Dasung is a Chinese company that makes E Ink tablets, monitors, and category-defying devices like the Dasung Link. Recently the company has been taking aim at one of the shortcomings of E Ink displays: low screen refresh rates.

Now the company has unveiled a portable monitor with an E Ink display that supports refresh rates as high as 60 Hz, allowing you to view full-motion graphics. There are some trade-offs to keep in mind though before investing in the new Dasung Paperlike 103.

The Paperlike 103 is a 10.3 inch, 1872 x 1404 pixel black and white ePaper display with a 4:3 aspect ratio, support for capacitive touch input, and a color-adjustable front-light that helps illuminate the screen in dark or dimly lit environments (although E Ink screens can also be easily viewed without the front light when used in environments with enough ambient light).

It has an aluminum alloy body that measures 239 x 195 x 5mm (9.4″ x 7.7″ x 0.2″).

E Ink technology offers a high-contrast, paper-like viewing experience with support for wide viewing angles. And some people find that they experience less eye strain when looking at E Ink than they do when looking at LCD or AMOLED screens. E Ink displays also typically use less power than other types of screens since they can display a static image indefinitely and only consume power when the images on the screen are being redrawn.

Those properties make E Ink displays ideal for use in eBook readers, note-taking tablets, and even some digital signage (like price tags). But most devices with E Ink displays only support a few screen refreshes per second… and some types of E Ink screens can take much longer than that to change a picture.

So while a few companies (like Dasung and Bigme) have produced E Ink monitors meant for general purpose computing, the low screen refresh rates limit the types of applications you would want to run on these displays.

But some companies, including Dasung, have developed software that allows for higher screen refresh rates… if you’re willing to sacrifice image quality. A full screen refresh is usually pretty slow, but if you’re willing to put up with some “ghosting,” which leaves a portion of a previous image on the screen when a new image is drawn, you can speed things up substantially.

We’ve seen E Ink screens running fast enough for animations and videos before. But Dasung was the first company to launch an E Ink monitor with a 40 Hz refresh rate, and now the company says its new 10.3 inch monitor cranks things up to 60 Hz, matching the refresh rates found on most laptop and monitor screens (excluding premium displays made for gaming or other applications where 120 Hz or higher refresh rates are increasingly common).

So what’s the catch? There are a few.

For one thing, ghosting is still an issue. I haven’t seen the new 60 Hz display in action yet, but Dasung put out a few videos of its 40 Hz display a few months ago and you can clearly see that some animations look a little janky compared with LCD displays, and sometimes a “ghost” of an image will remain on the screen for quite some time before it fades away. The issue is particularly pronounced when watching videos on the Paperlike Color, but you can also see it to a lesser degree in a demo video of the Paperlike HD.

Another issue? These E Ink monitors tend to be expensive. The Paperlike 103 is only available in China at launch, where it’s selling for 1,999 CNY ($275), but I’d expect it to cost more if and when it goes on sale globally.

For the sake of comparison, the Paperlike HD 13.3 inch monitor with a 40 Hz display is currently out of stock, but it has a list price of $699. The new 10.3 inch model has a smaller screen, so it should cost a little less than that. But I wouldn’t expect it to be priced competitively with portable monitors with LCD or even AMOLED screens.

I also suspect you’ll lose some of the energy efficiency benefits of E Ink if you drive the display at 60 Hz instead of refreshing the page once or twice a minute the way you would with a Kindle or Kobo eReader. But I haven’t seen any details about the power consumption of the Dasung Paperlike 103.

via ITHome, Tom’s Hardware