But no mention and video evidence of the pen input lag and precision, which is what's supposed to set this apart from other eink display solutions. The 1 has some lag, just enough to still be a nuisance: did the 2 fix that?
I have the 2 right here and it's better than the first. There's still a perceptible lag (that is, it isn't imperceptible) but it's better than anything else out there including other eink devices (I also have a Boox here that I compared it to, and the Sony DPT before it).
I have an iPad pro 11" (the last gen) and it's in par with professional drawing tablets from Wacom in terms of feel on glass, and that's solveable with a $15 screen protector.
It also has access to procreate or Adobe fresco if you're still up to getting abused by Adobe as opposed to whatever remarkable can come up with. It seems odd to be coming down on the iPad pro for drawing/writing - it's a lot of money but the experience is on par with much more expensive Wacom devices.
Yeah but it's also a locked ecosystem, so no thanks. The nice thing about a device like this is that it's purpose built: it can basically do one thing, and claims it does it well.
An ipad is a walled garden of expensive hardware and software that does everything, at a high price. Those are completely different worlds, and if we're talking "it costs a lot of dollars", I already own a universal tablet monitor. I don't need something that does less and costs more.
Couldn't the paper feel be solved by a simple screen overlay on an iPad? Something thin enough to give the texture? Almost like an anti-glare screen protector. I'll admit, the pencil on glass just doesn't feel right. I'd rather some perceptible drag/friction. It also helps me reduce errors as my drawing and writing styles are abysmal so I need something to keep some traction.
I have Sony's Digital Paper. It is beyond awesome. I notice no lag while writing, and yes it does feel like writing on paper. Is there some way maybe you can measure the difference in what you are observing, lag-wise? Lag has never been an issue I even perceive with Digital Paper. It 'just works'.
I had the DPT too and the remarkable 1 was noticeably better, and the 2 is noticeably better than the 1. I put some gifs in this article but it's really easier to feel than see.
generally the approach is to point a camera at it and record yourself under real world conditions writing and drawing. For instance, if a fast stroke starts to show up by the time you're already done drawing it, that's problematic latency, even if you personally don't notice.
would you be willing to actually point a camera at your device and show what the latency and precision is while writing and drawing? So far I haven't found a single device that doesn't start showing a fast stroke on the screen before I'm already done drawing it.
In what way? I find the lag on the iPad to be annoying enough that I've never bothered with it. I've never found any of the E-Ink devices to come close enough to paper to make me consider giving up paper notebooks - Though it's been about 3 years since I last checked them out.
Have you tried the current generation of iPad Pro? They claim a 9ms lag, and coupled with their technology for up-rezzing refresh rate and touch sensitivity when using the Pencil, it's quite a substantial improvement in experience.
That being said, the iPad Pro is clearly a high-end general-purpose device, with a price to match. The device that fits our pocketbook is always superior to the device that is amazing, but remains in a box in the manufacturer's shop because we can't justify the price.
It's better than any e-ink device for sure and it's competitive with the iPad Pro. I think the latter now has somewhere around 15-20ms of lag? So it's close.
But honestly they're different devices. Similar in many ways of course but different too. I don't think it's really apples to apples.
That number was calculated by taking a high-speed camera and watching how long it took the line to catch up with the pencil. They cheat on the metric by juicing up the prediction. You can see this by flicking the pencil and then picking it up -- the line will go farther than you intended. And if you change directions, the line will take more than 9ms to catch up with you.
Apple are cheating the 9ms lag measurement the way speculative execution and aggressive cache population are cheating performance benchmarks.
In general, this point makes me think of computational photography. If you have extra computing power, you can do things that are synthetic, but nevertheless real enough to deliver satisfaction, in real time.
The iPad Pro is not an e-Ink device, however since the OP was speaking of it being better than anything else out there _including other eink devices_, I wanted to confirm that "anything else" refers to devices like the current generation of iPad Pro.
Immediate red flags: all the actual drawing/writing shots have the pen move unrealistically slowly. Real people write fast, and draw fast. And then we we DO see normal paced drawing, it's either sped up, or obscured with a tactical camera angle. What the hell is this video?
A Youtuber made a Lego robot that moves a pen at a constant speed and took 480fps video of it. He says the 1 had a latency of 54ms and the 2 has its advertised 21ms.
No evidence that I could see, but they do mention it, claiming that this version 2 is 2x more respondent ( ”Speed at which digital ink appears on reMarkable“ ) than version 1.
I have RM1 and though I don't do a ton of sketching, I do annotate papers. Never felt there was lag in anything other than perhaps erasing, but I'm not a speed writer either.
You would definitely notice a 21ms lag while writing. Ideally you want to get below 10ms, but for physical-object-like responsiveness 1ms is the standard. See this old video from Microsoft research which demonstrates
I just watched the video and maybe I missed it but doesn't that mean that in order to have 1ms latency you'd have to have a screen refresh rate of 1000 frames per second? That seems like it would cause serious cost increases for displays, controllers, and graphics cards.
If it helps, you just have to refresh the (very small number of) pixels under pressure, and only at such a high right for a brief moment while they are being pressed.
I wonder if you could have a separate layer which physically (chemically) responded to the pressure to make it look like the screen was drawing your line, but which only lasted for about 50ms after the pressure is removed.
This chemical layer would be visible for just enough time for the real eInk pixels to actually refresh underneath the "pressure mask".
> You'd be stuck with essentially one "material" though -- eg color or brush or whatever -- but I could see its utility as a dedicated single-purpose device (like only intended for sketching/notes -- which I guess is mostly true of remarkable anyways)
I'd be curious about human perception of color matching/etc at the <50ms level - I'd suspect if you had _something_ that then became the actual color/brush, our visual system would probably just backfill to say it'd always been that color/texture.
You'd be stuck with essentially one "material" though -- eg color or brush or whatever -- but I could see its utility as a dedicated single-purpose device (like only intended for sketching/notes -- which I guess is mostly true of remarkable anyways)
The 10ms demo is almost as good and much easier to accomplish, requiring only 100 fps instead of 1000. Actually you would need more than 1k fps - suppose it takes 0.5 ms for the touch sensors and CPU processing and graphics updates; then half the time after a touch you would miss the frame and have to wait 1 ms for the next display update.
To me 1ms doesn't seem worth it given the diminishing returns. Something like 5-10 would be way easier to do.
Most devices these days actually heavily extrapolate, continuing drawing the line where they think you're going to draw it even before they've actually sensed where you drawed it. The effect is rather easy to see on a Surface Pro, but it actually works pretty well.
You can cheat, Samsung was just bragging about this earlier in August when they showed off the new Note and smart pen. They used AI to predict where the user was likely to move the pen next to cut the perceived latency even further, some really clever stuff.
The original Apple Pencil and first generation of iPad Pro boasted of a 20ms lag. That was considered impressive, but perceptible if you look at your writing carefully.
I found it fine for note-taking, but lots of people would still notice the latency, especially those using creative tools where there is a strong feedback loop between what you see and what you draw.
They are now claiming 9ms lag. I suspect this is imperceptible for the use case of note-taking and marking up PDF documents (e.g. highlighting, making notes in the margin).
But then again, 20ms is going to be more than fine for that use case as well.
I think you have to get below 10ms for humans to be unable to notice. Drawing is a worst case scenario for exposing screen latency; it's hard to match reality's 0ms and a pen with a fine tip doesn't help hide any of it like a comparatively chunky finger does. That said, 40ms -> 21ms is a really big improvement which could make the experience go from awkward to quite usable.
I can absolutely tell the difference between an early iPad Pro (20ms) and later (9ms), when using a pencil. With the lower, it feels more like paper, like color is coming out of the pencil.
"Close"? Anything over 3~4ms starts to be noticable, and anything over 10ms is "clearly" noticable for folks who expect the response of a pencil on paper.
I meant that as a lefty I'm used to my view of what I'm writing being obscured. I think a left hander is less likely to notice or be annoyed by the latency.
