In Daylight Computer’s San Francisco offices is a large piece of paper with a list of various devices written in purple ink that the company hopes to one day produce. The list is long: Daylight wants to make phones, laptops, different types of tablets. Basically any screen you can think of, Daylight wants to do it with a better, different screen that doesn’t blind your eyes in a dark room but looks papery and works great outdoors normal work.
I should mention another large piece of paper next to the product idea – an equally long list of reasons why Daylight might fail. As CEO Anjan Katta shows me around the office, the rest of the team is preparing for a launch event for its first device, a tablet called the DC-1, and it’s clear he’s worried about how the world will respond to his Great ideas for the future.
Daylight wants to be a lifestyle brand rather than a gadget maker. In recent months, Katta has been preaching the high-minded gospel of minimalist gadgets on his podcast and YouTube channel, arguing that blue light exposure is killing our sleep and that we need devices that inspire us to use them less and more deliberately, Rather than luring us in with bright lights and notifications. Rather than emulating high-tech suppliers like Apple or Samsung, Kata and Nikko seem to idolize companies like Patagonia that both make good stuff and stand for something. I figured if Patagonia could sell vests to venture capital firms, Daylight could sell tablets to tech enthusiasts.
The DC-1 sells for $729, which is a lot of money for an Android tablet, especially one that feels a lot like the company’s first product. It’s thick, heavy, and powered by an old chip. I like the speckled back and clicky buttons, but I can’t stop noticing those slightly misaligned ports, or I can slide my fingernail between the display and case and pry it open. I haven’t encountered any real hardware issues with this tablet so far, but the lack of build polish feels like a first-timer.
Katta told me that the DC-1 was not finished yet, especially the software. The device is designed to run software called Sol:OS, a customized version of Android designed to help you stay minimal and quiet. Right now, my test model is running a lightly customized version of the popular Niagara Launcher, and at one point, when I reset the device to factory settings, it lost many of the features the team had loaded in for me to test. All of which is to say, the device isn’t quite ready for a full review yet—which we’ll get when it actually launches for Sol:OS, which Katta tells me should be this fall.
Now, I mainly want to talk about the screen. The DC-1 has a 10.5-inch screen, which Daylight calls a “Live Paper” display. To clarify: Live Paper is not E Ink. E Ink is the technology used in the Kindle and most other e-readers, and uses actual ink. This means it looks great in sunlight and only consumes power when moving ink. (Technically, E Ink is a brand and “e-paper” is a technology, but everyone uses them interchangeably. E Ink is tissue paper.) Live Paper is actually designed to solve E Ink’s Some weaknesses – notably a slow refresh rate and ghosting that can leave blurry traces on the screen for long periods of time.
Katta told me that Live Paper is actually an adaptation of reflective LCD display technology that has been around for a long time. Reflective LCDs are LCDs without a backlight; they use mirrors at the bottom of the stack to reflect natural light back into the pixels. This makes them very comfortable to use in bright light, means they don’t use as much power, and makes them cheaper, thinner, and lighter. All good things! But there are just as many disadvantages: RLCDs are known to obviously not perform well in poor lighting. They are also difficult to find in color, large size, or high resolution.
There are already some popular RLCD devices. (HannsNote2 is a favorite of the r/RLCD subreddit, and the HiSense Q5 got some good reviews a few years ago.) Katta says he’s spent the past five years or so trying to fix RLCD’s problems and improve the overall system. He hasn’t solved all the problems yet—the DC-1 doesn’t support color, which Katta tells me is technically possible but would result in a host of other compromises—but the Daylight team has managed to make a 10.5-inch reflective LCD that It’s almost as pleasing to the eye as e-ink and almost as responsive as a typical tablet screen.
I say “almost” because in both cases it’s not fully realized. In terms of e-ink, the Live Paper has slightly more glare, uses a lot more power, and has much worse viewing angles than my Kindle. Viewing angles are probably the most obvious advantage of the E Ink – you’ll always see glare on the LCD, and while Live Paper has improved, it’s still not as clear and sharp as the E Ink screen in sunlight. E-ink feels like paper; Live Paper feels like a screen.
At the same time, compared to an iPad or smartphone, the DC-1 lags a little when you scroll quickly through apps (though not as much as with any e-ink screen I’ve tried), and you’ll see some wobble. Erratic “jelly” scrolling has plagued many devices. I also see a bit of ghosting if I move objects quickly; Daylight says the Live Paper screen refreshes at 60 frames per second, but I did notice that it sometimes Stuck and stopped.
There’s a case to be made that Live Paper is actually a jack of all trades, but in just the right way
Basically, the DC-1’s screen isn’t as good as the Kindle’s under ideal Kindle conditions, and it’s not as good as the iPad’s under ideal iPad conditions. But there’s a case to be made that Live Paper is actually a jack of all trades, and in the right way. It’s responsive and fast enough that I could easily type on the DC-1 and even watch videos (albeit in black and white). E Ink usually works in a pinch, but you can get a lot more done smoothly on the DC-1 than on a Kindle or Boox tablet.
The DC-1 is also easier to view from bed or in any bright light than something like an iPad. Personally, I like this slightly smaller display best – I like the Boox Palma as a pocket Android device, and I suspect I prefer its Live Paper display – but if you’re interested in using an iPad for reading , browse the web, write journals, and do crossword puzzles, the DC-1 can really do it all. It’s not a good Netflix machine, you know?
As for the backlight, Daylight’s clever idea is to let you control not only the brightness, but also the temperature of the light. (BTW, you can do this on many e-readers, too – some recent Kindle models have a “warm light” mode, which I prefer over the default light.) It emits a deep glow from normal daylight blue light , warm, amber glow, ostensibly more suitable for reading at night without disrupting your circadian rhythm and sleep. The overall theory makes sense, but it’s hard to say whether your phone screen is bright enough to actually cause significant damage. But even from a comfort standpoint, I really like it; I’m reading in bed right now and the light is low and it’s warm and I don’t know if I sleep better, but it’s definitely easier to read in the dark .
What’s even cooler is that you can turn off the backlight entirely. At its lowest setting, the DC-1 doesn’t shine at all. It relies entirely on ambient light to show you what’s on the screen. (RLCDs with backlights are sometimes called “transflective LCDs,” for what that’s worth.) Without the lights on, though, the DC-1 looked very dim, even in bright sunlight. And the contrast is low. I almost never turn off the lights.
Everything in the Daylight office is as crazy and fresh as the DC-1. There was a man outside, barefoot, putting pills into little straw boxes to be distributed to people later in the day. One table was filled with plush boxes of DC-1s, and another was filled with Patagonia slings for early buyers. There is outdoor-themed art everywhere. This company seems to know exactly what it’s about, but maybe not how to do it. After using this tablet for a while, I’m skeptical about the $729 DC-1 case, but I’m very optimistic about the looks of the Live Paper line of devices. Maybe a middle ground between iPad and Kindle can exist after all. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, Daylight raises an interesting question: What if you just changed the screen? I think the change could be much more than that.
