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The refresh rate of eink is kind of...muddy. It depends on temperature and target contrast. With the right waveform and voltage, you can push it pretty far(like 30hz+).

The thing is, Eink's waveform is kind of secret afaik, everyone has different tuning.

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As I understand it going faster typically skips steps that are necessary for maintenance of the panel. Fine for a while but if you don't periodically run a "proper" cycle the panel could eventually be permanently damaged.
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That's exactly it. I was a firmware engineer at reMarkable making the latest tablets.

We had some secret eink sauce (propriety waveforms) to get the high refresh rates and colour contrast without a full flashing screen reset, but even then you need to run longer maintenance refreshes occasionally.

Pixels are just vertical columns of viscous fluid with charged ink particles. A waveform is just voltage changes over time to these columns to shift the particles up and down. More black to the top = darker shade of grey. Colour (in the gallery display, at least) is the same, just with each CMY particle group having different charges and responses to different waveforms.

Every once in awhile this vertical column gets messy with loose particles distributed through it (ghosting, muddy contrast) so performing a hard rail-to-rail voltage reset forces all the particles up and then down, and gives you a clean slate.

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Out of interest, what (vaguely) is the amount of time you need between maintenance refreshes?
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It really depends on the state of the screen. It's easier with reading PDFs, for instance, when you can get away with a full refresh on page turns.

Versus someone drawing on the screen with a lot of zooming and panning. People with the tablet would notice that when they stop a series of these actions that were back to back, the screen will "clean" itself after about 5 seconds of idleness.

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Data sheet seems to say (Page 8 -https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/product-files/6397/P6397+C2226...):

> Image update time - 25 ºC - - 4 - sec

I'm guessing you could probably push that somewhat by going beyond the specifications, would wager a guess how far though.

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The datasheet says 4 seconds for the image update time. However, I didn't found the time for partial refresh.
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Partial refresh on these can often be surprisingly fast, even when full refresh takes seconds
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Probable seconds per frame at least.
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Assume slow
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