If your screen feels sharper, faster, and more like paper, that's Carta 1300 at work. It's driving crisper contrast, quicker page turns, and a smoother writing experience on today's ultra-thin e-ink displays. Want to know how it stacks up and why it matters for every black and white screen? Let's dive in.
What Is the Carta 1300 Technology?
Carta 1300 is E Ink's most advanced monochrome e-paper display, built on the foundation of its Carta platform but fine-tuned to meet modern demands for faster, clearer, and more responsive digital paper experiences.
Released in 2023, this display technology enhances contrast, accelerates refresh speed, and improves power efficiency, making digital ink feel less like a screen and more like an instinctive, paper-like medium.
Key Specifications That Define Carta 1300
Carta 1300 features a contrast ratio of approximately 20:1, offering darker blacks and brighter whites with greater clarity, particularly under natural light. The pixel density remains at 300 PPI, the gold standard for reading-rich content like books, notes, and reports, providing sharp character edges and detailed linework.
Where Carta 1300 pulls ahead, however, is in update latency: E Ink reports a 25% improvement in refresh speed over Carta 1200, making screen updates faster and ghosting significantly less noticeable. In stylus-enabled devices, Carta 1300 also improves pen input latency by up to 30%, reducing the delay between pen motion and on-screen feedback, and directly enhancing the writing experience for users who rely on precision and speed.
Deeper Black, Cleaner White: A Visual Upgrade That Matters
The improved contrast meaningfully affects user comfort and readability. On Carta 1300, blacks are produced with a denser pigment layer while whites are better illuminated by ambient light, giving more optical clarity to everything from text to hand-drawn diagrams. For anyone working in black and white environments, such as writers, editors, researchers, and illustrators, the subtle but powerful upgrade means less eye strain and more visual comfort during extended sessions.
Faster Interaction Across the Board
A breakthrough in Carta 1300 is its improved handling of on-screen motion. Thanks to a redesigned waveform controller and faster microcapsule response times, this display reduces full-page refresh cycles, which are typically needed to clear residual shadows from previous content. Its faster refresh capability allows developers to build more responsive user interfaces, smoother animations, and real-time writing apps that feel closer to pen-and-paper than ever before.
Carta 1300's improved speed also means fewer visual artifacts, such as ghosting or blurring, when scrolling through dense files or rapidly switching screens. Users flipping through hundreds of pages, working through PDF annotations, or switching between notebooks will notice how the entire experience feels lighter and more fluid.
Thinner Builds, Lower Power Draw, Better Integration
Carta 1300 is optimized for integration into ultra-thin e-ink tablets. It uses a slimmer TFT substrate and a more efficient microcapsule layout, enabling hardware designers to reduce the overall panel thickness without compromising durability. It makes room for sleeker form factors, allowing paper tablets and digital notebooks to feel more natural in the hand, closer to holding real paper.
Moreover, it's built to be more power-efficient. Thanks to its quicker refresh and enhanced bistable nature, Carta 1300 holds static images without drawing extra power and uses less energy during screen updates. It implies longer battery life and fewer charging interruptions for devices using the technology.
So, what does all of this mean for users? Carta 1300 brings together measurable improvements and tactile enhancements into a single display that feels smoother, faster, and more refined. It advances e ink display technology to a point where the screen becomes less intrusive, allowing your content to appear sharper, clearer, and more comfortable to interact with.
E Ink Carta 1300 vs. 1200
When E Ink Carta 1200 arrived, it marked real progress with faster refresh rates, improved contrast, and more responsive stylus input. But Carta 1300 goes further by unlocking higher speed levels, clarity, and precision for monochrome epaper displays.
1. Contrast and Visual Sharpness
Carta 1200 introduced a noticeable contrast boost, but Carta 1300 refines it further with a reported 20:1 contrast ratio, compared to around 17:1 in 1200. That may sound subtle, but it delivers deeper blacks and crisper whites, making long reading sessions easier and complex documents more legible, even under challenging lighting.
2. Speed and Refresh Performance
Refined waveform processing and faster pigment movement within the display's microcapsules enable Carta 1300 to improve screen refresh speed by approximately 25 percent over Carta 1200, making interactions feel more immediate and controlled. These changes support smoother visual updates while maintaining image stability and clarity.
3. Writing Experience and Pen Latency
Through faster pigment activation and more responsive display control, Carta 1300 reduces pen input delay by approximately 30 percent compared to Carta 1200. The advancement allows handwriting to appear more closely aligned with pen movement, resulting in a smoother and more natural writing experience.
4. Device Design and Portability
By enabling thinner display layers and more efficient panel integration, Carta 1300 offers greater design flexibility than Carta 1200. This allows manufacturers to build slimmer, lighter, and more durable digital tools without compromising screen performance.
5. Energy Efficiency and Power Use
Both versions leverage E Ink's bistable nature, where the screen holds an image without constant power. However, Carta 1300 optimizes it further, requiring less energy during refresh cycles and contributing to even longer battery life in real-world use.
E Ink Carta 1300 vs. 1000
Carta 1000 marked a defining moment in the early days of digital paper, offering meaningful improvements over older E Ink generations in text clarity and ambient light readability. But as user needs grew more complex and interactive, its foundational strengths began to show their limits.
1. Resolution Lost Fidelity on Larger Displays
Although Carta 1000 could deliver high pixel density at 300 PPI on small six-inch screens, larger devices often dropped to around 150 PPI, resulting in softer text and blurred detail. The drop in sharpness made it harder to view full-page documents or diagrams without constant zooming and panning. Carta 1300 addresses this by maintaining crisp, uniform resolution across various screen sizes, eliminating the trade-off between scale and sharpness.
2. Interface Responsiveness Fell Behind User Input
Carta 1000 limited interface responsiveness, with slower refresh rates that made page turns, taps, and view changes feel disconnected rather than seamless. Large files loaded slowly, and moving through dense content often broke the user's focus. With Carta 1300, refresh handling improves significantly, enabling transitions and inputs to respond faster and feel more natural, so users stay focused as the display keeps pace.
3. Stylus Latency Interrupted Writing Flow
Stylus input on Carta 1000 showed clear latency, with ink trailing behind the hand and finer strokes often failing to register accurately. It broke the sense of flow and made both sketching and note-taking feel disconnected from the user's thoughts. Carta 1300 refines the input response to a level where strokes appear almost instantly, giving users greater control and a more lifelike writing experience that aligns with real-time expression.
4. Hardware Limitations, Restricted Portability
Devices built with Carta 1000 relied on older, thicker substrates and heavier panel construction, contributing to increased weight and less ergonomic form factors. Manufacturers had limited flexibility in how thin or compact their designs could be. Carta 1300 introduces improved layering and panel efficiency, allowing ultra-thin tablets that feel lighter without giving up durability or performance.
5. Power Use Was Stable but Less Optimized
Carta 1000 applied E Ink's signature bistable technology, which allows the screen to retain static images without continuous power. However, energy demands during screen updates were relatively high, and battery life varied widely depending on user activity. Carta 1300 improves this by drawing less energy per update and transitioning more quickly between states, which extends battery longevity and makes devices better suited for intensive daily use.
Is the Carta 1300 Eco-Friendly?
Yes. Carta 1300 is eco-friendly because it uses very little power, lasts longer without performance loss, and aims to work efficiently without wasting energy or materials.
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Efficiency That Supports Long-Term Use
Eco-friendliness starts with durability and low power consumption, and Carta 1300 supports both. Its refined architecture reduces energy use during screen updates and enables devices to last longer without performance loss, minimizing waste over time. -
Power Usage That Aligns with Purpose
Carta 1300 uses power only when updating the screen, avoiding constant refresh and reducing energy footprint throughout daily tasks. -
A Low-Impact Display by Design
Without backlights, fans, seldom heat output, Carta 1300 runs silently and coolly. These qualities reduce stress on internal hardware, helping e ink devices stay functional longer and lowering the chance of early failure or replacement. -
Stable Performance That Ages Well
Carta 1300 resists the visual degradation that affects traditional displays, like dimming or image retention. Its consistent output ensures that screens remain readable and reliable, usable for years rather than seasons.
Does Viwoods Use Carta 1300?
Yes. Viwoods has embraced Carta 1300 to power its flagship AiPaper. The 10.65 inches Viwoods AiPaper features a 300 PPI Carta 1300 Mobius display, delivering sharp contrast, quick refreshes, and a smooth writing experience in an ultra thin form factor only 4.5 mm thick.
The Takeaway: Carta 1300 in Focus
Carta 1300 can be the upgrade that makes digital paper feel truly alive. With faster refresh rates, sharper contrast, improved power efficiency, and a remarkably natural writing experience, it sets a new benchmark for monochrome epaper displays. Whether reading, sketching, or taking notes on an ultra thin e ink tablet, Carta 1300 delivers clarity and comfort that finally closes the gap between screen and page.