While e-paper displays have been around a few years, we’ve seen them restricted to handheld devices like e-readers and watches. If you’ve ever wished you can enjoy the glare-free reading experience of paper on a computer, now’s your chance with the Paperlike.
A 13-inch monitor, it trades in the traditional LCD for one of E-Ink’s grayscale panels. That way, you can read your online newspaper’s website as if you were reading the broadsheet version. Well, close enough anyway.
Made by Chinese outfit Dasung, Paperlike is a USB monitor that simply plugs in to an open port on your desktop or laptop to serve as a secondary display. Since e-paper uses up little energy, it requires no separate power source, relying solely on what it can suck out of the USB slot to juice itself. It uses E-Ink’s Fina screen, a glass-based panel with an impressive 1,600 x 1,200 resolution (150 ppi). Since your Windows, Linux, or OS X UI isn’t designed for e-paper, Dasung claims that they’ve optimized the monitor’s overall speed and refresh rate, so there won’t be too many lags when scrolling down a long document or moving to another browser tab (just don’t use it for gaming and you should be fine). There are also high-refresh display modes that render with less detail than normal, but will facilitate a refresh experience that’s a lot closer to traditional monitors.
Recently launched in China, the Dasung Paperlike is priced at 5,999 RMB (around $970).