Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/06/remarkable-e-ink-sketching-sla.html
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After four seasons of moral ambiguity, betraying humanity to the Cylons three times, and, worst of all, what he did to Kara, how do you still trust that guy?
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I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one. The Noteslate has been kicking around as vaporware since at least early 2011.
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I just don’t think this is quite the paper killer, yet. Watching the promo video, there’s noticeable latency between pencil touch and rendering, and the relatively low pixel density is too distracting at normal handwriting sizes.
The software looks reasonably slick, and this could be really cool in two or three more iterations, but the price point is pretty high for what it offers.
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Would love to use a small stylus based tablet to take notes and draw on. I have no interest in replacing my laptop with a tablet though so this is exactly the kind of product I’ve been looking for.
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$716 at launch
$379 is pre-launch price
Prices exclude VAT and other duties. So add around 20% for a consumer price.
Other than automatic cloud seeking, how does this compare to the performance of something like the $25 Boogie Board (https://www.amazon.com/Boogie-Board-eWriter-Gray-J31020001/dp/B010HWCEFY)?
I would love a smaller thinnest Cintiq even if black and white and 8 or 10 inches (I can sketch and refine there and color in the desktop). Sensitivity to touch is hard to get right.
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The $25 Boogie Board can’t save, display or transfer documents. You can draw on it and clear the screen, but that’s about it. It’s basically an electronic version of this:
There’s a more expensive version called the “Boogie Board Sync” which sells for about $100 that allows you to save sketches before clearing the screen, but it doesn’t allow you to pull up saved images on the device screen either.
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Finally, a product made for kids like Jackie Paper
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Cool, thanks.
It is a pity that the panel tech behind the OLPC appears to have sunk without a whisper(also a pity that I cannot for the life of me find mine, I have no idea what happened to it).
E-ink has gotten pretty good for acceptably fast ‘page turning’ in ebook readers and similar applications; but if you want to simulate writing you need to shave off every millisecond you can, and probably a few you can’t, which makes electrophoretic displays a poor choice.
The panel in the OLPC had the refresh rate of an ordinary LCD, so substantially better than E-ink, and was extremely sharp and worked without a backlight(in transreflective B/W). The backlit color mode was pretty mediocre; but optional, and adequate in a pinch.
To the best of my knowledge, with those gone, B/W LCDs are pretty much limited to the relatively small(like the ones used in ‘pebble’ watches), assorted segment-based ones of little general purpose use, and extremely pricey(though rather nice) radiology gear for people who take their greyscales seriously.
It’s a pity. E-ink is stubbornly high latency, though it has gotten better at handling changes to just part of the image without having to redraw the whole thing, and obnoxious panel driver requirements(much higher voltages than LCDs). Conventional LCDs have improved; but having your backlight fight the sun will never not suck; and they just don’t seem to make large, bitmapped, transreflective LCDs.
Can non-white people use it?
The video leaves this point ambiguous.
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From the Amazon page for the Onyx:
Very frofessional, indeed.
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There’s also a boogie board app which is pretty cool: it’s just a camera app, but it knows what a blank boogie board looks like, so it can automatically correct the perspective and let you get a good-enough copy of what you sketched
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Hmmm, my memory may be fuzzy, since it’s been a while since I used it, but I remember the OLPC screen feeling pretty bad — really slow refresh rates, poor resolution, and the whole thing was pretty chunky.
Of course, that was seven years ago, so not surprising, but I’m not remembering with the same fondness you are.
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I’m pretty excited, I have to say. It’s taken a few more years than I would have expected (I thought e-ink textbooks that you could write in would be here five years ago — also I imagined flexible paper) but we’re pretty much there. This is actually at a price-point and quality that I would seriously consider if I were in college (assuming I could get my textbooks on it).
The price-point is a little high for me now, since I don’t use paper nearly as much, but if it were slightly better, and slightly cheaper, I’d be right on that.
I expect I’ll get one for my kids when they’re in high school in 11 years, if not before.
Both the noteslate & meetearl, two formerly promised e-ink tablets, have been stuck in vaporware for years and years.
People severely underestimate the costs to take a gadget from prototype to production.
A nice thing about my paper sketchbooks is that they NEVER “automatically back up to the cloud.”
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Only people in various shades of grey - no absolutely white or absolutely black people. And no people of (any) color.
