The limited number of polygons means that speeding up one of these systems to refresh the screen 60 times a second, as is needed to smoothly render fast-action scenes, requires cutting the number of polygons per screen to the point where detail suffers.

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Hitachi's UltraVision UltraThin LED TVs include the W806 Smart 3D TV series in 48- and 55-inch screen sizes, offering 120Hz refresh rates for 3D content, built-in WiFi and IPTV connectivity.

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Just like Windows XP, Lindows initially sets the screen to a flickery, eye-busting 60Hz refresh rate.

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In fact, the 16 graytone screen takes about eight-tenths of a second to refresh when loading a new page.

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The refresh was pretty much as expected: brighter screen, higher resolution, better video, lots of tweaks to the user interface to make the experience better.

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In addition to letting users dedicate different tasks to different screens, Mr Martynov suggested users might want to display important information such as an airline boarding pass or a map on the e-ink screen to take advantage of the fact that the technology only uses power to refresh - and not maintain - its image.

BBC: Yota smartphone

To make the text larger than 10-point font requires zooming in on the document and dragging it around with the iRex's stylus, a naggingly slow process given E-Ink's refresh rate of about one second. iRex claims it redraws its screen faster than Kindle, but in Forbes.com's tests it locked up sporadically and often took far longer to refresh than Amazon's less flashy display.

FORBES: E-Books