# dasung: a review for the dasung 13.3" e-ink monitor

in late 2020 i bought dasung's 13.3" hd-ft e-ink monitor. hd means high definition (2200x1650) and ft means frontlight + touchscreen.

i'm using it for a year now for the occasional hobby writing and i'm pretty satisfied with it. it does what it says on the tin: it's an e-ink screen that you can connect to your machine with an hdmi cable.

i think my eyes like it quite well. i usually use it in the mornings to do some writing or coding because i don't feel it's burning out my eyes like an ordinary led screen usually does. it takes a while until my eyes "wake up" and can take an ordinary monitor. but i also use it whenever i feel doing some hobby work (like writing this blog post).

it has vesa mounts so i have it mounted on a monitor arm. i'm heavily myopic, about -5D which means i see clearly up until about 20 cm. i usually look at this monitor from a close distance without any glasses. i sometimes tried doing this with ordinary monitors but that usually wasn't too pleasant. with this monitor i don't mind doing this. i also read my kindle without glasses and this is similar. it's a nice feeling that sometimes i can use the computer without any glasses. the most satisfying time to use this for me is the afternoons. i arrange its monitor arm in a way that the sun shines onto it. it just feels nice to work in sunlight.

i have it connected to my raspberry pi 4. it was bit of challenge to set it up. for starters, my archlinux needed a special hdmi_enable_4kp60=1 setting in its config.txt (https://github.com/tommythorn/Paperlike-Raspberry-Pi-4/issues/4). this one took me a while to figure out.

but the bigger challenge comes in setting up the user interfaces right. this is a monochrome screen. it can do only black and white. no grayscale. anything other than black and white is emulated via dithering.

this means i've disabled any aliased fonts in firefox and simply hardcoded all the fonts to terminus in it. that font is crystal clear to me, while aliased fonts were a bit too noisy for me (maybe i'm too picky). some of the websites look a bit uglier but in exchange it's easier for me to read them.

and i also made some changes to xterm to disable color handling in it: with my change anything colored is usually handled by either with a very light gray background (so very little noise around the letters) or simply inverting the colors: white on black for that cell. it works pretty well. for my own reference, this xterm patch is at @/dasung.xtermpatch.

i do some limited internet surfing on this too. it works completely fine but it's not as nice as on a fully colored monitor. at least i'm reminded that i should be doing some more coding or writing instead. if it could do grayscale, maybe there would be no dithering and i would like it even more.

the refresh rate is obviously slower than a led screen but much faster than on a kindle. it's fast enough that it doesn't really get in the way. fun fact: in the past i also used kindles as a screen for my text editor, mostly the large kindle dx 2. i usually ssh'd onto it, then ssh'd back into my tmux while my keyboard was still connected to my raspberry pi. so i still controlled my rpi but thanks to tmux's multiplexing feature, i've seen the output on the kindle too. but the overly slow refresh rate of kindle dx 2 made that painful so i didn't do this that much. no such problems with this dasung.

i think dasung now has a 25" e-ink monitor too. i probably wouldn't buy that, it's a bit too expensive at the time of writing and i don't really need it. at work i have to interact with all sorts of colorful web user interfaces so all the dithering would bother me too much.

but otherwise i can wholeheartedly endorse this product for someone who wants do some distraction-free text work and doesn't mind a bit of tinkering to get the editor color settings right.

published on 2021-09-29

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