- Yesterday, a startup named Daylight Computers launched the DC1, an AOSP-powered tablet that features the company’s new Live Paper display technology.
- The company says Live Paper solves one of the biggest issues with E Ink displays, their poor refresh rate, while still being readable outdoors without a backlight.
- We have photos and videos of the device from Daylight’s in-person launch event, showing what the tablet is like.
Back in late August of last year, I received an email out of the blue from a person named Anjan Katta. He messaged me from an email address associated with Jangle Inc., a startup that was clearly still operating in stealth. He showed me a project the company had been working on for the past five years: an e-reader featuring a brand-new type of display that solves the biggest problem with E-Ink — its poor refresh rate — without making as many trade-offs as reflective LCDs. After our call, I didn’t hear much about the project for the next several months, until it suddenly exited stealth this week and launched a product that excited the tech world: the DC1.
How does Live Paper compare to E-Ink and reflective LCDs?
The DC1, short for Daylight Computer 1, is the first product from the startup to feature its new display technology they’re calling Live Paper. Most eReaders have an E-Ink display, a brand of e-paper display technology developed by the E Ink Corporation. E-Ink is the display technology that most closely provides a paper-like viewing experience. It’s so good at it, in fact, that it’s used in almost every tablet dedicated to providing a paper-like reading or writing experience. The problem with E-Ink is that, because of how it works, it has heavy ghosting issues and refreshes very slowly, making it almost unusable for watching videos and painful for browsing the web.