The origins of the Daylight DC-1 with its creator Anjan Katta (2025)

If you put "tablets with a reflective black-and-white display" on your 2024 bingo card, people would have given you weird looks, but in May, Daylight Computer dropped something truly different into the tablet space. The DC-1 is an Android tablet with a 60fps, black-and-white, transflective display (dubbed LivePaper by Daylight) that sits between LED- and liquid crystal–based displays, and electrophoretic E-ink displays.

But the black-and-white reflective LCD technology isn’t the most fascinating part of the DC-1. Rather, it's how Daylight tweaked the underlying technology to deliver a one-of-a-kind experience that feels more like paper than any non-E-Ink display on the market, and how its creator and CEO of Daylight, Anjan Katta, brought LivePaper to life.

The birth of Daylight

How the DC-1 came to be

Source: Daylight

The road to the Daylight DC-1 began back in 2016 when Katta graduated from Stanford University, where he studied medical device technology. But after school, he decided to leave the country for two years.

Because he was constantly on the move, he spent a lot of time on his Kindle.

"I was just reading literature and papers and science and thermodynamics. And you learn how crappy your Kindle is if you're truly committed to reading and learning. It's fine for Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Gray, but if [you want] to write in, you know, with marginalia or active read or read PDFs or nonfiction, it's just not meant for that."

Source: Anjan Katta/Twitter

Tablets mitigate some of these issues, but they also introduce new ones, according to Katta. "And then the fact that, like, I would try to use my iPad [outside], like, you can't see it in the sun, or there'd be so much glare, or the battery life would end really quickly, or it would just overheat. Like, I was in beautiful places while traveling... and I'm like, why am I stuck inside when, you know, I could be so much more happy and in nature.

"So, in a way, I actually didn't intend to invent Daylight. I just wanted to find this magical E-Ink device that would be the ultimate learning computer. Like, it'll be really good for reading. It'd be really good for writing, really good for note-taking and maybe some other thinking stuff like mind mapping, you know, [or] being able to listen to low-fi beats on Spotify. But that's it."

From idea to implementation

What it takes to get an idea off the ground

Source: Anjan Katta/Twitter

When he got back to the US, Katta began work on what would become the DC-1. From 2018 to 2019, he attacked the problem from every angle, initially hacking on E-Ink displays, but they were held back by a hard limit to their refresh rate, restricting their range of applications.

What Katta wanted was a screen with the refresh rate of an iPad and the paper-like look of E-Ink, but nothing like that existed.

A new kind of e-paper

Source: Daylight/Twitter

"The core innovations that I put together and commercialized…were finding ways to make reflective LCDs paper-like," said Katta. "And so we have three patents that are on kind of the core material science innovations that made that possible. And the reality of it was just different research around gel polymer lithography, micro reflective structures, [and] a bunch of other stuff."

There’s a lot going on with the LivePaper display, but the thing that makes it feel like paper, and not metallic like most reflective LCDs, is the reflective layer behind the black-and-white LCD.

"Why are traditional reflective LCDs so metallic? Because you needed a mirror to maintain polarization," Katta explained. "And so you technically could replace that mirror with a piece of paper, but then [it] would have no polarization."

Source: GianniG46/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

The proper polarization of light is fundamental to how all LCDs work; no polarization means nothing visible on the display. Paper reflects light as well, but not like a mirror does. Katta said that quality of paper is called being diffused, matte, or quasi-Lambertian, so when polarized light reflects off its surface, it’s not just reflected in all directions, it loses polarization as well. This is one of the problems Daylight solved when making the DC-1.

"One of the core technologies is that ability to be able to diffuse the light, yet still keep the polarization," said Katta. "And that's what allows it to work, even if it's a reflective LCD, to make it look more paper-like."

Transflective innovation

Source: Daylight

But that paper-like look is just part of what makes LivePaper special. One problem with reflective display technology is the fact that it needs an external light source to be visible. That’s why most reflective LCDs are actually transflective — the reflective layer allows for the transmission of light similar to how traditional LCDs work, but that comes with its own set of problems.

"Most of the time, when you try to make a reflective display transflective, you basically poke such big holes in your reflector to have the light come through that you kill your reflectance, because now, rather than having areas that bounce light, those are now areas that are holes for the backlight," explained Katta. "And so, one of our core breakthroughs is being able to have it be transflective while maintaining a really high reflectance."

According to Katta, LivePaper has a reflectivity of around 25% compared to 9% for RLCD, 40% for E-Ink, and 60% for paper.

“The second thing is," Katta added, "we built our own custom backlight that has two different types of LEDs. So it has normal white LEDs and it has … amber LEDs as well. So, at a hardware level, it's actually blue blocked and to our knowledge, that's either rare or not really done for a long time, like a multiplexed hardware level backlight.

"And the idea there was really allowing you to have, you know, a flicker-free, blue-light–free, amber backlight experience. So you can use a computer at nighttime and it hurts less. It also has the fun side effect of being pretty retro like computers."

The cost of LivePaper

And when will it come down

Source: Daylight

The DC-1 has definitely generated a lot of buzz, but one of the things keeping it out of the hands of consumers is the price. A decent Android tablet will cost around $200, but the DC-1 costs $730. Why is the LivePaper display three times as expensive as a traditional LCD?

"It's the fact that we have this incredibly exceptional deal to be able to do it at very low batch quantities — you know, 1000 has the consequence of the price [being] enormous. That's why, [with] the overall product, we actually make very little money on it. We tried to pick the lowest price we could. It's just extremely expensive."

If you’re like me, and desperate for the price to come down, there’s still hope. "If we get to [15,000] or 20,000, the manufacturer may then actually negotiate a better deal for us that's more friendly, that's less risk-averse," says Katta. "The next step up is then, if you get to, you know, 50 or 100 or 150,000, is when you can... kind of run the line continuously. You could have one small line. Then you can actually get the next big decrease in cost."

Despite the $730 price tag, Daylight is completely sold out, and it’s only accepting deposits for units which should be delivered sometime in early 2025. And if Daylight can find a partner for its LivePaper displays, someone like Kindle, Kobo, or Boox, we could see the price really come down. Until that happens, you’ll just have to get yourself on the waiting list.