Recently, I bought a used Dasung 13.3" E-Ink monitor from China. The previous owner bought it on March 30, 2016 and decided to resell in less than two month. The item cost me 4275 CNY (~652 USD) including the shipping fee to Singapore .
I received the product this Tuesday. It came with an adjustable stand and a USB cable to connect with the PC. Note that Dasung provides different stands to overseas customers and mainland China customers. For the former is a portable stand while for the latter is a steel stand. Below are two pictures of my Paperlike with the steel stand. I have seen quite a few Chinese customers complain that the steel stand is heavy (~2.5kg) and ugly, but I like it very much, simply because it is so unique
Now after four days with it, I'd say the product did not let me down. It is definitely not comparable to a LCD/LED monitor in terms of display effects, and you cannot play games or watch videos on it. Don't expect it can totally replace your current screen -- actually whenever I view or process a picture I still need to drag the window back to the LED screen. However, it did fulfill my needs for PDF reading, document editing (I am now writing this post on it), coding and web surfing. This is the biggest value of the Paperlike -- you can now conduct your everyday eye-abuse activities, e.g., reading, writing and coding, on an eye-friendly display. For people like me whose eyes are vulnerable and easily get dried and tired on the traditional monitor, Dasung's monitor really makes our life easier.
The Paperlike monitor supports a resolution of 1600*1200 and 800*600. The maximum display gray levels are 16, but the key to use a E-Ink as a monitor is the so-called A2 and A5 mode, i.e., use only 2 or 5 gray levels for display. Reducing the number of gray levels can significantly improve the refresh rate. I am using the Paperlike with Windows 7, as an extended screen, in a resolution of 1600*1200 and A2 mode. The A5 mode can provide better visual effects, however it only support the resolution of 800*600. So there is a trade-off to be made. For me, I found a higher resolution can bring better experience than a larger number of gray levels.
Under the A2 mode, there is no annoying delay during typing and mouse operation like move, drag and scroll. The ghost shadow problem can be ignored. The driver did crash from time to time (every several hours), but I believe this problem can be alleviated or fixed by software updates.
To ensure the best experience with Paperlike, it is very important that you always try to adjust your applications' appearance so that it looks best on the E-Ink display. For example, when I browse webpages with Chrome, I found it helps a lot if you install an extension that allows you to change the fonts of the webpages, otherwise the texts of many webpages would be too dim to view on the E-Ink.
Last but not the least, the best measure to protect your eyes is always to keep good habits of using eyes instead of buying an E-Ink monitor.
p.s. Dasung is now open for the third run of pre-order on Indiegogo (will ship in August). They also provide some nice video demos there. Check it out if you are interested.