The Onyx Boox Mira is a 13-inch E Ink monitor for your PC. While admittedly niche, E Ink displays are good for people with light or flicker sensitivities, and anyone else who can’t easily use LCDs. Now, E Ink screens aren’t ideal for everyday tasks and entertainment, but Onyx is an expert at designing software that makes them suitable for such applications; these advancements are one of the strongest selling points of the Mira. The monitor is pricey at $799.99, but it’s portable and has other hardware features that help alleviate some of the problems inherent with this display technology. We don’t recommend that everyone go out and buy one, but if an E Ink display make your life easier, the Mira is a worthwhile option.
From Android Tablets to Accessible Displays
As mentioned, people sensitive to light or flickering are one of the main audiences for E Ink displays; research reports from 2017 and 2018 note that this experience is common in people with post-concussion syndrome, for example. Those studies recommend e-paper-type displays as an alternative. Note that e-paper is a generic term; E Ink is the name of a brand that has lawyers.
Onyx is best known for its range of Android E Ink tablets that range in screen size from 6 to 13.3 inches, including the $879.99 Max Lumi. The Lumi is primarily a standalone tablet, but Onyx built a PC monitor mode into that device. The Mira is an evolution of that concept and has key hardware features that make it easier to use as a standalone monitor.
Note that Onyx Boox is based in Shenzhen, China. Its website is boox.com and it sells products through Amazon. There is another, Russia-based company at onyxboox.com that appears to resell Onyx products, but you should avoid that one.
A Sleek Device
The Mira sports a 2,200-by-1,650-pixel E Ink Flexible display (207ppi). It uses E Ink’s VB3300-NCD module. A semi-translucent white bezel borders the screen.
The most important button on the device is a square, silver control in the lower right corner, which forces a full refresh of the screen and eliminates ghosting (more on this in a bit). The sides also have a button and a rocker for changing settings when you can’t use the Mac or PC software to do so.
Onyx includes HDMI and USB-C cables in the box. The right side of the Mira houses two USB-C ports and a mini-HDMI port. You can connect and power the monitor through either of the USB-C connections. If you opt to use the mini-HDMI connection, you still need to power the monitor via one of the USB-C ports because it doesn’t have a battery. In order to tweak settings on the monitor via the companion Mac/PC app, you must use one of the USB-C ports.
The monitor comes with a protective cloth cover that flips back to make a stand. The Mira also has four VESA screw holes on the back for standard mounts. At 9.1 by 12.1 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and 20 ounces, you can easily throw the display in a bag.
Windows can drive the monitor’s native resolution (2,200 by 1,650), but that odd screen ratio can make a lot of text styles difficult to read. Setting the resolution to 1,600 by 1,200 makes the default text size in Microsoft Excel and Word much more legible.
The Mira comes with a Windows driver app that lets you change display settings on the fly. For example, you can tweak the white and yellow backlights, as well as flip between refresh rates and contrast modes for different kinds of content. You can also set hotkeys to change the monitor mode or force a screen refresh. If you don’t want to run the companion app, you can change all of these settings by using the aforementioned buttons and rocker on the side of the monitor.
Now, the Mira is a touch screen, but that functionality didn’t work properly with my PC. When I pressed areas on the screen, my computer acted as if I clicked other locations on my main display. I’m sure Onyx has a fix coming for that.
Reading, Writing, and…Videos?
I tested the Mira with a Windows 10 PC, but you can also use it with a Mac.
PC applications tend to assume that you’re using a color display (or at least a 256-grayscale one), so the legibility of fonts on the Mira depends heavily on anti-aliasing, the subtle shading around the edges of strokes. In the Mira’s Text Mode, which gives you the truest blacks, the contrast is high enough that it kills most anti-aliasing; many fonts, especially serif, look uneven or gloppy.
The solution to this problem is Mira’s Speed Mode or Image Mode, but both modes have downsides. Blacks become grays at best and small fonts tend to look stipply and interpolated. There’s also ghosting as you scroll through web pages, although you can clear ghosts with the handy refresh button.
E Ink refreshes differently than LCD—it doesn’t scan down the entire screen, which is why it doesn’t flicker. Rather, the display driver moves static ‘ink’ particles in little fluid-filled cells, and only those that change for a given frame. Those particles sometimes retain residual charges even when their voltage changes. To completely flip a cell between true black and true white, you may need to ask it more than once or also change its neighbors, according to this fascinating StackExchange answer. So, a faster refresh means fewer pixels clear properly, which results in an overall grayer image and more ghosting. Pressing the physical refresh button flashes everything to white and then rewrites the whole screen image, thus getting rid of any ghosting.
The Mira’s Video Mode has a high enough refresh rate to play videos, but they appear very stipply and low-contrast. Narrow outlines around objects aren’t at all consistent either—you really should switch out of it as soon as you’re done watching a video to better see other interface elements.
Trying to switch between all of these modes makes for a less than effortless experience. Between the ghosting, the too-low or too-high contrast appearance, and the at-best-jerky pointer movement, I constantly felt like I was forcing a technology to do something for which it wasn’t designed. I wanted to edit a spreadsheet at length on the Mira, but after a little while, I moved back to my much more responsive Asus portable LCD.
On the other hand, this is an E Ink monitor that can play videos, and they’re watchable! If you can’t handle LCDs, you can now experience Netflix and YouTube. The experience is, once again, not great, with lots of ghosting, very low contrast, and huge whited-out and blacked-out areas, but compared with not being able to watch video at all, it’s a revolution.
A Revelation, Despite Some Flaws
The Onyx Boox Mira E Ink monitor is a real breath of fresh air for people with neurological sensitivities that preclude the use of LCDs or OLED displays. The reading experience on the Mira isn’t as good as on Onyx’s dedicated Android tablets or a handheld e-reader, however—if you primarily want to read books, documents, or webpages, the Onyx Boox Note Air ($479.99) is a better and less expensive solution.
That said, the Mira costs less than other dedicated E Ink monitors, including the $999 Dasung 13.3″ Paperlike HD. We haven’t tested the Dasung Paperlike yet, so we can’t comment on its performance or software, but it uses the same E Ink module as the Mira. So until we test a better monitor, we cautiously recommend the Mira to the people who need what it offers.
