I heard e-ink displays use virtually no power except when they are refreshing. Say you’re running an e-ink display that refreshes 60 times per second, is it still significantly more energy efficient than an LCD?
>Say you’re running an e-ink display that refreshes 60 times per second, is it still significantly more energy efficient than an LCD?
No.
E-ink displays are more efficient because if they refresh e.g. 1 time a minute instead of 60 times a second, then they are refreshing 3600x less often. Even if they took 100x more power per refresh, they'd still end up using 36x less power overall. It gets even nuttier when you go to e.g. refreshing once a day instead of 60Hz (60 * 3600 * 24 = 5 184 000 refreshes, over FIVE MILLION).
Please note that "e-ink" is basically a blanket term and contains a dozen different technologies (although almost all the screens that are actually sold at actual stores are electrophoretic displays), it's basically a genericized term based on E-Ink Corp so anything I say here is a sweeping summary.
