Bigme B251 Color E e-ink monitor review: Dreams don’t always come true

E-ink has come a long way. There are now lots of great applications for this, starting with pocketable e-readers like Palma box 2 To full color layered Android tablets like Box Note Air 4C. There’s plenty of appeal in a display that doesn’t require a glowing backlight. There’s less eye strain, no blue light concerns, and easier viewing, even in direct sunlight.

the Pygmy B251 The display plays into this appeal with a 25.3-inch color E Ink display. It looks and sounds promising, but in $1,499It must fulfill this promise. Unfortunately, I can’t say it does.

Not the screen you were hoping for

Testing the Bigme B251 may be my first time using an E Ink display, but it’s not my first time testing an E Ink device. I’ve seen a huge improvement in black-and-white contrast over the years, but E Ink displays with a color cast lag behind. The B251 is one such device, layering a color LCD over the e-ink layer. This negatively affects brightness as a result.

One of the main promises of E Ink is that you can rely on ambient light to illuminate the screen, so you don’t need a built-in backlight like a traditional screen. The problem is that the color layer darkens the screen so much that it needs to be illuminated unless you have your back to a wall of sunlit windows.

For me, even in a comfortably lit room near a sunny window, the Bigme B251 was too dim without lighting. This lighting is gentle on the eyes and has an adjustable color temperature.

Although the 3200 x 1800 resolution on a 25.3-inch screen should be adequate, clarity is still an issue due to the cast of colors and shadows. Even text legibility in black and white content is not up to par, with text showing noticeable pixelation.

Black text on a white background is the best scenario, but white text on a black background is difficult to read. Bigme claims e-ink resolution of 300 ppi and color accuracy of 150 ppi, but I’m skeptical. This should be as sharp as a 15.3-inch 1200p display, but I use one alongside the Bigme, and the latter doesn’t look as sharp.

The B251 offers a few different picture modes to help nudge it in the right direction when viewing different types of content. For web browsing, there’s the aptly named “Web” mode. There are also text, photo, and video modes. Each has some customizations available for contrast and saturation, but they have locked refresh rates.

Photo mode offers the best clarity, but it has a very slow refresh rate, probably around 1Hz. It is almost impossible to get around. Although the “Video” mode is smoother, it is incredibly blotchy. The videos themselves look fairly smooth, but the rest of the screen becomes largely unusable, especially with artifacts constantly appearing if the pixels aren’t refreshed with new content.

The “Text” and “Web” modes offer a nice compromise, but they’re still not entirely satisfactory. Outside of Photo mode, the others rely heavily on color constancy, which makes the screen messy and grainy for a lot of content. That’s not a great look for such an expensive gadget.

Mixed bag otherwise

Aside from the screen itself, the Bigme B251’s screen is average in size. It has a reasonable variety of ports: HDMI, Mini HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C, plus some USB hub capabilities. Wireless streaming to the screen is also possible, although I didn’t find it quite as convincing as Bigme’s promotional content suggested. For example, I couldn’t get my phone to fill the full height of the screen when it was in portrait orientation.

The B251 comes with a small remote control to quickly adjust settings. Although it’s a basic remote, it’s very useful since the controls built into the screen feel cheap and have hard-to-read labels.

The screen hardware looks nice enough, with a simple white and silver color scheme that harks back to some older Mac systems. The white edges are more than an inch thick, which is undoubtedly large for 2026, but they are pleasingly curved and uniform. Unfortunately, those edges and the entire back cover of the display feel like they’re made of very cheap plastic for a $1,500 monitor.

The stand has some actual metal, and is one of the only parts present, but this is made up for by the neck portion having a plastic plate that is painted silver to look like metal. On the bright side, the stand offers a lot of positioning flexibility with tilt, pivot, height, and swivel adjustments.

The B251 has speakers, but they don’t sound great. There’s some obnoxious echo in this case, even at medium volumes, which is hard to accept for a monitor at this price.

Just another nail in the coffin: The B251 uses an external power brick. The screen isn’t small overall, nor is it thin by any means, and it only needs 60 watts. Relying on an external power brick crowding the office seems completely unnecessary.

Final thoughts

The dream of a great-looking e-ink screen that can be illuminated simply by lighting up the room, and showing content that is clear and easy on the eye, is not dead, but the dream is Pygmy B251 It doesn’t get done. Although this screen gives you a lot more screen real estate than you’d get from E Ink tablets, it’s a very compromised experience for a device this high in price.

I found it nice to look at, but that was made up for by the extra strain on my eyes to parse rough-edged text. I had to figure out where my mouse cursor was, thanks to the low refresh rate, and try to figure out what was happening in areas where there was no color.

If you want e-ink that’s easy on the eyes, I’ve spent days writing and browsing the web in black and white Box Note Air And the color Box Tab Ultra C. Although it is much smaller than the B251, the experience was just as better. Plus, its portability means you can just take it out directly under the sunlight and completely avoid backlighting.