I talked to my wife constantly about how badly I want an e-ink monitor, they’re just still so expensive for the specs I want haha. I’d take a solid 24”, maybe 21”, b&w 30hz at this point if the price was right (sub-$500).

Yeah, to get a 24" e-ink monitor anywhere near that price, we’d need much higher production volumes. Right now, it just isn’t mass-produced enough to bring costs down to the sub-$500 range.

I totally understand the limitations there, i’m just spelling out what I’d like!

Since you are really into that stuff, could you please share your opinion about the widely shared view that e-ink remains artificially expensive due to patents ?

Or point to reading material you find truthful. Thanks !

Three years ago, I posted about modding a ThinkPad T480 into an e-ink laptop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563

That turned into a community project and eventually into building our own FPGA-based e-ink display controller to improve refresh speed and reduce ghosting.

The result is a dev kit and monitor: open hardware, supports 6–13" monochrome and color e-ink panels over HDMI or USB-C, up to 75 Hz with sub-100 ms latency, and includes a C API.

Hardware, firmware, docs and schematics: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider

I'm probably getting one for desktop use, but I'm also curious for other use cases, what's the power usage like? while idle or doing high frame rate video?

Great! The board uses about 1-1.5W under continuous use with no OS/kernel power optimizations.