I could be wrong on this, but I recall reading that the slow refresh on most eink screens isn't so much a hardware issue as a battery issue. Quick refresh would be pretty pointless on an ereader and be using power for nothing so they're tuned down.

This was an old ereader that people managed to hack and get a faster refresh on in 2012: http://liliputing.com/2012/01/hacked-sony-reader-shows-just-...

There are also people who have run linux on kindles and it looks surprisingly usable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8aFW5wROS4

Do you mean power intensive if you're updating the screen constantly, like you would if typing?

This article mentions that they're very efficient:http://www.wired.com/2016/05/get-ready-world-covered-electro...

"...[e-ink price tags] will last two to five years on the coin-cell battery that comes inside."

That refers to tags that are updated once or twice a day at most though.

> Do you mean power intensive if you're updating the screen constantly, like you would if typing?

That's what I meant. (And I'm not sure; ISTR that they are more power intensive for updates, but I don't know in typical general-computer-use cycle how they would fare against more typical laptop displays, if it would just be reducing their advantage or flipping to a disadvantage.)

Yeah, I would be interested to know how they stack up. Seems to me that a lot of power is saved by not lighting the screen up brighter than the sun. The updates take a lot of power, I thin, because the whole screen has to be refreshed with each keystroke. But that's the same as with LCDs, isn't it?