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In late August last year, I unexpectedly received an email from a man named Anjan Kata. He sent me a message from an email address associated with Jangle Inc., a start-up company that was apparently still operating underground. He showed me a project the company has been working on for the past five years: an e-reader featuring a brand new type of display that solves E-Ink’s biggest problem — its low refresh rate — without making as many trade-offs as reflective LCDs. displays. After our call, I didn’t hear much about the project for the next few months, until it suddenly came out of stealth this week and released 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 the new display technology they call Live Paper. Most e-readers have an E-Ink display, a brand of electronic paper display technology developed by E Ink Corporation. E-Ink is the display technology that provides the most paper-like viewing experience. In fact, it’s so good at it 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 the way it works, it has serious problems with ghosting and refreshes very slowly, making it almost unusable for watching videos and painful for web surfing.

Live Paper isn’t E-Ink, so it shouldn’t have the same inherent ghosting or refresh issues. However, the challenge with using more traditional display technology such as LCD is to operate in direct sunlight. Most LCDs use a backlight to achieve visibility in direct sunlight. Illuminating the display using a backlight not only results in higher power consumption, but also reduces the experience of viewing on paper. Reflective LCDs can eliminate the need for a backlight by using a mirror to reflect ambient light onto the LCD layer, but there are still some trade-offs. Live Paper is said to solve these trade-offs.

The company’s CEO Anjan Katha explained to Hacking news some of the problems with reflective LCD displays that the company wanted to solve with Live Paper. First, he says that Live Paper solves the problems around “reflection.” [percentage], metallic look / not paper-like enough, viewing angle, white state, arcing, parallax, resolution, size, lack of quality backlight, etc.” Their goal was to make “the most paper-based display, which has no ghosting and a high refresh rate of 60 to 120 frames per second”. Their work on developing this display technology began in 2018 with the first proof of concept born in late 2021. Finally, for the past 2.5 years they have been working on putting Live Paper into production, which he claims that it was “exclusively produced by [their] display factory in Japan.

Even with these improvements, he says, E-Ink will still be better in some areas, such as “bistability, viewing angle, white color, etc.” However, he believes the company has developed display technology , which is more than suitable for the needs of e-readers, but can also be used for general computing tasks such as coding or web surfing. In fact, the company’s ultimate goal isn’t just to sell a tablet, but rather to demonstrate the usefulness of its display technology. Kata says the company wants to create a “monitor, phone and laptop” using the cash flow from the sale of the DC1, which costs $729.

Daylight DC1: The first tablet with Live Paper

$729 is quite expensive for the Reader, considering that many E-Ink tablets tend to be much cheaper. The DC1’s price can be explained by the new display technology and the lack of scale, but it will still be a hard sell for many consumers. Potential buyers really need to believe in the company’s vision, the promise of its display technology and the utility of the DC1 to sell itself on it.

In terms of specifications, the DC1 has a 10.5-inch Live Paper display with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 at 190ppi. Kata says this resolution was chosen specifically because it “results in a larger aperture ratio, which allows for a brighter screen.” He says the company “couldn’t detect a difference in resolution” when testing at 220-240 ppi, but “the difference in brightness was noticeable.” To enable reading when there is not enough ambient light, the DC1 also has a ‘Pure Amber Backlight’ which users can optionally switch on. It also supports Wacom’s EMS technology for pen writing, weighs 550g, has stereo speakers and a microphone. It doesn’t have a camera, but it does have a microSD card slot and some POGO pins, although it’s unclear what the pins will be used for.

Under the hood, the DC1 is powered by a budget MediaTek chip, the Helio G99, coupled with 8GB of RAM, Wi-Fi 6 support, and Bluetooth 5.0 support. The tablet packs an 8,000 mAh battery and charges via its USB-C port, which supports USB Power Delivery. Katta claims the tablet lasts 67 hours with the backlight off while reading, 30 hours with the backlight off while watching YouTube, and 30 hours with the backlight at 30% brightness while reading.

As for the software, the DC1 runs Android 13 with some slight modifications. The company says it has disabled notifications to reduce distractions, but otherwise the software is pretty similar to the stock AOSP build that MediaTek provides for the Helio G99. While the company hasn’t confirmed whether the DC1 has Google Mobile Services (GMS), one of our readers, a user named Lord Reset (@LordServerReset on X), attended the launch event and shared photos and videos with us that showed it has apps on Google. (Lord Reset kindly provided all the DC1 photos and videos used in this article.) Interestingly, our reader also said that the devices at the launch event used Niagara Launcher as their home screen launcher app. I asked Katta if the company plans to include the GMS and Niagara Launcher in DC1 devices for retail sale, but did not hear back prior to publication of this article.

Although the product page says the tablet supports up to 60Hz refresh rate, our reader noticed that Android’s refresh rate overlay shows the device running at up to 120Hz. That’s because, according to Kata, the display technically supports a variable refresh rate of 60 to 120 Hz, but the built-in PDF renderer and software don’t support such a high refresh rate. Thus, they are waiting to patch their software before announcing that the device supports 120Hz.

One question I had, and Kata confirmed, was whether the company plans to allow developers to hack the device. He confirmed that the company plans to release a bootloader unlocker in the near future, allowing developers to flash their own versions of Android or other operating systems to the device.

Although I haven’t had a chance to try out the new DC1 myself, I’m very excited about its potential. I’ve long wanted an eReader that doesn’t suffer from the ghosting and refresh rate issues of E-Ink. If the DC1 is anywhere near as good as the company claims, I hope we see a wave of new e-readers featuring the company’s Live Paper technology.