Chinese Manufacturer Finds A Way To Get Video Running Smooth-ish On E-Paper Displays

January 23, 2025 by Dave Haynes

One of the knocks – kinda sorta – against e-paper displays is that they only really support showing static images, and can’t run video like more conventional digital displays. A Chinese manufacturer called Dasung has started marketing a small E Ink-based monitor that does support video, and has a refresh rate equal to lower-end desktop monitors.

There are some serious caveats here:

• First, it’s black and white, not color;
• Second, it is only available in the Chinese domestic market at the moment.
• Third, at $275 USD it is not expensive, but I’m not sure how much market demand there is for a tablet-sized display that can run video in black and white.

The company’s 25-inch B&W e-paper monitor, which has a slower, choppy 33 hertz refresh rate, is $1,500 USD (and available outside China. But $1,500 is about 10X the cost of conventional LCD monitor that is going to look waaaaaay better.

German language content partners invidis have a post up about this new “Paperlike 103” monitor, which Dasung says marks the first time 60 hertz refresh rates have been realized on production display based on an E Ink panel.

The Paperlike 103 has a 10.3-inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1,874 x 1,404 pixels. It includes a capacitive touchscreen and physical buttons along the edges. Like all e-paper panels, it is reflective, which means it works best in direct sunlight. In low-light conditions, a small front light automatically turns on to boost legibility – just as happens with e-readers used with low or no ambient light.

The market for this is, ummm, elusive, but what it does suggest is that R&D is advancing to get video working well on e-paper. I have seen E Ink demos of video support at trade shows, and the displays looked horrendous. But all kinds of tech looks horrendous in its early iterations … until it doesn’t. Remember the AI-generated images from two years ago, and where that’s at now? That’s software, but you get the idea.

If you need a sense of where things are at on the color side, watch this video. You can skip ahead to about 35 minutes, when the host runs some test video.

If the goal of getting videos on screens that don’t guzzle power the way high-brightness LCDs do, there is already tech out there that does it. Reflective LCDs, like e-paper displays, use sunlight or bright ambient light to illuminate screens – and an LED edge strip when it gets dark to illuminate the screen. So … LCDs with full video support, but much more energy friendly than conventional LCDs with backlights.

When I was in Taiwan last fall, I met with HANNspree about its EcoVision paper displays, which are reflective LCD. That story is in the Future Displays report you can download here.