What is the lifespan of high refresh e-ink devices such as this monitor? Is it measured in a billion refreshes for example? E-ink displays have been slow to update but like this monitor there are a bunch of e-ink tablets which even allow you to watch videos and play games. In my head it feels like it detoriate the device faster.
It will deteriorate relatively quickly if you're using it primarily to watch video. Of the three vendors of e-ink monitors (Boox, Dasung, Waveshare), I believe only Waveshare is clear about this in their support documents ("The e-Paper display cannot work as common LCD displays, the lifetime of the e-Paper display is short and it is related to the update times. You cannot use e-Paper to display video for a long time, which will shorten the lifetime of the e-Paper display.").
With e-ink, the dots do not fail right away; the contrast deteriorates around the 10 million update mark.
That would be, of course, if for 93 hours one played a 30Hz flashing B-W-B-W... The average dot switch, on a binary (B/W) threshold, on normal video, is probably well less than every second. A value between 1'000 and 10'000 hours is more realistic. The technology was not born for this use.
Nonetheless, the lifetime values one can find do not seem to be precise and reliable (that of 10 million is one piece of reported official information and not the only one). Having tests would be better, I am not sure how much these speculations can be trusted. Anyway, given the presence of EPD based smartphones in the market, together with the monitors, information will have to come out of users' experience.
