In the DIY electronics scene, I’ve occasionally come across posts about small cheap e-ink displays essentially burning in and how to try and avoid it (shifting things around like on OLED)

https://github.com/esphome/feature-requests/issues/1109#issu...

This could be actual burn in, or it could be a failure in how they are refreshing (with some potential fix if refreshed properly). I’m not familiar enough to be certain myself, but I personally suspect they are likely being driven too hard and are truly damaged.

In normal e-reader use I’ve never seen this as a practical issue.

I’d recommend watching the video below, where we talk about how fast refresh affects a panel’s lifespan.

https://www.youtube.com/live/okjJURIejIY?feature=shared&t=24...

For dynamic content, a higher refresh rate absolutely will lower an eink panel's lifespan. As the refresh rate increases, more of the underlying content's changes will be captured and more pixels will change state.

I have an e-ink display that's now 15 years old. It's definitely a bit less clean, there is sometimes mild ghosting even after doing a full refresh. Doing two refreshes in quick succession fixes that.

I also have another display that was exposed to full sunlight through a window for about 8 years. It's now a bit faded as a result.

All in all, I consider it pretty good.

Yes you can kill or degrade them if you drive them too hard, but achieving higher refresh rates and less ghosting is mostly about finer calibration and faster lookups on bigger tables

Kind of, many e-ink device when using under sunlight lose their contrast overtime. The Fossil Eink watch is one of the example.

That's a separate effect - eink degrades under UV. Fossil eink watches did not have enough UV filtering.

Waveshare specify 1 million switches per eink dot for their panels.

https://files.waveshare.com/upload/4/4e/2.13inch_e-Paper_V4_...

https://files.waveshare.com/upload/6/60/7.5inch_e-Paper_V2_S...

1 million switches for a pixel is about 5.5 hours at 50 Hz, assuming the worst case of a state change on every frame. Surely it can't be that bad for larger panels? The existing e-ink monitors from Dasung and Onyx would have had problems by now.

I imagine most people are using those monitors for text-based applications, which have a much lower rate of pixel change. Still - the pixel switch lifetime is currently a limitiation of eink.