There’s a large piece of paper in Daylight Computer’s offices in San Francisco, with a list written in purple ink of all the kinds of devices the company hopes to one day make. The list is long: Daylight wants to make a phone, a laptop, different kinds of tablets. Basically anything you can think of with a screen, Daylight wants to do it with a better, different screen, one that doesn’t shine brightly in your eyes in a dark room, but instead looks like paper and works well outdoors .
I should mention another big sheet of paper right next to the product idea one — an equally long list of reasons why Daylight might fail. And as CEO Anjan Kata shows me around the office, the rest of the team preparing for a launch party for its first device, a tablet called the DC-1, it’s clear he’s worried about how the world will react to his big idea for the future.
Daylight wants to be more of a lifestyle brand than a gadget maker. In recent months, Kata has been on a podcast and YouTube tour, preaching the noble gospel of minimalist gadgets, arguing that exposure to blue light is killing our sleep and that we need devices that encourage us to use them less and more. rather consciously than being baited with bright lights and notifications. Rather than modeling themselves as high-tech purveyors like Apple or Samsung, Katta and Daylight seem to idolize companies like Patagonia that both do good things and mean something. And I guess if Patagonia can sell vests to venture capitalists, Daylight can sell tablets to tech enthusiasts.
The DC-1 costs $729, which is a lot for an Android tablet, and especially a lot for a tablet that looks a lot like the company’s first product. It’s thick, it’s heavy, it’s powered by old chips. I like the textured back and clicky buttons, but I can’t stop noticing the very slightly offset ports or the fact that I can slide my fingernail between the display and the case and literally tear the thing apart. So far I haven’t had any real issues with the hardware when using the tablet, but the lack of production polish feels like a first try.
Kata told me that the DC-1 is still not complete, especially the software. The device is designed to run software called Sol:OS, a customized version of Android designed to help you keep things minimal and quiet. My test model is currently running a slightly customized version of the popular Niagara Launcher, and at one point when I factory reset the device, it lost many of the features the team had loaded for me to test. All of which is to say that this device isn’t ready for a full review — we’ll get to that when it launches Sol:OS for real, which Katta told me should be this fall.
For now, I mostly just want to talk about the screen. The DC-1 has a 10.5-inch screen, and Daylight calls it a “Live Paper” display. Just to be clear: Live Paper is not E Ink. E Ink is the technology you find in the Kindle and most other e-readers, and it uses real ink. This means it looks really good in sunlight and only uses power when moving the ink. (Technically, E Ink is a brand, and “e-paper” is the technology, but everyone uses them interchangeably. E Ink is Kleenex.) Live Paper is actually designed to address some of E Ink’s weaknesses—especially its slow refresh rate and ghosting. which leave faint imprints of things on the screen for too long.
What Live Paper actually is, Kata tells me, is an adaptation of reflective LCD technology that’s been around for a long time. Reflective LCDs are LCDs without a backlight; they use a mirror at the bottom of the stack to reflect natural light back through the pixels. This makes them great and comfortable to use in bright light, means they don’t consume a lot of power and allows them to be cheaper, thinner and lighter. All good things! But there are just as many downsides: RLCDs, as they’re known, clearly struggle in poor lighting. They are also hard to find in color, in large sizes, or in high resolutions.
There are already some well-liked RLCD devices. (HannsNote2 is a favorite on the r/RLCD subreddit, and the HiSense Q5 got good reviews a few years ago.) Kata says he’s spent the last five years or so trying to solve RLCD’s problems and improve the entire system. He hasn’t solved all of them—the DC-1 doesn’t do color, which Kata tells me is technically possible, but causes a bunch of other compromises—but the Daylight team has managed to make a 10.5-inch reflective LCD that’s almost as as easy on the eyes as E Ink and almost as responsive as a typical tablet screen.
I say “almost” because it’s not quite there either way. On the E Ink side of the spectrum, the Live Paper has a bit more glare, uses a lot more power, and has significantly worse viewing angles than my Kindle. Viewing angles are perhaps the most obvious benefit of E Ink — you’ll always get glare on the LCD, and while Live Paper is an improvement, it’s still not as crisp and clear in sunlight as an E Ink screen. E-ink feels like paper; Live Paper feels like a screen.
Meanwhile, compared to an iPad or smartphone, when you’re scrolling quickly in an app, the DC-1 lags a bit (though not as much as any E Ink screen I’ve tried) and you get a bit of that wiggling ‘jelly’ scrolling.” which previously plagued many devices. I also see a bit of ghosting if I move things quickly; Daylight says the Live Paper screen refreshes at 60 frames per second, but I definitely notice it stuttering at times.
It must be said that Live Paper is actually a master of all trades in the right way
Basically, the DC-1’s screen isn’t as good as a Kindle in ideal Kindle conditions, or as good as an iPad in ideal iPad conditions. But it must be said that Live Paper is actually a master of all trades in the right way. It’s responsive and fast enough that I can easily type on the DC-1 or even watch video (albeit in black and white). E-ink is often fine, but you can get a lot more done smoothly with the DC-1 than with a Kindle or Boox tablet.
The DC-1 is also much easier to look at in bed or in any bright light than something like an iPad. Personally, I’d most like this display in a slightly smaller form factor – I’ve found that I like the Boox Palma as a handheld Android device, and I suspect I’d like it even more with a Live Paper display – but if the iPad-using type for reading, web surfing, and maybe journaling and crossword puzzles, the DC-1 does all of that really well. It’s just not a good Netflix machine, you know?
As for the backlight, Daylight’s clever idea was to let you control not only the brightness, but also the temperature of the light. (You can do this on many e-readers, too, by the way—some recent Kindle models have a “warm light” mode that I like much better than the default light.) It can go from a normal, daylight blue light to a deep, warm , an amber glow that’s seemingly better for reading at night without screwing up your circadian rhythm and sleep. The overall theory is sound, but whether your phone screen is bright enough to cause massive damage is harder to say. But even in terms of comfort, I really like it; Now I read in bed with a rather dim and very warm light, and I don’t know if I sleep better, but it sure is easier to look at in the dark.
What’s even cooler is that you can turn the backlight off all the way. At the lowest setting, the DC-1 emits no light at all. It relies entirely on ambient light to show you what’s on the screen. (A backlit RLCD is also sometimes called a “transflective LCD,” for what it’s worth.) Without the light on, however, the DC-1 looks very dim and low-contrast even in bright sunlight. I almost never turn the light all the way off.
Everything about the Daylight office feels as frantic and new as the DC-1. There’s a guy outside, barefoot, putting pills in little weed boxes to give out to people later in the day. There’s a table full of plush DC-1 cases and another with Patagonia thongs for early buyers. There is outdoor-focused art everywhere. This company seems to know exactly what it’s about, but maybe not exactly what to do about it. After using the tablet for a while, I’m skeptical about the $729 DC-1 case, but I’m pretty optimistic about what a set of Live Paper devices might look like. Perhaps the middle ground of iPad and Kindle can still exist. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, Daylight asks a fun question: what if you just changed the screen? I think it can change a lot more than that.
