Though personally, I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments. Just setting the brightness at a decent value gives a good enough contrast; after all an e-ink display just reflects light so if the ambient lighting is constant you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness. I think the scrolling issues of e-ink would be a much greater source of eye strain and discomfort.
You can also use an off-white color as a background. Like HN does! It gives a similar feel as paper.
This is the kind of thing I would expect my monitor to do for me (unless I manually override it). Brightness AND color (so, cooler during day, when the sun is shining through the windows, warmer at night, when the lightbulbs try to approximate incandescent lighting).
However keep in mind that sun shining through the window, even if natural, can be a source of eye strain too.
Strange as it sounds, I prefer the constant lighting of the fluorescent lamps in my office.
If you're lucky, your monitor can be controlled over HDMI or DisplayPort commands.
Matching the room brightness is exactly why I wrote it and because I wanted a nearly-dependency-free binary.
I'd love to see what this thing can do with a mobile processor and a laptop battery. I bet you could get a battery life in the days.
Yes, but that is a huge deal. I consider it one of the biggest life changers that will come for a large part of the population. We've built our lives around the limitations of emissive displays. What if you didn't need to shield out the sun to be able to do office type jobs? What if the boss in the field on a work site could just sit down where they are when he needs to do some computer stuff and be able to show designs to his workers without having to bring all inside a room or go make prints?
I think it also depends greatly on where you are. For Europeans, e-ink might not be so interesting, since it's dark and cold there. And when the sun actually shines, they are on holiday anyway. But for places with a lot of sunshine, e-ink will change a lot of things. That might mean we'll have to let go of scrolling as a paradigm. But let's face it: scrolling only became the default because of bad UI choices and lazy designers. Paper moved from scrolls to pages eons ago.
Or you could use the front camera, and you could even have 3D effects, so a real world light could be reflected in shiny stuff on screen, and cast shadows for non-flat content, etc.
That works for high-contrast content, but tends to fall apart where more subtle shading differences matter. Either greater pixel depth (16 greyscale shades are common), halftoning (surprisingly effective given ~300 dpi resolution) or dithering (somewhat higher quality, avoides Moire effects) would be able to tackle considerably more content well.
(Based on my experience with an Onyx MAX Lumi, similarly-sized screen, multiple display options, and a wide range of content.)
The article mentions that there is greyscale rendering possible, but that text is first rendered 1-bit, with 1-bit greyscale applied after a few seconds for antialiasing. My experience with high DPI (dots per inch) displays is that antialiasing is far less an issue, both because the individual pixel size is so small and because with a monochrome screen, the reduced resolution of colour displays (where three pixels are required to provide colour for any given region) isn't a factor. Effectively the pixel density of a monochrome display is about 3x greater than an equivalent colour display, based on the same nominal DPI / dot pitch.