alt Hacker NewsIt's not that those steps are necessary to prevent damage, it's that those steps were traditionally necessary to maintain calibration of the individual cell states. Also...the first several generations used really slow graphics processors based on the premise that use cases didn't require fast refreshing.
eInk mostly fixed the calibration issue years ago before the first eink monitors came out, and most eink products these days use beefier graphics processors.
> It's not that those steps are necessary to prevent damage,
It is my understanding (but I'm not even remotely an expert) that e-paper panels can suffer from permanent display burn due to the charged ink particles sticking to the glass. The stock waveforms take this into account and prevent it from happening. However I'm not entirely clear on the low level details or if this only applies to some subset of panels or etc.