Founder of Visionect here. I'm so happy when these kinds of posts surface as this is exactly how we've envisoned our platform to be used - by tinkerers builidng interesting ideas.
I do see a lot of comments regarding the price, so it's best if I do the general disclaimer. E Ink screens are very pricy (compared to LCD). The driving is even pricier. And since this is not a mass-mass produced product (at least not in a sense of your 75" OLED TV) you get to the price that you have. We've worked for years on getting the price down for the E Ink screens (trust me on this), but there is a question of critical mass. E Ink in the non-reader, non-shelf label applications is still a very niche solution, that will command very high price. I hate to say it, but the only way we could have brought the price down with current quantities is if we built an inferior product as the price right now is the function of Bill-of-Materials.
We tried a lot of applications, some covered previously here on HN, we currently see that there are just two other avenues where E Ink is being used and has the potential for mass depoyments in the near future.
1. In offices it can be used as interactive signage - we've built a very successful solution for meeting room booking around it (see http://getjoan.com).
If anyone would like to get more information about E Ink, please shoot - we've tried every E Ink display out there, played with color display and probably seen every E Ink application out there. You can also shoot me a direct mail to luka.birsa AT visionect.com.
Hello Luka! I really like your products. I am in a quest for a small e-ink display that might survive the rigours of being placed behind a car windshield. Is this an application that, in your opinion, can be handled with an e-ink display or will sun, extreme temperatures, etc destroy it. Is there any kind of hardened e-ink product out there? I hope it is ok to pick your brain on this. Thanks!
So we do have quite a lot of experience running these screens in extreme environments - we've worked with a company called Mercury Innovation and built a fleet of traffic signs that have been running in scorching Australia non-stop for about 4 years now.
There are a couple of things you need to do:
- Protect the screen against UV (there are protective foils and glass with integrated protection you can use). Failing to do so will cause permanent damage to the screen. This is a solved problem with loads of companies using EPD for external usage.
- Make sure you respect the maximum temperature limits - the driving board should be aware of extreme (>50C temperatures) and prevent updates in those cases. There are special waveforms that extend the operating range to beyond that, but you will get only black and white updates.
Realistically EPD robustness is a solved problem. About 6/7 years ago we've launched a product based on epaper that was water tight and was intended to be used outside (permanent mounting on desks). We did not see any problems with display. And the parking signs have been running 4 years non stop any failures in the field.
Thank you for taking the time to answer! I hope that in time eink displays will become more relevant, I really think that they are the best solution for many applications.
A perhaps stupid idea for you: bring newspapers, museums / art galleries together and convince them to fund a company that sells a large display like the one seen in the article to the masses - and instead of just the front page of the NYT, you get, say, a painting, or something else, every few hours.
A large e-ink display for art powered by a subscription could be interesting. I think you’d have to do it as a prestige piece though... think $10k each minimum.
The art would need to be tailored to the medium. You could use a museum/gallery partnership to commission pieces exclusive to the service and optimized for the display. Pieces would rotate out. Perhaps have a gimmick where each piece is displayed on only one device at a time, and once it rotates away from your device it never comes back unless you pay extra for it. Call the whole thing a study in semi-permanence or something.
You’d have to get some high brow endorsements to make this work.
Convince the MOMA, or a similarly prestigious museum, to offer that to 10,000 members, at 10k a pop. Tax deductible as usual.
Then, convince other 4-5 prestigious museums elsewhere to do the same. Boom, you have 50k display, which means you have a niche, rich market to start from.
We have working prototypes of smaller displays in house, but I do not think E Ink offers large format solution. There is one caveat with color - the refresh rates are still not quite there yet (we've seen ~5-10s for the 4096 color version), but we've seen considerable improvment recently.
I think it's just a good use-case away. Perhaps we'll see the screens break out in the education space first and then the rest of industry as well, but we're looking at various applications with color and we might be first.
It seems to me like even a 5m refresh period would be fine for an art display? I doubt I'd want to change pieces more than once a day.
I'm probably an outlier, but I'm an all digital person and my walls are bare due to the size, backlighting and power cables of the recent art frame fad products. I've been waiting with bated breath for consumer ACeP screens. I have a lot of artwork that I don't think needs smooth gradients, even just a bit of color would be wonderful.
Anyways I just wanted to drop in and say I'd definitely buy something (and probably for a multiple of what current digital art frames go for).
On that note though, all I've seen of ACeP are promo photos and I don't quite trust promo photos. If you've any experience with them, is there anything you can say regarding how they actually perform visually?
We have ACeP in our labs and it looks really good while displaying images. It's not high end glossy print colorful, but it's very very close. More than enough for most applications. It's also a stark difference to the color-filter variants that were available previousy. There the contrast was poor due to the filter they overlaid over a regular E Ink reflective surface.
Hi luka-birsa,
Do you think E-Ink computer monitors will ever be a thing?
This is something that I'm personally really looking forward to to relieve eye strain commonly caused by LCD monitors.
You can acually buy them today - Dasung did manage to productivize them enough for people to try them out. But it's really hard to compete on price, especially with consumer 27" 4k display costing 100-200$.
Pricey, small and really not the best design, but it's a start. I say it's a start but at the same time I'm afraid this is the best we're likely to get, given that the e-ink market is not growing and the technology isn't competing with cheap LCD screens and tablets.
A shame; I wouldn't mind a modern, affordable take on the typewriter with an E-ink screen (13 or 15 inch) and mechanical keyboard. I could probably build one if I have a lot more expendable income and time.
It's a very niche product. Most people opt for modern OLED displays for consumer needs, so it's really a chicken and egg problem. I'm sure if you start buying in bulk companies will notice. Sony is working on a bunch of consumer E Ink devices and I'm sure they would be more than comfortable doing this at scale, as long as there is a need.
Thank you for your reply Luka. Do you personally think E-Ink monitors can offer consumer advantages to LED monitors?
Can the same latency be achieved in these displays? (< 4ms between input and result on screen)
With current E Ink technology no. Even if it was technically feasible (not sure about that), nobody is focusing on high refresh rates. Increasing refresh increases battery consumption and that means you're taking away one of the key benefits of EPD.
We tested 8fps video on our devices a while back and in the end you're getting a B&W display with 8 FPS updates... Why wouldn't you go for something like LCD or OLED instead? I don't believe you can beat LCD at being LCD.
There are other technolgies that promise fast update times, that offer similar characteristics (look into ClearInk), but they are nowhere near where E Ink is in terms of maturity.
Could an E-ink screen behind the backlight of an LCD screen be used to enhance the dynamic range of the screen? The idea being to modulate the local brightness of the screen by changing the color of the e-ink.
The screen really does not let a lot of light shine through. There is a reflective coating (imagine aluminum foil) that reflects back. We did try to use the opacity of screen with high power leds for some usecases but it did not work. I think you need to look at E Paper optical characteristics as you would look at 1 mm thick cardboard.
The best way to fix optical characteristics is to play with the substrate and layers in front. Like adding a very good frontlight really helps with contrast even in non-dark conditions.
E Ink film is sensitive to UV light. It will optically degrade without proper UV protection. We've had a display without protection on a sunny desk by an open window (so no UV protection on the windows as well) and we got permanent burn in after a couple of months - this is why all finished devices take extra steps to protect against UV.
Properly protected screen will last for ever - we have units in the office running for at least 5 years without stopping.
E Ink owns the majority of the patents, so direct clones of E Ink are being made under license. I do not think that the patents are the limiting factor - the specific applications are somewhat limited compared to widespread use of OLED.
For the applications that have mass apeal we saw that the price goes down to a comparable level of an LCD (eg in ebook readers and shelf labels).
There is also a bunch of innovation happening in the market - competitors like ClearInk are trying to build a better version of E paper, but it's always hard to scale some new technology and it will take some time before anything substantial comes along. E Ink was lucky that they found the killer app in ebook readers and that really helped them get to volumes that allow them to build these screens in commercial volumes.
I would actually like to see combination of the two tested. Such as a greyscale high resolution e-ink base and a transparent layer of Mirasol like color pixels that can activate.
Kind of mimicking CMYK from print, and LED TV:s locally adjusting LED backlight to improve contrast ratios, and some high HDR screens. Except a very low energy use variant.
I have been constantly hearing about eink getting cheaper/better for over a decade now, but the price that the author paid (2300 euros for a 32-inch screen) seems ridiculous. At that price point does it make any sense to not just get a regular LCD for a small fraction of the cost? Dimming the brightness and adjusting the color profile will get you pretty close in terms of experience. The few dollars a year in electricity savings isn't relevant either.
The difference between eink and LCD is big enough that it's not even worth doing without the eink. A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo. And it would very obviously just be a TV. While the eink looks amazing.
I think you either have to shell out the money for eink, or don't do it at all.
>A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo.
It really depends on how you do it. They sell TV's like The Frame[1] from Samsung ($599 for the 32" version) that look much closer to a picture frame and are designed for almost this exact purpose. If you are in some semi-permanent home (you probably should be before you spend $2.7k on an art piece) it isn't much work to mount it in a way that would hide the cables. From the looks of the photos in this article, the e-Ink version isn't event mounted flush against the wall and appears to be tilted downward. I don't love the way that looks given the cost. I would much rather spend half the money on that TV and a professional mounting.
The average power consumption of The Frame is 118 W (figure provided by Samsung). The average power consumption of an e-ink display that refreshes once daily and needs a single annual recharge is effectively 0 W. Using a rough price of electricity in San Francisco of just over $0.22/kWh, The Frame costs ~$230/yr to run.
I don't know if I could, in good conscience, countenance wasting that much electricity on running a TV 24/7 to show a static image that updates once daily. Yes, you'd have to be running the e-ink display for awhile to break even on the power costs, and you could save some money on The Frame by putting it on a schedule where it turns off at night, but it still seems overly wasteful.
Realistically, the kWh is used to determine cost of ownership by most people, not environmental impact.
230~ USD a year to run a 600 dollar product versus the initial cost of a 2300 dollar display with little to no electricity overhead -- and both have similar rates of failure with regard to non-display components.. AND that's disregarding 'Samsung Vs. Small-Company-From-Slovenia' being a factor in the purchase.
I understand eink is unique, but that characteristic has to be sold to people as a trait that is worth the difference..
That's a hard sell, if compared directly to one another.
(p.s. backlit displays are tacky, but my house is covered in them. I love it. I'm a tacky kind of person, though.)
Hey, don't hold our heritage against us and rather swing by our Valley office when C-19 allows us to meet.
On the subject of price - I fully agree with you - the price for sure can't be justified just by energy savings. It's a completely different product, with totaly different features and use cases. And yes, using it just for reading the news is costly.
I do like I how it looks tho, but that's just me. :)
I'm not sure where you are getting that 118W number. I can't find it on that page. The energy guide[1] states 87 kWh per year at 5 hours per day so roughly 48W per hour rather than 118W so drop that yearly cost down around $100. Also I don't want to sound like I am shilling for Samsung, but there are various power saving options on the device. I'm not sure if those are included in the estimate. Either way, even in the markets with the most expensive electricity costs, it would take several years if not over a decade for this approach to match the initial price of the e-Ink option.
Also both these options are wasteful in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the LCD option will likely be more wasteful than the e-Ink version, but neither is particularly justifiable if you are concerned about waste. I would also venture a guess that on the full spectrum of environmental waste those two options are much closer together than either is to just throwing up an old fashioned art print on your wall.
Again, why are you using 5 hours per day? When used as a photo frame, this is going to be on for a lot more than that. The pathological case here is it's on for 24 hours per day, not merely 5.
Because the 87 kWh total is based off the assumption of 5 hours per day. We need to use that to get to the actual wattage. Once I have the wattage, I can use that to get to the 24 hour per day 365 days per year usage of 418 kWh.
Another way of getting there is taking the 87 kWh estimate and multiplying it by 24/5 to get 418 kWh.
Ahhh, now I see what you're doing. I found a source that says 118 W though, so I guess it's just a case of dueling sources at this point. If someone owns one of these and has a Kill-A-Watt then we can find out for sure.
Where are you getting the 118 W number from? A LED TV this size will use a fraction of that (30-40 W max, and can be brought down further with power saving options).
> How much electricity does this all use, I can hear you asking. I haven’t tested that out myself, but we do have a note from Samsung. They say The Frame needs almost the same amount of electricity in Art Mode as in TV mode. In hard figures, external reports talk of 100 watts in TV mode and 60 to 130 watts in Art Mode, depending how bright the room is. While Samsung themselves give 118 watts as the average value, they don’t specify if this is while watching TV of admiring art. But we can safely assume this isn’t a top-scoring environmentally friendly product yet.
Well there is your problem. That review is not of the 32" version. A bigger screen is going to require more power. I can't tell exactly what size those power numbers are from, but it is at least the 55" version and not the 32" version that was used as a comparison to the 32" e-Ink display in the original post.
Well on the plus side we now have figures for the annual electricity cost of both the 32" model and the larger 55" model. $100/year is probably still more than I'd want to pay on a picture frame though, I gotta say. That's about the same cost as basic Netflix.
I am right there with you. I can't say I would jump to purchase either but the $600 upfront and $100 per year option is less outrageous to me than the one that costs $2700 upfront but is practically free in perpetuity.
But light box type backlit art just doesn't look right, it's a cool comparison and worth doing, but with e-ink you get contrast that is proportional to the ambient light (and unless art mode changes significantly the refresh which it might, I haven't checked, LCD screen will still not photograph or film well). It won't photograph as well with flash etc. either. And obviously most important: if you have friends who are pretentious enough to turn up at your house wearing sunglasses, it'll look good for them too...
I get it's sort of priced as an intangible piece of art, that is worth wildly different amounts to different people, but to the people it's worthwhile to, the difference is everything.
Yes, I'm also a sucker for e-ink. I just love the aesthetic.
Thanks for digging into the costs and info then, it's been an interesting conversation to follow.
meanwhile, the e-ink display is black and white, so for the newspaper or some other kind of art might be enough, but the lcd screen on the other side is much more versatile, It can even show animations and video.
Do you guys have variable rate plans? In Texas I pay spot rate updating every 5 minutes. There is a 3c/kwh fee regardless of price. Most of the time it's 2-3c/kwh however it occasionally goes to $1-9/kwh. At night it's usually .01c to sometimes well into the negatives where I get paid to use electricity. As you can imagine I charge my electric car at night and in average it only costs me about $2-3 per 1000 miles of range.
Oh, that is expensive. Here in northern sweden I pay $0.08 per kWh. However you guys plastered all your houses with solar panels a few years ago so I guess that helps a lot to keep the cost down by not needing to buy so much.
Last month, ConEd charged me 12.65¢ per kWh just for delivery (before taxes, surcharges, etc). Then my actual electricity supplier charged me a further 16.90¢ per kWh. Call it 30¢ / kWh.
To me, the poor look would be from the LCD being its own light source. The e-ink screen makes it look like a proper piece of paper since it’s illuminated by outside light. I think that really changes the concept. If I want a TV hanging on the wall, that’s easy enough (as you say). If I want a daily newspaper hanging on the wall looking like the real thing, I bet e-ink looks a lot better.
In the showroom The Frame looks indeed quite good, but I'd be worried about how it looks in less optimized spaces (i.e. dimly, unevenly lit). And they reserve the "Art mode" adjustments to their specific app for it, so you're very limited in using it for your own content.
With a light sensor you could adjust the colour of an LCD display so it exactly simulates the light reflected by paper. I don't understand why nobody did it before. Now you can't patent it though because this comment serves as prior art :)
Yes, these sorts of things are common in photography workflows. There are color profilers [ex: 0] that update your monitor's profile in real time to maintain a consistent profile given ambient light changes.
They're usually used as part of a larger calibration workflow, for example: calibrating your monitor and printer so that what you print with a specific ink/paper combination looks exactly like what you see on the screen. (Or, as much as is technically possible to do so.)
I've also noticed this on my Google Home/Nest Hub, where it has an effect where it adjusts the image on screen to match the color temperature of the ambient light. It makes for a really weird (albeit pleasant) effect that to my eye makes the image look more like a printed/reflective image. I've long wondered if you could duplicate that effect by replacing the backlighting in a junk LCD with something that can adjust color temperature and adding a color sensor, but haven't had time to try it.
I was in the mall just a few minutes ago, and while I was waiting for a coffee I was standing next to one of those movie-poster billboard things that have TV in them. Every few seconds a poster for a movie, or cleaning product, or some store would pop up, each had some subtle animation. They were really high res, 4k perhaps. Really nice and crisp.
Anyhow, I was thinking how great the images on them were.
The total absence of a backlight is hard to replicate the experience of in real life. Spending $2500 on this is also not for me, but I just spent a couple minutes playing with the contrast and brightness on my high-middle Dell monitor and I couldn't get anything that was convincingly "closer to paper than to a computer monitor".
Having to run a hidden wire to it is another downside, but 500 euros probably covers that job in most cases.
I wonder if one of those non-backlit memory LCDs could do the trick. (The kind of display used on the Playdate console, and I believe most Pebble smartwatches.)
1. LCD does not run on a battery, like this. Greatly improves aesthetics and flexibility of placement
2. LCD will never look the same. You can dimm it all you want, but in evening you'll still have a backlight. I have Samsung Art Frame TV, which tries to do the same. It's closer than most things, but nothing like an e-ink display. It's night and day compared my (2) eInk tablets
I'm fairly sure 32" and above has only been available for 3 or 4 years. With a low volume, niche product 2300 Euros is really not unreasonable, particularly in a commercial setting
It is really difficult to describe the benefits of e-ink vs. even great displays. The closest perhaps is the oled of my iPhone with the automatic color adjustment. But for emulating the look and feel of paper, e-ink cannot be beaten. I just basically replaced my iPad Pro for note taking with the reMarkable 2, and it is amazing what a difference it makes. Besides the textured surface, it just looks like paper with ink on it. The iPad is great, but always looks like a screen.
e-Ink really does look very different. Especially if you are hanging it up in a bright, sunlit room, it is a world of difference from LCD. In fact, the sunnier it is, the better your e-Ink displays look, while the worse your LCD displays will look.
Also, e-Ink displays don't emit light so they are extremely pleasing to the eye, and don't light up your bedroom at night, if you want it in your bedroom. They also can maintain an image with zero power, which is great if you're conscious about energy usage.
The 2300 euro price of this display is a bit beyond my personal budget for projects, but if you're happy with 13.3 inches you can try this Waveshare display:
If you want a clean construction with all the electronics in one piece, another option you might consider is to hunt for used, 13.3 inch older Boox tablets, which run Android, and just write an Android app for them to do whatever you want them to do.
If you're looking for a less hacky version that still looks good (similar to the OPs 32" display) and is simple to build upon - you can use our 13" touchless variant.
The Joan line is fully productivized and you can use our hosted service to connect to any HTML source (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-13/).
Scale matters a lot. e-ink form factors that are used in consumer products have gotten much cheaper.
The smaller 2-3 inch ones (like what some stores use for their pricetags) are only a few dollars. You can find tablet sized displays for ~50 dollars. I eink is often the best choice, especially if you care about power consumption (like a hobbyist project on batteries) and a less obnoxious aesthetic (backlights in dark rooms are annoying).
I've thought about making an eink calendar before, but since the cost is so high I wondered if it would be cheaper just buy 31 2 inch screens and somehow connect them.
The screens usually have at least 1-2mm border around them, plus driving complexity will go over the roof. But it's a great tinkerers project - go for it!
Since our software allows tiling we've built some test large scale composite screens out of our 6" and 9" devices - I think maximum was around 25-50 screens combined in a big virtual surface, with resolution over 10k x 10k pixels. So sure, it can be done, but is a pain to setup and run.
if it’s obvious that you shouldn’t spend $2300 consumer electronic being relegated to an art piece using almost none of the utility it is capable of, then dont do it
if the answer isnt so obvious then it’s still interesting and viable
When I saw the article I thought that perhaps he found that well priced large e-ink display or pulled from a failed product, but turns out he just found a large one.
Every couple of weeks I find myself wondering: "It's (insert year here), why no e-ink picture frames yet?".
Much as I like tinkering, I don't want a cobbled together raspberry pi plus lower power mamagement module with some alibaba special screen, all wrapped together with duct tape. I just want a nice looking consumer grade device, maybe 8x6" or thereabouts, reasonable resolution, grayscale is fine if necessary, an sd card slot where I can stick a load of jpegs and let it run with a photo change or two a day, with about six months in between recharges.
Is that too much to ask?
I'm sure the first company to do this is going to make a killing.
Consumer market is all about quantities and pricing, so it's really hard to launch a successful consumer product in this space as E Ink internet connected photo frame is as niche you can get.
We actually offer a device that can be used in this way (it's intended for business use) - it's a 13" device that will work up to a year on battery power, can be mounted with a magnet (no drilling) and has a Red Dot award for design (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-13). You can upload images or connect whatever webpage you want.
People may think they want colour, but I'm convinced it's not as much as they don't want something resembling a glaring low grade android device, propped up on a bookshelf, with a usb power lead trailing out of it to the nearest socket.
A nice sharp grayscale, hang and forget (maybe on an actual wall), with the e-paper aesthetic, is going to beat this hands down.
I'd disagree entirely. As mentioned in my other comment, I have an e-ink tablet on a stand on my desk[1], and I think it looks stunning, especially contrast wise. It has that "real physical object" kind of aesthetic, that is virtually irreplaceable if you want a thing of beauty.
It doesn't glow in low light, and it's only increasingly visible as Ambient light gets brighter. Those are features for a static thing to look at in my book.
That orange glow was actually terrible white balance because of the context I took the photos. I Should have corrected those pictures, that orangy hue is not how it looks.
And if cartoons, graphic novel panels, newspapers rendered on e-ink don't seem like "anything even resembling art" to you that's fine. It's the most subjective thing in the world, but there are a lot of people who do.
My photos were not meant to be representative of the peak of how good the screen can look, else I'd have taken them again.
I’m torn between thinking this is a performance art piece commenting on the consolidation of media outlets, and a Cramer piece from a lost Seinfeld episode (“Jerry, you gotta see this. It’s great. All the news, all the time, you never need to leave your apartment. Think of the money you save on shoes...”)
What about a physical front page that gets printed daily using something like an HP Designjet T210?
You can mount it (it's wireless) and it can print 2' wide from a roll of paper. You feed the paper into a custom frame (add margins to the PDF -> JPG script) and then add a slightly sharp cutting edge at the bottom of the frame so that every day the previous day's frontpage will come out from the bottom of the frame and you can tear it off (reuse as needed).
You would need to pay for something like a 700' roll of 24" butcher paper for $18 and ink (yes I know HP is a terrible company on ink) but it might be even more realistic!
Now you've got me thinking about how to translate this to my POS printer. I'm already grabbing the NYT front page into DayOne, I might as well get more use out of it :)
I wanted to see more pictures of the screen from the front dammit! I would like to know what it would look like if I were to just get up and stand in front of it as if I were reading it.
There's one shot that's almost 3m away. Then the rest are extreme close ups only showing half the thing at an angle!
I believe the author was concerned about the copyright infringement that might occur due to showing the entire front page. Seems he purposely made all text below the headlines unreadable.
Perfectly reasonable concern, although I too wish there was a clearer shot of the front. Dang copyright laws!
Same. Can it also show HQ black and white sketches? Or other artwork?
I remember getting a digital photo frame for my parents when I was like 14 and instantly (even with teenage sensibilities) being upset that it looked fake and tacky. If it looks like paper or photo or painting - that's great.
Yes, this is third time I'm sharing this link but I have a large format (A4) e-ink device and I actually love it for when it's just sitting on a stand and showing my chosen images.
I remember that previous post, and was interested in building something similar. I got turned off by the high prices of large eink displays but I did build an amazon lambda to let me use that published PDF as a daily news-source. I really like not having an infinite scroll or any links to anything else. It's open if other people want to use it: https://nytonline.net
Ahh this is super cool! Looking at the Visionect product line and their website isn’t entirely clear - do you need to pay a subscription fee for the cloud service that manages the device settings? This would be a great piece of office art but will be a much harder sell if there’s a paid cloud component...
Off-topic, but it really is `the Netherlands`; not unlike "the United Kingdom".
As Dutchmen myself, I too often see software doing this wrong, which is why I mention it here; in dropdowns, validations, invoices etc. When you design a "country dropdown", its `the Netherlands`, and it comes after `Nepal` and before `Netherlands Antilles`, and it should be highlighted when someone types `net`. Often one can "solve" the sorting by moving the `the` to the back: `Netherlands, the`, `United Kingdom, the`, though that's a bit of a hack more than an actual solution.
At least you don't have to guess whether you're filed under 'UK', 'England', or 'Great Britain' four times (USB-style) before you find it.
(Yes it is usually UK, but often enough isn't to be annoying. There are legitimate reasons you might want to be more specific, but IME it seems to happen just at random, based on where the developer got a 'countries list', I suppose.)
Not to mention when UK sites, or sites that already know I'm in the UK, give me an otherwise alphabetised list with 'United States' at the top, and then even when I start typing 'Uni' make me go through UAE first...
If we're playing the small-gripes-game, well at least yours is actually listed! Unlike the Faroe Islands, which are frequently missing. Okay not that much these days, but it still happens sometimes!
I could probably pick Denmark instead, but then my package would most likely never be delivered.
That doesn't sound like a small gripe! What do you do, if it does mean it wouldn't be delivered? You just can't order from a lot of places, and if it's something that matters enough you hassle them about it? Egh, yeah, I don't envy you!
I didn't expect the e-ink display to cost 2.3k Euro's, but I love the concept and it looks great.
If the price could come down I think a consumer product that can be pointed at any web page would have lots of amazing use cases - from dynamic picture frame, to news, stats, etc.
Why is everyone so obsessed with what this costs? I'd imagine a lot of us have couches with a similar price tag, despite much cheaper options being available.
This is likewise part of someone's living room, they can spend whatever they like on it as a matter of taste.
Because many here dearly would like to have this setup, but cannot justify the price tag. A couch is a daily used piece of furniture, basically something essentially needed for comfortable evenings. A good couch you can use for a very long time. This is gorgeous, but just a toy without filling a daily need.
Also it is the frustration, that eInk prices should have come down further and there should be more eInk powered devices available on the market. There are a lot of really great things one could make, if eInk would be more widely available.
If a lot of great things were built and bought by customers, eInk would be more widely available. :) If you want to make eInk happen in other applications, just go and buy the devices that are out there.
You can be the visionary that makes the segment happen. :)
I'm on the other end: Why is furniture so damn cheap? It uses natural resources, causes waste, needs transport, and above all, needs manufacturing, by craftsman and women.
My wife repairs (upholstery) furniture and car interiors; with european wages, refurbishing, say, your designer-office chair or sofa easily costs upwards of €2000
(the answer, I'm afraid, is that "manufacturing" is cheap because of defacto slavery (sweatshops) of state subsidy (China), that "waste" and ecological footprint is not included in the price, and transport also subsidised by both the far-too-cheap "overseas" labor, and often even direct from states.)
It'd be cool if couches came as a kit with an order sheet for you to source the foam locally. The frame and coverings would fit in a door-sized package. Hmm.
Because I come to hacker news wanting cool DIY tech I can do something with in my home. At $2300 this article is interesting but not what I was hoping for.
"Oh that's really cool I could do X with it." Looks up price -> closes tab.
It is art, but the author also said he reads it daily to get a news digest. It is full-sized and sharp, so just as easy to read as a newspaper, and also hanging at eye-height.
I can also see it as part of a news diet: get the headlines and major trends of the day while waiting for your coffee and toast in the morning, then you don't need to be distracted by news websites when you're working. That's actually how the morning paper was meant to be consumed: get info early in your day. If you want the whole paper, the software could be modified to load the entire paper PDF and have a control to page through.
I wouldn't call it envy. It is just the frustration that eInk screens are still so expensive. This display is gorgeous, but I cannot justify the expense in the grand scheme of things.
Because this Hacker News, where you have to be either cynical or pedantic in all your comments. This project is very cool, so the only major downside (the price) is used to fuel the cynicism.
It could cost 15 bucks and people would comment about the fact that it uses a cloud CMS. Or be disgusted by the PHP snippet.
It’s just the culture of HN. You can’t change that anymore.
32" eInk wall art, or a 16-core Ryzen 9 workstation with 128GB of RAM. Let me think, hmmm, I guess I can't really put a price on impressing my hipster friends.
Where can you get a workstation like that for $2,300? Is that building it yourself out of parts? Last time I looked into getting a machine like that it seemed to cost more like $4,000+.
In a similar vein, someone previously created a "Very Slow Movie Player" using e-ink.[1] I always thought this would make for a nice little art piece in a room.
I posted a few days back that I was putting together one of these, very similar to the one described in that story.
The e-ink screen I was waiting for (this one: https://www.waveshare.com/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm) arrived literally days after I posted that comment, about a month earlier than expected, and I now mostly have an initial version of the project working.
Some comments: A nice 6” screen for $70ish is a pretty great deal, although I’ll confess that I’m thinking about upgrading to their similar 9.7” screen, which is about double the price.
A full frame update takes about half a second (but the whole screen does flash white during it, so it definitely draws the eye if you have it anywhere in your eyeline when the frame update happens. In theory the display supports partial updates, but I’m not sure it supports them in greyscale display modes; I haven’t investigated that yet)
One gotcha which I hadn’t planned for is that even when fully blank, the display isn’t really white. I’d say that it’s maybe a 30% grey, so the movie frame can often appear to just be a big black rectangle, unless the room lighting is really good. And if you’re framing the display with a white mat around it (as I did), then that’s just going to make it look even darker again. I think I’m going to have to cut a new mat from a darker material. And in the meantime, I’m boosting brightness and contrast of each extracted frame before converting to greyscale, and that’s helped a lot. (In the medium story, Bryan is using a 3D printed frame in black without a mat, which strongly mitigates the contrast issue)
Another gotcha I ran into is that the frame I bought to put the project in (an Ikea Hovsta) turns out not to be deep enough to house a pi + the hat which controls it, so I’m probably going to need to buy a deeper frame (right now I have the pi hanging out the back while the frame sits on my desk). You might be able to squeeze everything into the frame if you used a RPi Zero and wired the connections individually, instead of connecting via the HAT.. but I’m not sure whether an RPi Zero will be able to keep up with decoding a HD video stream and dithering and displaying frames even at a 2.5 minutes/frame speed. (I haven’t tested at all; it might be totally fine!)
It's not at this large scale, but I have an Onyx Lumi, and somehow my favourite thing about it is that I changed all the lock screens to pictures from the Moomins, and it sits on a stand on my office desk [1].
The Lumi is capable of playing video in e-ink, and I actually had a desire to see a classic newspaper like this, but with small videos instead of images, I love that old new tech concept as simple as a newspaper with moving images (on click probably, more than constantly aminating).
I also use it daily as a practical device and it's only a 13" size (A4), so substantially smaller, but people would still question how much I paid, and probably question me even harder if they new I'd also got a ReMarkable 2 on pre-order.
I just love the aesthetic of e-ink so much. I previously submitted a post about the Dasung Paperlike monitor[2], and I actually bought it years ago and sold it because I couldn't handle the refresh rate, but I was interested to see they are still going and still the best in class for that use-case. The Onyx Lumi actually also works as a second monitor so my dream of working outside on sunglasses might still happen.
I love this use of e-ink as wall art, and I have hoped for years the technology could become more ubiquitous outside of e-readers.
I love the idea of an e-ink display as an art piece, but does a dedicated display for news headlines really operate in the spirit of calm technology, given the current political climate?
Interesting thought. On the one hand, its lighting (or lack thereof) causes it to visually blend in with its surroundings; it doesn't stand out at all and functions as a piece of art. But its content can metaphorically yell at a person.
I think calm technology is characterized by tech which is easily ignorable/does not outwardly communicate unless the user wants to interact with it. Given that the display effectively functions as a piece of art unless someone decides to look at and read it, I don't think it would contradict with this characterization. The stress that would be responsible for violating the spirit of calm technology only exists after a person decides to read the display.
One of the key technologies of surveillance in the novel is the “telescreen,” a device very much like our own television.
The telescreen displays a single channel of news, propaganda and wellness programming. It differs from our own television in two crucial respects: It is impossible to turn off and the screen also watches its viewers.”
Well, it’s only halfway to 1984, since it doesn’t look like it has a camera. Let’s call this a 992 technology.
For New Yorkers, walking out of the flat and being bombarded by a loud presentation of news was part of the experience for over 100 years, ever since newsstands have been around.
But the difference here is instead of being bombarded with 7 or 8 differing dailies headlines, you get exactly one. The NYT. That’s a bit Orwellian.
For some reason, the story of the man who ate nothing but McDonalds for weeks straight popped into my head.
Neither being obsessed with the news nor being completely away from it will bring calm. You need to give yourself "just enough" time to process what's happening and yield control to the world.
Of course, this is easier said than done and I'm failing terribly at it.
And, I think the idea of just having the front page of the New York Times on your wall, which will only show a set number of stories and will only ever update once per day, could be a great moderating force!
I think this varies a lot from person to person - I love being up to date and knowing what's going on in the world keeps me 'calm', just to give perspective.
As an art piece, this certainly keeps itself in the background and never tries to get your attention, instead just catches your eye, which might fit the 'calm technology' paradigm a bit better.
Yeah, and frustratingly or fortunately (depending on how you look at it) that board has a full Linux/WiFi/Bluetooth stack on it so you don't need/can't use a ESP32/Whatever.
Oddly, I got this flash message after adding a screen to my cart:
31.2˝ monochrome ePaper Display [VA3200-QAA]【Display Module Only】
PLEASE NOTE:
(I) THE PRODUCTS ARE NOT CONSUMER PRODUCTS INTENDED FOR PERSONAL, FAMILY OR HOUSEHOLD PURPOSES; AND
(II) PURCHASER IS PURCHASING THE PRODUCTS FOR COMMERCIAL USE AND/OR IN A BUSINESS CAPACITY. ORDERS PLACED BY CONSUMERS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED
Seems a bit harsh, and it wouldn’t be for regulatory reasons, would it?
eInk displays are really quite fun to work with. Pre-pandemic shutdown, I was working on a custom work badge holder that was primarily an eInk display to show my picture and daily work calendar.
A little Arduino can easily pull down my week's schedule from Outlook, then update the screen for the current day, then put itself in a deep (extremely low power consumption) sleep until it's time to update with the next day. Wake up, update display, go back to sleep - all in a few seconds with minimal battery use. And any time I re-sync via USB, it updates the schedule and the display, plus charges a small LiPo battery that runs things.
Is it super useful? Eh no, everything it has is on my phone already. Is it fun tech to work with? Most definitely.
PS
Probably most people know this but in case not, once you set an eInk display, it requires no power to maintain the image. I've got a few small ones I put images on a few years ago that are still just fine.
You could probably improve upon this with an ESP8266; built-in WiFi and the ability to deep sleep should allow for completely wireless operation for a couple weeks / months.
Same and now I'm actually debating getting that 32" panel. I've longed for some sort of pinboard style display that I can put things like calendar and reminders on for years now.
The primary blocker is the price. This use-case is going to be huge when the price falls enough. I can imagine using two or three in various contexts around the house/office.
I built one using raspberry pi and PaPiRus display. It's tiny but it suffices for a desktop notification system.
I also gamified it using a plant so that I would read all unread emails by the end of day (having it grow/die depending if I hit the goal). You should give it a shot.
Imagine waking up one day and half of that frame is "We value your privacy, please accept our cookies" and the other half is "you ran out of free articles for this month, please sign up for a subscription here". Might be more realistic as well.
Currently, BOM cost is higher than that, I believe. But we can hope that with devices like the Remarkable bringing larger format e-ink that the pricing can be driven down with process improvements that come from scale.
Thank you so much for that link! I just got my reMarkable2 (which I adore) and this is quite useful. Both by itself as well as for hacking pointers. Being able to use my reMarkable as a static eInk display of a content of my choice is so useful, something I always missed with my kindle.
The screen itself _is_ a commercial product. The custom software to run this is only a few dozen LoC on a server and you could probably work out how to hack it directly with the Visionect software.
Hmm.. not 100% sure but I see 2 bugs in the PHP script:
1. the src of the image in the HTML is the local path on the hosting server (it would become src="/var/www/nyt/nyt.jpg" )
2. The v= parameter always uses current date, even if it downloaded yesterdays image. I assume it is being used to prevent caching, but thus doesnt really work. I'd use either an hash of the file or store the date used for the download in a variable and use that.
I was just thinking how cool it would be to have a colour e-ink display showing something like the current New Yorker cover. They do exist [0] but are likely significantly more expensive again than monochrome, and the 32" panel listed on the site is only 720p.
I bought a 7.5-inch eink screen from Amazon, put it in a photo frame, and programmed it to show my todo list so that I could check the list without turn on my laptop.
It is pretty good. The only thing that annoys me is that when it refreshes, the screen flashes (in back and white) multiple times, which disturbs me.
Usually the e-ink screens which flash multiple times during an update are tri-color screens; most commonly either black/white/red or black/white/yellow (and other colors are apparently available, but much less commonly seen in the wild!)
Every display like that which I’ve used could be put into a display mode where it shows only black/white, which will make updates a lot faster and result in the screen only flashing once per full update. For example, I have a very small black/white/red display which takes about six flashes and 15 seconds to complete a display update, but if I put it into black/white mode (i.e.: disabling support for red), then the update takes less than a second and only one flash.
That might be an option for you if you don’t mind giving up the third color!
That's definitely a matter of perspective, once you consider it as an art piece you should consider the pricing in terms of how art is priced. It's approx $800 per sq ft, which certainly wouldn't be considered expensive in the art world.
Of course galleries usually take about a 40% cut, so the retail price would probably end up north of $5,000, probably more if the artist wants to make any money too. Which definitely moves the price per sq ft up.
I would like something like this but with the actual news/blogs that would interest me day-to-day. Then I could make it a ritual/rule that the only information I can consume would be from this display away from my office whilst standing.
Then I will block all news sites from my computing devices.
In similar vein, I'd always thought to use the daily APOD (astronomy picture of the day) photos with or without the accompanying summary (have not thought out the project any farther than this) for any sort of similar, daily refreshing piece.
I don't care too much how janky it is: raspi, Chinese lcd, barebones/no casing, etc etc.
If someone created a dumbed-down tutorial to make this happen, I'd be really inclined to recreate it. (And perhaps, there already are a dozen such tutorials out there ready to make me eat my words.)
Check out Inkplate [1], which is an ESP32 based 6.5" E Ink display, refurbed from a kindle. It has everything to build a wall mounted screen, that can update itself over Wifi or Bluetooth with battery for weeks.
They Croatian company [2] is already working on a 10" model.
The spec sheet on that link says '2x FPC interface', what does that mean? When I google 'fpc to hdmi' I get a bunch of generic hdmi cables. Is 'FPC' just a form factor to transfer an hdmi signal? More to the point, how would I hook up a display like this to an RPi, and how would I hook up 3 to anything without using a GPU with 3 outputs?
> As more and more connected devices arrive in our homes, it’s a good time to remember the principles of Calm Technology, first formulated at Xerox PARC in 1995. They talk about how technology should respect our attention and remain in the background most of the time, how relevant information should be presented calmly and make use of the periphery.
All New York Times content (including front pages) from 1851-1925 should be in the public domain. Are there any projects to scan, publish, or otherwise make them available to people?
This format, combined with the ability to hop around in time, would be pretty neat.
For a cheaper version of this (400 vs. 2300 Euros) on the reMarkable tablet, see remarkable_news[0], which runs as a systemd service and periodically refetches the URL of choice.
What about a projector that shoots an image to a persistent sensitive surface. That would be reinvention of photography!
Let's say, reset with one frequency of light, then flash with an image that holds for > 24h.
A yearly print subscription is probably only a couple bucks more per month when added to the monthly digital you’re paying for.
Get it in paper at your doorstep and save a bunch of money? Or hang it on the wall daily? If you want to read more just... turn to the right page!
Edit: I understand it’s not as fun or as arty to do this. I get why the OP is doing it, but $2700 seems like a lot. You could automate 25 kindles and a raspberry pi to create a collage (or show 20 different front pages?) for that kind of money.
It's wall art, not the news. The author reads the news just fine with their news subscriptions.
The form is more important than the function, at least to the author. Of course it can be achieved in any number of ways, but the author chose this way because it is pleasing to the eye.
<sarcasm>
But...but...but he wrote a bit of PHP that uses ImageMagick to convert the PDF to a JPG!
</sarcasm>
At least he linked to the original posting by that Google guy who actually built his version from parts instead of buying a ready-to-go-but-pricey solution and tethering himself to some cloud CMS backend of the manufacturer.
I'm surprised that NYT still offers these PDFs unauthenticated. If enough people build these displays, they will eventually take notice and turn them into (literal) paywalls.
I read the first few paragraphs, then searched for a dollar sign, which did not come up, nor did a euro sign, because oddly the author chose to write out "2300 euro's" [sic]. So a little bit hard to find the buried price for people who aren't interested in reading the whole column.
I do see a lot of comments regarding the price, so it's best if I do the general disclaimer. E Ink screens are very pricy (compared to LCD). The driving is even pricier. And since this is not a mass-mass produced product (at least not in a sense of your 75" OLED TV) you get to the price that you have. We've worked for years on getting the price down for the E Ink screens (trust me on this), but there is a question of critical mass. E Ink in the non-reader, non-shelf label applications is still a very niche solution, that will command very high price. I hate to say it, but the only way we could have brought the price down with current quantities is if we built an inferior product as the price right now is the function of Bill-of-Materials.
We tried a lot of applications, some covered previously here on HN, we currently see that there are just two other avenues where E Ink is being used and has the potential for mass depoyments in the near future.
1. In offices it can be used as interactive signage - we've built a very successful solution for meeting room booking around it (see http://getjoan.com).
2. The market for outdoor displays - especialy smart bus stops that run on solar - is starting to ramp up. Check out what our partners are doing in this space (a recent live deployment https://www.visionect.com/blog/coimbra-the-city-of-the-stude...).
If anyone would like to get more information about E Ink, please shoot - we've tried every E Ink display out there, played with color display and probably seen every E Ink application out there. You can also shoot me a direct mail to luka.birsa AT visionect.com.