60 Hz – A new wave of fast e-ink didn’t come from a breakthrough in the display panels themselves—it came from taking control of the controller. Wenting Zhang’s work has moved from early tests to Modos Flow, a fully open-source, user-repairable 13.3-inch portable e-in
On a laptop, e-ink has always felt like a promise with a delay. You refresh, you wait, and then the screen finally catches up. The frustration is familiar enough that most people assume the slowness is baked into the technology.
Wenting Zhang’s argument is sharper: it isn’t inherent. The lag, he says, is mainly the controller. And with the right controller approach, a high-resolution e-ink display capable of a 60 Hz refresh rate isn’t science fiction—it’s buildable, and aimed at use as a computer monitor.
The reason e-ink feels sluggish traces back to its original purpose: e-readers. Those devices needed to run on low power, with limited interfaces and slow processors. For years, the displays were designed to match that world, and the trade-offs showed up as high latency and slow refresh rates.
Zhang says the push toward a different path started with the laptop problem. It wasn’t just about improving refresh speed. It was about interfaces—he wanted to use an e-ink display on a laptop build. and he needed the electronics to keep up. As soon as a custom controller entered the picture. the results suggested it could do far more than e-ink was known for.
Early tests with fast refresh rates were positive enough to earn a Hackaday Supercon 2024 talk focused on how to make e-ink go fast. That momentum didn’t stay in the lab for long. It later became Modos Flow, a fully open-source, user-repairable 13.3″ portable e-ink monitor.
The road from proof of concept to something you can live with—and actually use—wasn’t quick. Zhang describes a long development path. including optimization and feature work built from scratch to balance appearance with responsiveness across different display modes. And even when the technical challenges were being tackled. familiar headaches showed up: development hassles. bad timing. and what he calls wasteful vendor shenanigans.
There’s a video telling the story, embedded below, where the chain from controller decisions to a faster real-world display is laid out. If you’re looking at buying one, there are monochrome and color versions offered through Crowd Supply.
The story’s through-line is hard to miss: e-ink’s reputation for delay may have been shaped more by what it was connected to than by how the pixels fundamentally behave. Now the controller is where the change lives—and the product points to what happens when that bottleneck finally gets redesigned.
e-ink monitor 60 Hz e-ink Wenting Zhang Modos Flow open-source monitor user-repairable display controller technology Crowd Supply Hackaday Supercon 2024 portable e-ink