E Ink’s color ePaper tech gets supersized for outdoor displays
152 comments
·February 11, 2025chainwax
PaulRobinson
Consider whether advertising at all should be everywhere, not just the brightness of it.
In Brazil, one town banned all advertising hoardings (back when they were just posters), and observed multiple changes in how people felt about the space, including the fact that they were hiding entire favelas ("shantytowns"), that many locals were not really aware of.[1]
It's been a while since I subscribed to Adbusters magazine[2], but I do believe in their central premise that advertising, whether it be in public spaces or online, is harmful to mental health and society, because it perpetuates an unhealthy consumerism, and it distorts truth.
So, I say, don't just make advertising a bit more subdued than an LCD (but not as sustainable as recyclable paper which was fine for a long old time): let's just get rid of it.
ToucanLoucan
I wish I could up this far more than once. Instead of “sustainable” waste, how about just do without ads? Everyone hates them, their effectiveness is murky at the absolute best, and even non-emissive ones are intrusive and obnoxious. We don’t need these things anymore, if I want a new gadget, or lunch, or whatever, I don’t look out at fucking billboards, I pull out my phone and google for nearby businesses or for the gadget I’m after. Public space ads were a shit solution for product discoverability when they were invented, and today they’re completely fucking irrelevant. Most ad tech is to be honest, it’s just an entire industry built of people and companies pretending it’s 1955.
mazambazz
You don't need to look at a billboard at the time that you want to buy something related for it to work.
The mere-exposure effect (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect>) is all that is needed.
If ads were "completely fucking irrelevant" then companies wouldn't be spending the large amounts of money that they do on it. I agree that ads are a nuisance, but they're not going to be easy to simply get rid of, as long as money is involved. And considering how tightly coupled finance is with policy nowadays, I find it highly unlikely legislators would pass bills banning public advertisements. Especially when sometimes the government itself is the one getting paid to promote goods and services.
Finally, the issue is also defining what constitutes an advertisement. How do you draw the line between advertisement and free speech? If, theoretically, a very passionate citizen, enjoyed a product so much that they simply wanted to publicly express their satisfaction with it, posted a sign of that expression, does that constitute an advertisement?
If it does, and gets removed, then I'm afraid that's no different than some dystopian form of censorship.
If it doesn't, then it would be trivial for companies to continue advertising, because then every ad could just be re-framed to be the personal expression of an individual.
HelloMcFly
I agree with the idea, but I guess this is just one element of life I've accepted that we've lost as a society. I just don't have the energy for every fight. I knock on doors for civil rights, I put on outdoor gear to do wildlife population counts or invasive flora removal, I don't have the energy left for another cause.
PaulRobinson
Sure, but it takes a village, and all that. If polling data shows voters resent advertising across their town, you'll find that becomes a key part of messaging and canvassing for votes, so just saying something might be enough.
And we can work together: I don't have time to knock on doors for civil rights or go count lesser-spotted newts, so I'll thank you for what you're doing to make our society better, and I'll go do some lifting on this bit, 'k?
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.
Karliss
Considering that I see giant >50 inch vertical LCDs screens used as advertisement boards in bus stops and every 100m along street. Same places that previously had rolling advertisement lightboxes swapping between printed ads every couple of minutes. So i would say there are quite a few places where ads are already past the point and the cost analysis isn't E-ink vs printed poster or rollup lightbox, it's E-ink vs >50 inch LCDs.
Browsed aliba and price difference between those rollup lightboxes vs similar size outdoor LCD advertisements wasn't that big ~$200-$400 for lighbox and maybe $400-1000. Wouldn't be surprised if advertisement companies can also ask more money for ads on digital screens compared to printed ones. Payoff period might be shorter than you think. But it would be nice to hear from someone in business who knows more accurate numbers.
As for refresh ugliness in case of advertisements it might be considered a feature even without fancy effects -> blinking attracts attention. And once you unavoidably turn your head to take a look at what's blinking in the corner of your eye the add has already changed. As long as it isn't too frequent maybe once every 3-5 minutes it will probably be considered acceptable. The giant LCDs with annoying videos area already sufficiently big eyesore.
Lutger
Movement is as much a visual pollution as light is. I find it very, very distracting. That is perhaps a cognitive defect on my part. The fact that e-ink screens will be relatively static is only a good thing in my book.
Another complication might be that e-ink by itself is not visible in the dark, though it isn't a problem to add lights. However, that could again be a benefit.
Personally I would love a ban on ALL advertisement in public spaces, even print. Some brave politicians have done it on a city level, and the citizens just love it. Banning moving images and lights for advertisement would be a compromise, e-ink screens could then still be allowed.
dspillett
> Movement is as much a visual pollution as light is.
I find more so, especially when it happens in my peripheral vision. It can be irritating enough for me walking past overly animated displays in shops, I bet it could be dangerously distracting for some drivers (who aren't always giving as much attention to the road ahead as they should be anyway) going past street or shop window signs.
> though it isn't a problem to add lights.
Does backlighting eink work? I think all the hand-held displays I've experienced have been lit from the sides. That is probably practical though: the old posters-on-a-roll setups seen in highstreets were often lit that way and with modern bulbs it wouldn't consume as much power these days.
> Banning moving images … e-ink screens could then still be allowed.
I would be wary of that loophole. I've seen some impressive displays of quick refresh rates for e-ink, so playing distracting video content would be perfectly possible assuming those techniques scale to this size, and if advertisers can do it they will whether it is good for anyone else or not.
Telemakhos
> I find it very, very distracting.
The human brain has cognitive subsystems devoted to detecting motion that seems non-random, that is, that seems to move with deliberate purpose contrary to other motions like leaves or ripples. It's important for predation on both sides—for the predator or the prey.
That's also exactly why advertisers love it and will continue using it. They will buy any politicians who look likely to ban moving images or lights.
jfim
It's not only you. Movement in general is a preattentive feature, meaning that it gets processed subconsciously and appears to "pop out" in an image.
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.
dspillett
> Bus advertising.
If what I see on busses around here (York, UK, and occasionally other cities) is anything to go by, bus-side advertising is dying on its arse. Most of the busses I see are carrying adverts for sales that ended months ago of films “in cinemas now!” that stopped playing on the big screen a year or more ago. If bus-side adverting were in a healthy state I'd have thought new content would have replaced those long ago.
m463
wonder if temperature and durability will be issues on the side of a bus...
achow
> ..that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently
On the contrary I would imagine that 99% of information displayed in outdoors is static in nature and does not need something in the range of 24fps.
After all once upon a time 100% of the world's outdoor displays were static, and things were fine. Time Square should not be a benchmark.
anigbrowl
full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly
Non-problem in my view. Today's 'ugliness' is tomorrow's nostalgia.
Animats
> I think seeing more public spaces shift away from emissive displays and putting more emphasis on quality lighting again would definitely be interesting.
What's the point of running the display on a battery if you need power for the "quality lighting"?
echelon
> I personally love this.
The tech is awesome, but the E-Ink company is holding it back.
We would have had large and cost effective displays well over a decade ago if E-Ink (the company) didn't patent patrol the technology. It's impossible to do anything in this space without touching their patents, and so independent of their direct involvement and licensing, there's no third party innovation or competition happening.
These displays have had so much promise, but they've taken decades to evolve into diverse shapes and sizes. And they still cost an arm and a leg relative to other display technologies.
Other commentary:
AshamedCaptain
Why is this _always_ repeated? Where are these patents? Where are the examples of eInk going against their competition??? Because you have a _myriad_ eink-like technologies from many other companies, most of them literally better than eink, that were available but were abandoned after they failed in the market.
One example I particularly liked is Mirasol, who was abandoned despite being owned by Qualcomm out of all companies (HIGHLY unlikely to be scared by a patent troll, considering Qualcomm could be arguably described as a patent troll themselves).
It's simply ridiculous to think that eInk would torpedo their own technology out of incompetence/malice/whatever yet these ideas keep being parroted here without _any evidence whatsoever_ as if it was gospel from the gods.
The real reason, of course, is that this technology is hard (plain physics), and that there's little investment because most consumers could not care less. The supposed advantages of eink are paper-thin at best (contrast sucks and keeps getting _worse_ after each generation, and that is without taking into account the color ones), customers have a hard time distinguishing it from other technologies such as reflective/memory LCDs (which practically beat them in every metric you can think of, even power usage -- except for long enough periods of idleness which are not of interest to any consumer), and at the end of the day most people will choose a backlighted LCD over all these alternatives anyway...
See Garmin, which started with reflective LCD watches for outdoor usage, and the moment they experimented with a plain old fugly backlighted LCD they decided to replace most of their series, _even the ones for primarily outdoor usage_, with backlighted LCDs (e.g. Fenix 8). Customers just buy shiny flashy screens more, what can you do about that?
eInk survives because they're actually one of the cheaper techs, which is the only reason talking about "billboards" is even remotely plausible, and even then they're having a hard time.
gamblor956
There's a lot wrong in this comment.
Eink B&W screen contrast has been improving dramatically with every generation, but there was a significant backward step in the jump to color eink screens (due to how the current Kaleido technology works). The Gallery technology does not suffer this lack of contrast, but the trade-off is that screen refresh times are slower than 1st generation e-ink panels.
Garmin still uses reflective LCDs, even on the Fenix 8. The AMOLED is a separate SKU.
Eink is superior to transflective LCDs in terms of power use as it only needs to be refreshed when content changes; an LCD must be refreshed multiple times per second. Only bistable LCDs can display an image without power but this comes at the cost of resolution and contrast.
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grishka
Shouldn't the first of those patents start expiring soon?
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_blk
I just have a strong distate for ads. Period.
Except the funny cat ones.
taurknaut
I'd love a future without advertisements.
crazygringo
All the examples in the photos are clearly lit, so the idea that these won't use power or will be unlit doesn't seem plausible. Just think of how many paper ads are lit from behind, when you're walking around a mall or airport.
Second, the contrast is bad. Most colors wind up looking washed out. It can be nice for reading, but advertisers want their ads to pop.
I don't see this taking off for advertising at all, because advertisers won't like it. What it does seem more useful for is informational signage. Building directories, maps, etc. Because those don't need to be lit, and the e-ink can be a lot higher resolution than a lot of jumbo LED displays.
navi0
The Innovator’s Dilemma supports your last paragraph but will likely make your first two paragraphs age poorly.
The tech will continue to improve if it finds its niche. Dynamic, low power, color informational signage displays are a big enough market by themselves to adopt and support enough product cycles to address shortcomings that advertisers have.
The potential for no mains power (e.g., small solar panel or a vibration energy harvesting power source) means virtually any flat wall could be turned into advertising inventory. Do accident lawyers need their ads to pop or just be displayed over and over again?
SXX
What you say could be correct for a lot of technologies, but not this one. E Ink tech do not have much traction because of "E Ink" the company and their patents. Basically it's highly proprietary and they dont want to give away control over know-how and production. Until major patents expire no one will it touch with a ten-foot pole.
catlikesshrimp
about energy efficiency of lighting, maybe they can move the lights depending on the time of the day. For some ads at least (like roadside)
Unfortunately, advertisers prefer the most distracting light intensity they manage. Only regulation can solve that.
turtlebits
Nowhere in the article does it say they won't use power? Being able to use a solar panel and a small (5000mAh) battery is pretty great. At least they'll still show an image even without power.
mystified5016
Have you never seen those highway billboards that rotate between three displays?
Advertisers will buy it because the seller can make the physical ad spot N times cheaper by showing N different ads during the day.
crazygringo
The question here isn't between static paper and e-ink.
It's between glowing LCD panels and e-ink.
Advertisers are already cycling their ads on LCD panels at bus stops, on the subway, etc.
Going to e-ink just makes the advertisement much dimmer, it can't handle video, and it becomes washed out. Why would avertisers ever prefer that?
sharlos201068
Probably because they'd be cheaper and easier to see in direct sunlight.
mrguyorama
Billboards are already digitized all over so I would expect any "We can make it N cheaper for N clients" pricing to already be done.
novaRom
Destined to become "best seller" if Aldi/Walmart/Ikea could offer 75" with 4K RGB for $150-200. This would be a perfect indoor wall decor in any room, kind of ultimate poster.
asoneth
A 31.5" color e-ink poster is ~$1700[1]. I do not know what these large panels cost but (possibly due to low yields) eink panel prices seem to scale superlinearly with area. I would expect a 75" panel that is five times larger to cost more than a used car.
Anything can become a "best seller" if you are able to arbitrarily lower the price by multiple orders of magnitude -- $500 luxury cars would fly off the lot but would not be profitable.
oefrha
Lol you can hardly get a 7.5’’ for that price. I once looked into making a few programmable ePaper “posters” for myself, and noped out of it when I saw the price.
mariusandra
Having gone through such a search just recently:
- This 13.3" panel cost ~$420 to make https://www.printables.com/model/1189455-waveshare-133e-6-co...
- This 7.3" panel cost ~$150 to make https://www.printables.com/model/1189420-waveshare-73e-6-col...
This includes shipping the panel from waveshare.com, paying taxes, adding a raspberry pi zero w2 + a sd card, and printing a case
daemonologist
My understanding is that the yields on large eink panels are horrendous (which is why they cost thousands and thousands of dollars). I would definitely buy one at that price though.
thefounder
I think you can’t even get them for $1500 - $2000
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.
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. :)
fosh
This is so polished! Have you shared the latex / other bits anywhere ?
chainwax
This was recently shared here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137513
m463
Can you point these at your own server instead of theirs?
whamlastxmas
I own 5 of them and love them!
jwithington
Trmnl was referenced but also this one https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/getting-started-with-badg...
bitdivision
https://www.waveshare.com/product/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-...
The spectra color displays seem to be available cheaper than I expected ($250). Note that the refresh cycle is really long on these though.
I'm now tempted to put something together.
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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.
brian-armstrong
$2500 isn't too far off of the BOM for epaper this large, plus some markup for the assembler. Even if you bought this as a bare panel and a battery on Alibaba, you're not going to do better than $1500 or so. At current date that's just what it costs
grogenaut
it's just absurdly priced though when you compare with a 80"+ tv, I get it, its different lower volume tech, but chicken and egg.
rbanffy
Indeed. This is the issue with these panels. They tend to be prohibitively expensive. Worth for signage because labour costs will dominate in the long run. I suspect this is what dictates the panel prices.
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CommieBobDole
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.
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.
gamblor956
Note that if you view the gallery, the 2nd and 3rd photos are real-world photos from industry expos.
If the Kaleido 3 Outdoor is similar to how the Gallery 3 panels work, image refreshes are very slow compared to the standard Kaleido 3 panels (which can't do vivid colors): on the order of seconds. This is acceptable for displays that change every few minutes or hours, but would be unusable handheld devices.
It's interesting that they've chosen to continue the Kaleido lineage rather than make a stronger push for Gallery.
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
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.
jolmg
You're not paying for art. You're paying for paper you can later display art on.
Also, with e.g. an oil painting on canvas, the cost of producing that is the time of the artist to paint it by hand. I don't think 10-20K is anywhere reasonable for e.g. a mass-produced inkjet-printed thing. Likewise 10-20K for a PNG file would be even more insane.
bitdivision
The displays seem to be available for around $250
https://www.waveshare.com/product/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-...
mariusandra
$250 is just part of the price.
I just went through the process and made this for myself: https://www.printables.com/model/1189455-waveshare-133e-6-co...
The total price was around $420. This includes shipping, taxes (to Belgium), a pi zero w2, a sd card, and printing a case.
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.
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.
deadbabe
Why art, I want to put photos on it that swap out every so often.
kusokurae
[dead]
bryukh
The interesting part here isn't the color - it's the temperature range (-15°C to 65°C) and massive 75" size. This could enable practical solar-powered information displays at bus stops and other public spaces.
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?
JSteph22
No e-ink product is cost effective.
That's why they have to tout other benefits like being "eco friendly".
toast0
Having a connected display gives advertisers a huge amount of control that they desire.
Being able to control the time of day that your ad is shown is a pretty big deal. Being able to edit or take down a poorly considered ad campaign very quickly is also a pretty big deal. Coordinating paper ads and other media is tricky, because the companies that manage the advertising display inventory only have so many workers and therefore only so much capacity to do changes.
Raztuf
Sounds like a real headache. Maybe we should get rid of this whole advertising thing.
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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.
VyseofArcadia
Right, but how much does the display itself cost compared to $15 to print a poster out and stick it in a frame?
outworlder
$15 times the number of posters you want to rotate. Plus the labor to replace them, multiplied by the number that you have.
floydnoel
electricity isn't the only resource to consider, however
atulvi
All I want is a Guernica sized borderless home art display.
rbanffy
E-wallpaper you can lay out modularly sounds like an amazing use case. Tiling edges would need patterned conducting/insulation adhesives but with some clever protocol negotiation each wallpaper tile can self-identify and display the pixels assigned to it. With some printed antennas it can be powered via RF for changing the image and then left unpowered.
m463
> Dimensions 349.3 cm × 776.5 cm (137.4 in × 305.5 in)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
interesting!
rcarr
Can any of the big e-reader companies just please release an A4 sized color e-reader? It can clearly be done, why are we still stuck with black and white for the 13 inch ranges?
cjameskeller
For ~$600, the Remarkable Paper Pro has a color, 12" diagonal display. https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-paper/pro/details/fe...
I don't have one, but it's closer to what you mention.
gamblor956
Currently, the cost of the panel alone would be nearly $1000. Yields on Kaleido-family screens aren't great (and are supposedly even worse for Gallery, the high-quality color panels) and they get even worse for larger panel sizes.
nottorp
Hmm why are all those companies trying and failing to make "smart" AR glasses.
All they need is to come out with a product that covers billboards in real time.
uBlock Origin for real life.
goda90
You could use them to replace everything with messages like in They Live https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yjw_DuNkOUw
nottorp
No in They Live the messages were already there but they were conditioned not to notice them consciously without the glasses.
BaraBatman
Funnily enough, a few months ago, inspired by They Live (and by a Simpsons episode) I tried to do exactly that as a POC: block real life billboards
https://github.com/bart-ai/bart
Ideally, one would use something like this on an AR headset/smart glasses and block unwanted stuff from their view
diego_moita
So, it is a product that has no vivid colours, no fast refresh, no video, is more expensive than a big television (i.e.: more interesting to steal if outdoors) and "doesn't cause light pollution" (i.e.: doesn't stand out the way you want adds to do).
What are its advantages then?
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.