Dasung is running a Indiegogo campaign for their upcoming 253 25 inch E INK Monitor. The first batch is completely sold out and will be shipping out to customers in August. They will be taking orders on their Shopify website and will be charging $2250 USD and those orders will be fulfilled in December. It might be sometime before we actually see any hands on reviews, to give everyone an indication if this worth buying or not.
The Dasung Paperlike 253 features a 25.3 E INK display with a resolution of 3200×1800. It looks like it has a front-lit display. It comes with its own stand and will be able to be mounted to the wall with VESA. It will have a full HDMI connection to plug into your video card or PC, it is unknown if it has a Displayport input. Dasung typically releases their monitors to be entire powered by HDMI, so it doesn’t have an internal battery, a processor, RAM or internal storage. It is basically just a monitor, but with an E INK display, instead of OLED, LCD, LED etc. There are four physical buttons on the bottom left hand side of the monitor. One is a power button, a toggle switch to turn the front-light on or off, a full page refresh and to engage in A2 mode. This mode basically will increase the performance, which is good for programs that would have lots of animations or to browse the web.
The overall design of the Paperlike 253 is stunning. It has a gunmetal silver strip on the bottom, where the physical buttons are and a slim black bezel on the sides and top. The back of the monitor is also pure silver, so it would look really nice on a desk. Prior Dasung products have all been jet black, so this one at least has a different color scheme.
Since this monitor can act as a primary or secondary display, it opens up a wide array of possibilities. You will be able to spend hours writing, programming, surfing the internet or doing other productive things. Since it has an E INK display, it is not backlit, so there would be no lights shining in your eyes, since e-paper absorbs light. People with vision disorders will feel right at home, and will finally be able to work, without the drawbacks of the eye strain that typical monitors cause.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
