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Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

How easy (and expensive) is it to buy OEM displays? The products you sell look cool, but seem to cater for the commercial market with economy of scale. If I want to got to EINK and buy a 6" Spectra panel, is that even possible as a hobbyist? Plastic Logic look the same.

If you look on Digikey, the best you can do is about 3-4 inches it seems. So for very simple stuff e.g. I want to add a basic non-volatile display to some sensor I've hooked up to a microcontroller, there aren't many easy options.

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Access to panels is possible, you just need to find the right distributor. But getting the display is just a small part of the story. You need to build your driving electronics and figure out how to drive the display. 3-4 inches are also usually much simpler to drive, you can use a TCON and there's no waveform management, etc...

The fact that this is much harder than it seems (hardware is non-mainstream, access to documentation is limited, support is very hard to get, displays need special driving chips) actually prompted us to provide a development platform for E Ink. It took us years to figure everything out and for somebody wanting to prototype something this is a show stopper.

As far as pricing goes, the 6" panels are priced approachable, while the large displays still need to hit the mass production price points. Obviously if you buy from us in bulk we can provide you much better pricing than a price for a development kit, but E Ink is not cheap.

I like how with words like "non-mainstream hardware", "acess to documentation is limited" you make it sound like using E Ink tech is incredibly complex and that mere mortals would not be able to do it on their own. Then at the end you casually mention that your company, Visionect can help. I googled and found that you are selling $6000 devel kits. I'm curious what is the price you're getting the displays for?

I understand your frustration, I too just want access to decently priced, and various sizes of e-ink displays. From my time playing with the little adafruit displays, I also get where Visonect is coming from as a whole stack (hardware, controller, api, software) that makes it easier to just get up and going sounds pretty dang great.

I think what it comes down to for me, is I am not buying a dev kit to get hooked into an ecosystem that I don't have really clear pricing on. Which is really to bad. I think if you had a cheaper wifi only 6" model that people could afford to throw away money on just to test ideas out, then you would get way more people interested.

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