My LCD doesn't flicker either. Some LCDs use pulse-width modulated backlights, which do flicker, and there are gaming LCDs with optional strobing to improve motion clarity, but these are not inherent to the LCD technology.
The amount of blue light emitted by an LCD depends on the backlight used. Some brands advertise low blue light. You could even build an LCD with zero blue light emission if you wanted to, at the cost of being unable to display blue. And even with a conventional backlight, you can reduce the blue light to very low levels in software, e.g.:
E-ink reflects light over a broad spectrum, so the amount of blue depends on the amount of blue it's illuminated with. It can be higher than the LCD in some conditions.
not disagreeing, but you can't chose the display of the laptop most of the times.
Besides, in the last 2 years people reported many more cases of eye strain and blurred vision (at least in my country), because "home" is not really the best work environment for 95% of the people.
There's a reason why offices are always well illuminated.
e-inks are usually used with lights turned off and when ate not I use the red light because it's better for reading.
Maybe you're misunderstanding the usage of "flicker" here. I'm not saying that I can see my monitor flickering, because nobody can past a certain refresh rate. What I'm saying is that any monitor inherently flickers because of its refresh rate, independently of our perception.
I'm not entirely sure if what's being said is true but I believe the intention is to stay:
All LCDs "flicker" in the same way all movies "flicker". The technology simply displays or flashes a series of still images quick enough to be perceived as fluid motion or video.
I'm not sure that's the intention, because they said that "e-ink doesn't flicker". But e-ink certainly has a refresh rate. So I think they attribute some other form of flickering to LCD.
(And in fact, some of the e-ink readers with optional display lighting will use PWM to modulate its brightness, and then exhibit flicker. This is a super dumb engineering choice, though, so it's not very common. The Kobo Forma was an offender.)
Fair point. E-ink does refresh the entire screen though, correct? It's closer to a old-school slide projector than a monitor. I admittedly know little about this topic.
As an aside, I'd love a secondary e-ink monitor. Hopefully the technology improves so prices come down.
of course it has a refresh rate when there is a change in the image, but if I'm reading something completely static then literally nothing changes whereas an LCD screen still does things in the background
On an LCD also nothing changes when the display image is static.
When the image is not static, because an LCD updates line by line, if you don't coordinate your data updates to the refresh rate you can get artifacts such as "tearing", where different sections of the monitor show different data that doesn't fit together. However, e-ink displays doing differential or fast partial updates have similar problems (and some exciting new ones, making refresh overall quite bad). You just usually don't try to display fast moving imagery on them.
e-ink displays are what is known as "bi-stable", meaning you don't need to apply a voltage to keep a pixel in a particular state, only when you want to change that state. This is not true for LCD, where you do need to keep supplying a voltage. This however doesn't result in any visual change if the voltage isn't changing.
The real difference here is that LCDs aren't reflective, unlike e-ink. So you need a backlight, and that light shining at your eyes is more tiring than how things work with an e-ink display. That either doesn't need a backlight (in a bright ambiance), or the LED lighting isn't behind the display and doesn't shine directly at you, but rather bounces through the display surface. This is a nice quality.
