t want to ‘waste it’).
It has a few extra features like being able to cut/copy/paste, making it easy to rearrange notes and clean them up.
I also like that it runs Linux and you can SSH into it and get root.
I have the first generation, the rM1, which I specifically prefer over the later version. The rM2 replaced the plastic screen with glass, and the outer casing with metal. It is now more ‘premium’, and I think more people prefer the industrial design of this model. Honestly I find it dull and characterless, yet another metal and glass slab. The newer device is more brittle and likely to shatter, and for me it’s moving towards being more like an iPad (my least-favourite device, and one I keep only for FaceTime, it otherwise sits unused on a shelf). My plastic rM1 is softer, lighter, can flex a little without shattering, and the screen has some give in it which is satisfying to write and draw on. It has less RAM, a slower processor and worse battery life, so I lose out there, but I like the way it feels so much. Ultimately I can write very comfortably on it, and make very complex drawings (as complex as I would ever want to draw at that size anyway), so although I’d prefer the upgraded internals, I wouldn’t swap what I have.
Onyx Boox Nova 3
I keep a keyboard attached to this and use it as a small, peaceful writing device.
Each weekend I take 24 hours away from the internet and electronics. Some weeks I’m more strict than others so sometimes I do some writing or check emails, and this is the device I use. With the light off, writing markdown in Vim, it barely feels electronic, more akin to a typewriter.
Keyboards made to fit iPad Mini (or at least old versions like the 4th gen) fit the Nova (7.8" screen) pretty well. They attach with the tablet sliding into a little rubberised grip, which seems a bit kludgey but works fine.
I first bought a cheap Arteck keyboard which was selling for less than £10 on Amazon (those iPad models for which the keyboards are compatible are old, so there is probably not a huge market for accessories). It was OK but didn’t exactly feel high end. It creaked and felt hollow around the palm rest, and the most annoying problem for me was that the screen(/tablet) could only rotate back a little, not far past 90 degrees. This meant it was difficult to get an angle which was good for both typing and seeing the screen. It proved the concept (that the iPad keyboards could work) though.
I’d heard good things about the Brydge ones. They were silly prices in the UK though, well over £100 (about 3x the US cost). But I waited and kept checking eBay, eventually snagging one for less than £20.
The Brydge keyboard is a blatant step up in build quality. It feels really solid, made of lovely materials — the shell is thick aluminium and the rubbers and plastics feel dense and durable. The keys have a great action, although the travel isn’t huge it feels well-defined… when you press a key you know you’ve pressed it.
Some truly bizarre design choices have been made though: tab is hidden behind a modifier, and look at that weirdly massive Q key (in the pic)!
For now there’s not much I can do about the Q key but I can hammer out some of the other weirdnesses with the Key Mapper app on Android.
Like all Boox devices the Nova 3 runs Android, and therefore Termux. I have root. So I can use it for most things I do on my other devices, but its small screen makes it less than ideal. As a writing device though, it is ‘andsome.
Onyx Boox Max Lumi
This is my favourite device for reading those books which have a lot of important formatting, such as programming textbooks, or illustrations. A lot of documents are only available as PDFs which don’t re-flow very well on smaller screens, so this is great for those too.
It’s the first Max (13.3") device with a light (even though I prefer e-ink in its natural unlit form, an optional light is definitely handy at times). Although it’s a couple of generations old now, it still feels light, fast, and reading large-format books on it is very pleasurable. The e-ink panel is a Mobius, which has been superseded by panels with higher contrast ratios now, but does have a plastic substrate meaning it should be even more forgiving to flexing and bending. Similarly to the reMarkable 1, this device feels warm, soft and friendly, rather than cold and dystopian like so many modern devices.
I find the tone of the bezel around an e-ink screen can really affect my perception of the screen. If you consider that the screens have quite a compressed dynamic range (spanning middle shades of grey rather than true black/white), then surrounding them with a pure black or a pure white bezel changes the overall dynamic range within your field of view — now you have a more extreme tone in view, and the range of greys on the screen becomes comparitively compressed/more narrow.
The Max Lumi comes with a black bezel. I’ve temporarily modded mine with white tape. I definitely prefer the device with a white bezel, although my solution feels tatty (as you can see in the pic). I don’t know of a reasonable way to change the bezel to white permanently, but if I find one I’ll do it.
Kobo Mini
This is the device I take with me in my rucksack when I go into the city for grocery shopping, to read while I wait at bus stops. I bought it for next to nothing on eBay as it wasn’t working, but it was a software problem I was able to fix. It’s small and light, so cheap that I don’t mind if it gets damaged, and it doesn’t look shiny or expensive so doesn’t attract attention. It would be my favourite small e-reader if only it had a front light.
Kobo Glo
The Kobo Glo is basically the same device as the Kobo Mini, with a slightly larger screen and a front light.
I run KOReader on all of my e-readers as it’s a great bit of software and I can sync books and reading progress without being logged in to a Kobo account.
