While E-Ink has gotten better enough that we’ve seen some e-readers use it with Android, the experience is still far from seamless, with ghosting, flickering, and annoying screen lags still a regular part of daily use. That’s always been E-Ink’s tradeoff for that stellar battery life. As such, we’ve increasingly seen some companies go back to LCD for implementing their paper-like displays. The Daylight DC1 is another device to go that route.
A note-taking tablet, it looks like any of the larger options from Remarkable or Boox, albeit one that trades in the E-Ink panel for a more traditional reflective LCD. Granted, it’s not using an off-the-shelf LCD panel, but a heavily-customized one that allows it to reproduce a paper-like appearance.
The Daylight DC1 is a monochrome tablet with a 10.5-inch Live Paper display, which comes with 1600 x 1200 resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate, making it a whole lot easier on the eyes for a whole lot of modern tasks. What is Live Paper? It’s basically a modified LCD panel that use diffusion films, polymer lithography, and dichroic dyes, allowing it to retain the responsiveness and high refresh rates while offering a paper-like appearance. According to the outfit, the display produces no blue light whatsoever, while being optimized to reflect ambient lighting, which it relies on to ensure the screen’s legibility. For low-light situations, you can turn on the amber backlight system, which, they claim, produces none of the PWM flicker found in more traditional LCD panels.
It’s designed not just for reading, by the way, but also for writing and drawing. As such, it comes with a passive Wacom EMR stylus that you can use to take notes, annotate books, and do sketches. It currently runs Android 13 that they plan to replace with a custom version called Sol:OS, which is designed to be minimally distracting. As such, all notifications are turned off by default, so you can just pick it up when you want, instead of having to check it throughout the day. According to the outfit, it should be able to run most Android apps, so you can use it like any regular tablet.
The Daylight DC1 houses a MediaTek Helio G99 system on a chip, with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. It’s got both Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 for connectivity, along with a microSD slot for extending your storage capacity, stereo speakers, a built-in mic for video calls, and a USB-C slot. The whole thing is powered by an 8000 mAh battery, with the outfit claiming multiple days of battery life between charges. Given that this is an LCD panel, that’s probably not true, so you should expect to charge this nightly, much like any phone or tablet.
Is there a real market for this? We don’t know. It’s far from the most powerful tablet for its price and battery life will definitely take a hit from that LCD panel. The design seems a little outdated, too, with large bezels on all sides, although some people might find that utilitarian (it’s easier to grip).
The Daylight DC1 is available now, priced at $729.
