More RLCD tablets are entering the marketplace, closing the divide between slower E Ink and high-quality OLED.
E Ink has historically been regarded as the premier display type if eye health ranks high on your priority list. However, an E Ink alternative you may not be familiar with is making notable strides: RLCD. Short for Reflective Liquid Crystal Display, this technology harnesses the reflective properties of E Ink and adapts it to a more conventional pixel-based display, yielding significantly smoother performance than E Ink could ever aspire to offer.
This isn’t my first encounter with an RLCD device. I previously wrote about the Daylight Computer in June, an Android tablet that features a custom black & white RLCD with a backlight. That backlight makes it a standout among RLCD devices, as most of them exclude the back or front light to achieve a more “paperlike” feel. The only other significant RLCD tablet with a front light is the upcoming Eazeye Paper 2, expected to launch in April 2026.
Today, I’m examining three distinct RLCD tablets — Harbor Paper 7, Daylight Computer, and Hisense Q5 — to highlight the advancement of RLCD into a genuine competitor to E Ink, tracing back from one of the first RLCD tablets ever produced to the latest in color RLCD that resembles a screen printed on metal.
Five years of RLCD progression
Most e-readers use an anti-glare coating to minimize reflections and mimic paper as closely as possible, but the original RLCD tablet did not. The Hisense Q5 was an innovative yet ill-fated device upon its launch in 2020. Discontinued shortly after its initial production run, Hisense later produced a second batch in 2020, as COVID disrupted supply chains, likely contributing to this unique tablet’s premature end.
Leading up to this product, all LCDs utilized transparent layers that permitted a backlight to shine through a layer of colored pixels, forming the images observed on screens. The Hisense Q5 replaced that transparent layer with a reflective one and retained only a black hue, optimizing light reflection back to the user.
This tablet was groundbreaking at its release, and while the lack of a backlight and a black-and-white display constrained its potential, its influence on the display industry was remarkably significant. Years later, companies like Daylight and Eazeye would follow in Hisense’s footsteps, further advancing RLCD with products such as the Eazeye Monitor and Daylight Computer.
Those companies elevated RLCD to the next level, developing genuine 8-bit displays that no longer depended on temporal dithering for bit depth simulation, introducing a new wave of truly flicker-free displays. Although these remain niche products, it is evident that RLCD is gaining traction due to its ability to provide significantly quicker refresh rates and richer colors than E Ink.
The top E Ink displays typically reach a maximum of 40Hz, while RLCD can achieve 120Hz. In contrast, color E Ink displays usually support up to 4096 colors, whereas the 8-bit depth of color RLCDs can display up to 16.8 million colors. Unfortunately, the Harbor Paper 7 color RLCD tablet I have utilizes dithering, meaning it cannot be classified as genuinely flicker-free.
Certainly, every technology has its constraints. As I noted in my article about the Daylight Computer in June, RLCD needs a constant power source to render an image. This is because it is still constructed on a traditional LCD pixel framework, which requires power to the pixels and continuous refreshing.
E Ink, on the other hand, is a fully passive technology that only draws power when the images on the screen change. Thus, if you’re reading something, E Ink requires no power to maintain the display because the pigments remain after being “set.” LCDs, however, refresh the screen 60 to 120 times per second, regardless of what’s happening.
Color or black & white?
Within the realm of reflective displays, a peculiar phenomenon occurs when color is introduced: the displays dim. It makes no difference if a built-in frontlight is utilized or if they’re exposed to natural sunlight, a color RLCD or color E Ink display will invariably appear darker than a black-and-white one. This trend persists until someone devises a novel approach to reflect light off the colored pixels.
This happens because black-and-white displays have a single pigment: black. Color displays must filter light through multiple colors — generally red, green, and blue — before it becomes visible to the user again. Since each pixel or pigment is now divided into colored sections, there is less physical space for light to bounce off the display.
It parallels how camera sensors operate. While a large digital camera can still capture superior images compared to what your smartphone could achieve, it’s challenging to overcome the laws of physics, especially.
