E Ink's color ePaper tech gets supersized for outdoor displays
43 comments
·February 11, 2025CommieBobDole
glitchc
Agreed. More importantly, it's hard to believe that the relative contrast difference matches real-world use. They would have been much better off taking a proper photograph.
dyauspitr
You wouldn’t catch it if that lettering on that store looked fine.
xattt
You don’t shop at CBIIAHO?
grayhatter
if you ignore the dystopian hellscape that this comment is about to glorify... this does seem like the ideal (commercial) use case for AI imagery. The first being because I was only interested in the color gamut or fidelity of the eink, I completely filtered out the atrocity that is that AI generated mall... The AI generation they used is very well trained to produce images that, with only an instantaneous glance has no artifacts that immediately jump out as out of place. I'd describe it as a background blur you're less likely to notice. The caveat being a blur would be completely unremarkable, while this background is... unfortunate... fever dream does seem quite apt.
stevewodil
What is the issue?
jodrellblank
Look at the name of the shop on the left. It's an AI stable-diffusion type image. Look at the person standing on the right in the background who sort of has two heads? The top right the upper walkway has a blue glass wall which also waterfalls into the white wall.
The shop on the left, where is that dress? Inside or outside? The window to the left of the dress with the white rectangle outline is in front of the dress at the top of the picture and behind it at the bottom of the picture.
seanmcdirmid
It looks like it was AI generated, which makes us question if the product is also AI generated and doesn't really exist. I'm sure this is just bad advertising, they didn't take a shortcut with the product but they took a shortcut in showcasing the product, to the detriment of people actually believing if this is a real product.
1317
i didn't notice it at first either
look at the names of the shops
chainwax
I personally love this. I have a pretty strong distaste for bright screens everywhere and rather like the look of e-ink screens. I'd love a future where we move away from putting up LCD panels on every surface we can advertise on.
sho_hn
I think seeing more public spaces shift away from emissive displays and putting more emphasis on quality lighting again would definitely be interesting.
What mainly limits the applications for this tech is that full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly, so it prefers static content. For public spaces this could mean a greater emphasis on graphic design quality as well, since you'd probably only want to refresh out of sight of customers, e.g. outside of business hours.
The problem is that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print. Overall my gut feeling is that the economics just aren't quite there yet without some more effort put into changing the equation.
For examle - I think that E-Ink should actually kind of try making the refresh experience have its own aesthetic. Right now the refresh on the Spectra panels looks like the panel is having a seizure. If they could make it look cool (e.g. doing it a fancy geometric pattern or something), it might make it OK to refresh while being seen.
zimpenfish
> information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print
Bus advertising. According to people I worked with back in 2010 that were working on LED panels for buses[0], changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days. Which is a long time for a bus to be out of service.
An e-ink panel is a great solution - lightweight, zero power use until it needs changing, and the refresh rate doesn't really matter.
[0] Didn't succeed because LED panels at the time were big, low-res, bulky, and extremely power hungry.
michpoch
> changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days
That sounds like wrapping a whole bus with an ad. Hardly something an LED or e-ink display could replace.
TriangleEdge
I'd like a smaller one in my home that I could interact with programmatically. Something that could hold weather forecasts, family calendar events, reminders, pictures, etc. I like the matte look of e-ink.
brian-armstrong
There's Visionect if you want to go large enough to see on the wall at a glance (32")
xienze
Perhaps a requirement left unsaid by OP, but something reasonably priced. $2500 is a bit rich for what it would be used for.
sho_hn
Here's the one I built for my home:
This is still a black and white panel, but it's not that different with the color ones. Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
StevenNunez
This is so cool! I always dream of doing this but don't know where to start. Even using old LCDs for new and interesting form factors would be a dream. Nice work on this!
sho_hn
Thanks! The main difficulty & goal with this one was reducing the power consumption to the absolute minimum, which meant putting some effort into component choices and I also ended up writing the display controller driver myself.
But if you just want to get going, you don't really need to go through that sort of trouble. You can just buy a panel + controller board via a retailer like e.g. Waveshare, and hook them up to a computer. Quite a few of these controller boards even have HDMI input, or come with SDK code for e.g. Raspberry Pi if they use SPI over GPIO. You can tinker quite a bit without things getting more challenging, and if you can arrange for wired power you may not really need to optimize anything.
generj
How was your battery life performance?
I’ve been (slowly) working on a similar project and it’s been easy to get it running on my desk hooked into power but much more difficult to elegantly frame the panel that can just live on a wall.
sho_hn
I ended up replacing the battery with a larger one than the one pictured in the end, a 3100 (ed: hang on, was it maybe 3500 even?) mAh Samsung 18650 cell. I also switched the voltage reg to a more efficient chip. I now get about 9-10 months on a charge (with one daily refresh over wifi) in practice. At those durations battery Li-Ion self-discharge is actually a big factor sadly so a lot of those mAh fade into the ether. :)
chainwax
This was recently shared here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137513
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jackgavigan
There are also plans to use E Ink's technology for digital art: https://inkposter.com/
nashashmi
The price point is too painful for home use unless you place your frame high above inaccessible without ladders.
It should be used for billboard advertising. You don't even need that many PPI pixels per square inch because of how high above it is, and it would save ginormous bucks on printing canvases and technicians changing the ad. Not to mention, timed advertising.
hansonkd
> The price point is too painful for home use unless you place your frame high above inaccessible without ladders.
When i read this comment i had to go look at the product because i was expecting 10-20k. Looks very reasonable to me. The most expensive is only $2500? and the cheapest only $600? Seems super inline with what I would expect to pay for art.
jsheard
Is the image fidelity really good enough for that? I thought color e-ink had pretty limited bit-depth and gamut.
cogman10
It's not. They have 4k colors available. Good enough for an eink reader, not good enough for art display.
sho_hn
The Kaleido panels features in this article indeed do 4096 colors, but the Spectra 6 panels also from E-ink can be a bit more - they mix particles of 6 different primary colors, and with some advanced dithering in place you can get pretty impressive results that really look quite pleasing.
Still, there's a lot of details to consider and trade-ofs to make wrt/ content, and Spectra refresh is also dead-slow.
Perhaps to their credit, E-Ink isn't even trying to hide the refresh in their marketing material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr_EQaqTK0M (second half has a lot of examples of poster-sized Spectra 6 and Spectra 3100 panels).
hapidjus
Not all art would work but you could definitely find works that could work within the constraints.
geodel
Priced between $600-$2000. It can be themed for particular occasions, great for places like corporate offices, hotels which already spend quite a bit to look chic.
deadbabe
Why art, I want to put photos on it that swap out every so often.
kusokurae
[dead]
VyseofArcadia
I am a little skeptical of this application of e-ink. Is this really cost effective or environmentally friendly? Compared to an LED or OLED panel, sure, but how does it compare to ye olde poster behind glass? If you're willing to give up on snazzy animations anyway, how many times would you have to change the poster before the color e-ink is cheaper?
ChrisNorstrom
Yes. E-ink doesn't need electricity to show an image, it only uses small amounts of electricity to change the image. Technically, if it ran on batteries, you could pop in some batteries, change the advertisement image, and then take the batteries out and the image would stay like that permanently.
mrkpdl
Seeing panels of this size is making me want eink whiteboards for planning meetings.
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atulvi
All I want is a Guernica sized borderless home art display.
Imustaskforhelp
I had this idea , a long time ago , my thinking was that e inks don't actually require energy to store data , so effectively we could use e inks for advertisement and only change them when needed , effectively being the best of both worlds ie. less energy cost / carbon emissions and more cost effective / removing the labour aspect of removing / putting up bill boards
Advertisements are a fundamental part for a company. Depending on the type of company , it would still make sense for bill boards to be put out.
Hot take , but advertising onlines are a threat to security unlike bill boards , most online ads actively try to promote malware simply because of how easy it is to create an ad (google ads , more like yeh you can promote your spyware for homebrew by paying us a buck or two from the money you scam by your infoware)
I also don't like ads , simply because they don't understand me. But some do , there are many ads from my country that I & many others do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVvmLakUtXE
see this , an ad for bike in indian economy
Try to guess the number of views , seriously , I am talking to anybody reading this , to genuinely try to guess the number of views for a video whose length is exactly 1 minute.
Its 8.3 Million
Some people compare it to be a better song than many cinema movies songs for which you go to and pay with your cash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGwIFVUK7M
This ad is by Jindal , I got this in my recommended , yes a ad as a video shoved in my recommended.
Some commentors comment how they saw this ad in their movie cinema before the start of movie. And they said , that they felt that the movie they spent on the cinema was already worth it because of this ad alone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGwIFVUK7M
This has 20 Million Views !
I am sure that many american / other countries also have such advertising. But I don't like apple like advertising / bland .
Maybe its just me , but I like the old style so much more. Filled with emotions and art , yet it doesn't cross a line of being over. It just fits in perfectly.
I am 16 years old and though I don't use twitter , though I don't use facebook / I was never in the time for my space.
I still feel nostalgic for that era. I like how old twitter looks. I like how myspace functioned. In fact I created an account on spacehey just for that.
I like the old style liked videos , square box , it makes me feel as part of something greater , a bit nostalgic.
Also just remembered hamara bajaj ad which is also really nice.
from the hero splendor ad that I linked in first link
Tu hai toh main hu aur manjilo ka ghar aana chalta rahe
A very rough english translation would be
You are therefore I am , and let the dreams come to our house. Lets keep going.
It captures emotions perfectly.
I have spent 15 minutes writing this post & I have no regrets.
Thanks for reading.
ivell
Many Indian ads are creative and emotional. I know quite a few friends who actually spend time watching the ads if they have nothing else to watch.
wahern
> You are therefore I am
Reverse solipsism?
Could the folks at E Ink not afford a stock photo of a mall to Photoshop their product into for their press release? That first image looks like a fever dream.