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It should probably not be lost on us that the E-ink display[1] he's using in the prototype costs $1500. That's a lot for what basically amounts to a one color display, and if we ignore all the other features of E-ink, you could replicate this for less cost with other tech.

I recently experienced the Samsung Frame[2] which - to be clear - is NOT an E-ink panel, doesn't have the power savings, etc., but it's larger, cheaper, and has a very believable art mode. I was one of those guys who tried mounting an old flat panel to the wall to display art that I liked before realizing that it just wasn't believable. It was a nice enough effect in a well lit room, but turn the lights down in the slightest, and it's very obviously a television set, and just didn't feel at all arty. On the other hand, the Frame is extremely believable as a framed art print, to the extent that it fooled me the first time I saw one.

I haven't bought one yet, but it's much easier to imagine spending the $1000 for a Frame, mounting it vertically, and hacking out a way to format a newspaper graphic into its art mode than it is for me to imagine spending $1500 on an E-Ink display. Aside from being cheaper, if the project doesn't work out, then I can at least use the Frame for its intended purpose.

[1] - https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%CB%9D-monochrome-epap...

[2] - https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...

Question about the Samsung Frame that I didn't find answered in reviews: Does the adjusting brightness etc to look natural also work with external signals, or only when showing images in "art mode"?

From my limited exposure, my best guess is that whatever lighting / contrast adjustments it makes in art mode are only enabled for art mode.

I'm not sure what 'looking natural' for a television screen might look like. Naively, if you wanted the television mode to look more like moving pictures, I'd think you'd have to figure out a way to knock down the refresh rate considerably. 15Hz ought to do it. If you're asking me if it just adjusts the television brightness to surrounding lighting conditions, I don't know, but it feels like art mode is doing more than just adjusting brightness (though possibly I'm wrong here and brightness is just much more convincing than I've experienced in the past)

Ah, too bad. I had hoped for something that could display a slideshow from a Raspberry Pi etc, since I'd want the content to update automatically in regular intervals and not rely on cloud services.

IIRC you can add your own 4K images to it via thumb drive and it'll rotate through them without relying on a connection to their upstream art server.

Take this with grains of salt as I don't own one, don't know the interval, and couldn't guarantee that it isn't bricked without an internet connection, though I find that highly unlikely.

I guess for automatic updates one could simulate a USB drive and send remote control commands, but that feels a bit too hacky and disruptive for something where sleekness is the focus. Thanks for your responses!

I own a Frame, and the normal viewing mode does have a very slight brightness adjustment that is automatic, I think I turned that on. It's not as dramatic as the Art Mode setting.

The art mode dimming is very good, it has tricked every single visitor I've had in my living room, they always say nice painting. Then their minds are blown when it's revealed it's a TV. It's very convincing at first glance.

Problem is showing personal images, it does not do as good of a job. I think it uses the same settings as other inputs.

Aww, that's what I feared after the reviews always just raved about the art mode. If it doesn't even work so well for imported images, even worse.

Well, that's one expensive toy expense saved I guess.

Also, my frame at least has some kind of broken internal Wifi.. so using it as a tv with the internal apps is annoying, I have to almost daily factory reset it to get it to reconnect to our (otherwise fine) WiFi and stream stuff... :/

Ah yes I turned off all the "smart" features I could. I don't trust Samsung with anything. I use a Chromecast for streaming needs, it's very reliable.

I would bet the art mode pictures are analyzed somehow to optimize the settings, or the settings are hand-tuned for each picture.

Not applying art mode to arbitrary user pictures removes the risk of them making art mode look bad, when art mode is pretty much the main reason to buy this TV over another.

But they advertise Art Mode as "you can add your own pictures" :/

For $1500 you could hire someone to come over and put a new newspaper into the frame from time to time.

I was thinking the same thing. Or you could get 10-15 annual newspaper subscriptions, delivered to your door/mailbox.

Yes but the refresh rate of newsprint is terrible!

24 hours isn't optimal, but it gets the job done.

That's not a living wage

If someone considers it the best use of their time, they're better off with extra cash than without.

By that logic gig economy apps are good, yet they are heavily criticized and in some cases sued.

Gig economy apps being criticized or even sued is not evidence they are bad.

*I don't personally like them, but no doubt there are workers that like their jobs at doordash or uber--> not everyone doing those jobs is doing them out of desperation.

Well I guess the question is: if desperate people might take the job, and the job is not sustainable for anyone but teenagers and retirees, should the job be allowed to exist seeing as it would not sustain the desperate person?

sorry for the late reply,

my answer might reveal a philosophical difference between our points of view, but I'd ask: would the desperate person be better with a job that covers some of their expenses or no job that coverers none of their expenses? I believe in having a social safety net of some kind (i really like negative income tax), but how useful is it for the government to ban jobs people would otherwise work?

the argument could be made that uber could just be forced to pay a living wage, instead of banning their jobs- but the difference is small. uber is already losing money- i would say that forcing them to pay a "living wage" just hastens their collapse and bankruptcy, so we're back to arguing if these jobs are better existing or not existing.

It's not a job, it's a gig. Don't go getting DoorDash in trouble. They might have to start treating their employees as employees!

Let's say it takes someone 30 minutes in total to drive to your house, replace it, and drive back to their own house.

If they did it every day, that's 15 hours in a month, or 182.5 hours in a year.

If you paid that person $1500 for the year, that's $8.22 per hour, above federal minimum wage.

The minimum wage is far lower than a living wage, even in low-COL areas.

Y'all need hobbies

I suggest they put a newspaper on someone's wall.

Yeah but it doesn’t take 30 minutes, more like 5 minutes if a lot of people were using this service. Or 2 minutes if you simply paid the paper boy to do it!

That's not a full time job.

If I had a newspaper delivered to my door I'm not paying a living wage for the delivery person either. How is this any different?

That reminds me of the newspaper walls they have (or had?) in China. Basically, it’s a place outside where the newspaper is pinned up so people can come by and read it while standing, kind of like a bulletin board (probably was like this everywhere before newspapers became cheap).

That was how government announcements were published for centuries. You ¿still? see that at police offices, with “Wanted” posters.

Sure, we also have bulletin boards, we just don't pin entire newspapers to them (anymore?).

This is sort of a thing in Portugal. They display all the papers on a board and you can (and people do) read the front pages, and then you can decide if you want to buy one to read the rest.

Yep, in Russia too, at least 20 years ago.

This used to be very common in Italy, particularly near community centres, libraries, and political-party locations (in the latter case, of course, it was restricted to specific newspapers). It took a lot of maintenance (vandalism, weather, etc) and slowly disappeared with the multiplication of media channels. Still, it was a very low-tech/high-democracy way to disseminate information. You can still read newspapers for free in libraries and cafes, but obviously it’s not the same (you cannot discuss with others at a library, and cafes will typically stick to sports and local news to avoid alienating anyone).

How about an inkjet plotter and a big spool of paper... later revisions might dabble with erasable ink and surface combinations. If it is monochromatic, it might even be able to collect and recycle the ink.

Actually the display he used was a color eInk display but he chose to use it in greyscale mode as an aesthetic decision.

> E Ink’s 31.2-inch monochrome display fit the bill. The 31.2-inch color display gives you colors, but not at any satisfying resolution or contrast ratio. I

$1500 for the display, plus a $500 board to drive it, plus...

I really like it, but not that much!

You don't have to convince me to use eink, you just have to convince me it is worth the price.

For example, I've been dying for one of these:

https://www.padformusician.com/en/

Imagine having my entire music library in an eink tablet. Then, when I go to my parents' house I can play any of my music on their piano.

But I'm not willing to spend $900+. I'd be willing to spend up to $200

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. An e-ink tablet needs the same SoC, battery, metal case, and software engineering that an LCD tablet needs. So if an e-ink display cost the same as an LCD, the tablet would cost the same. But because of the limitations of the display technology, the device would do less than the equivalent tablet. You can't play games on it. You can't watch Netflix on it. Browsing the web would be a chore that nobody would do except in an emergency.

For that reason, the devices don't exist.

Something like a Kindle Paperwhite works, especially for people who read a lot of fiction. It's small, light, easy to read outside, and fairly cheap.But upsize it and now you have a very limited function tablet.

OK, it works for reading PDFs of things like scientific papers (which I understand is something people like the Remarkable tablet for). And it's easier to read outside. (Might be a bit cheaper too because you don't need as powerful a processor.) But you're mostly trading off a pretty general purpose device--which is getting even more so--for something that has a really narrow set of use cases. And isn't really as good as the smaller models for just reading text.

Not quite the same; battery needs are a fraction even with front lighting, CPU can be slower due to lower display refresh rate, displays are less fragile so you can have a less robust case, etc. Unfortunately, this doesn't overcome the higher display cost. Perhaps an e-ink feature phone would have a high enough volume to do so.

The Hisense A5 e-ink phone is available now for around $200and runs on Android 9. https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/hisense-a5-e-ink-smartp...

I may have missed it but I can't see any mention of the battery life - surely that's one huge aspect.

I've ended up using an iPad Pro for this. It's a little more expensive but multi-function so I use it for more than music.

I've been eyeing a Remarkable tablet for similar use. I'm an (avocational) organist and choral singer, and would love to have my entire library accessible at all times. The Remarkable has a smaller screen (10.3") than the PadMu (13"), but it is somewhat cheaper.

I made the plunge a few years ago to get a gvido device, which is similar. The big problem is the refresh rate on the device. It is incredibly slow to flip pages, which is a big problem when you're playing. I spent $1500, and the device is basically useless because it's so slow. And the japanese based company doesn't take open box returns, so now I'm stuck with it.

If the device could flip pages quickly, it would be an amazing device. It just can't.

Back around maybe 1988-9 I worked with a company that built the first big screen video card for the Mac 2. They went to Sony and said "we want to buy 15,000 monitors", they were humorously heavy 19 inch 1kx768 monitors, cost something like $5-10k.

Sony laughed at us, we'd never sell that many, besides (unlike TVs) they essentially made them by hand on a minimalist assembly line - we sold 25k that year.

It's the same chicken and egg thing there's not a lot of incentive to optimise the production costs until the volumes spike and that wont happen until the prices drop

Sounds like a valid use for burning VC. Rather than subsidize bicycle sharing or cheap car rides, VC could bootstrap scaled production lines for new risky tech.

China has basically sorted the scaling of production lines. A large part of the VC money for bicycle sharing should be capex in a large number of bicycles, but that's a lot cheaper than it used to be due to the available manufacturing capability.

That's true for general electronic and mechanical stuff and obviously not true for everything. Semiconductor, batteries etc. are much more specialised.

And even E Ink Kindle is a bit niche. It's great for reading flowing text as in most fiction. However, for things with a lot of graphics/photographs a tablet or even a phone tends to be a lot better. To say nothing of all the other things you can do with a tablet. As a result, when I travel, I almost never take my Kindle because a tablet is so much more versatile.

Right. E-ink ist really only for mostly static display. Thats why I think that for proper pdf-reading you would need an e-ink reader which can display the whole page at its original size, so roughly A4 sized. Even the 12.9" iPad Pro is a bit small for that, but at least it can quickly zoom and scroll.

Personally I'm fine with reading PDFs on the 11". I have a 12.9" I bought mostly as an experiment in creating videos. For drawing and so forth the larger screen is nice. But I find it's too big/heavy to read on.

There was the Kindle DX which was 12.6" on the diagonal IIRC. I guess that's still a bit too small though, and the last model of that came out a decade ago.. I'm guessing it didn't sell well because I've never seen anybody using one.

I knew some professors in college that had the DX and that was exactly why they used it. They could download a bunch of newly published papers/references frequently and only have to carry the DX.

You'd see them roaming about the campus reading them. Eventually I think that swapped out for iPads since they could be used for non-paper things.

Well, margins do not need to exist when reading on a tablet (unless for margin notes but these are usually scant). I have an iPad 2019 which I think is 10’3’’ and honestly, math papers (my area) are pretty much equal to the “real thing”.

I would pay $2 - $5k for a poster sized, high-dpi black and white E Ink display that had wifi and a bunch of readily available art. Especially if it could be battery powered so I could mount it on brick wall. The technology and novelty is incredibly cool.

Eink cost comes mostly from lockin by Eink, Epson and few other parties.

The technology is ridiculously low tech by the industry standards in comparison to any tft screen

The Place and Play looks very much like what I am looking for, but indeed, the prices are not exactly consumer-level.

I really wonder, whether there would not be more consumer interest in these devices, if there were actual offerings. What about offering the 13" display in a plastic housing with a software more crafted to the consumer/hobbyist? Perhaps powered and controlled by USB-C or optimized for the Raspberry Pi. How low could the prices go, especially with larger volumes?

Of course, it could be just me, and there is not much interest in the wider audience.

For me the ideal size would be like a 10 or 11" device I could use for text-based things. (Think Emacs-ish only type of device, or something)....super light weight, long battery life.

The components cost too much.

Perhaps if this was some open source play where everybody did everything for free. We tried different pricing, different positioning and we could not breakthrough into large volumes with a platform play. Everybody in the end tries to haggle you on the price / cut you out and unless you have Google-deep pockets you can't afford to lose money for a couple years to launch this wide.

I'd say that it's pretty much impossible to do a platform play in hardware if you're a startup. Even when talking about IOT, which is arguably the simplest hardware I don't remember of a platform play that went really well. Most of them are meh or random successes like the ESP WiFI (again not started by a small startup, but still could be argued that is a proper hacker platform).

If you want to play with some of our solutions, hit me up at luka dot birsa [at] visionect dot com and I'll see what I can do.

I've been looking for a replacement for my smartphone, mainly because I don't want to be addicted to apps anymore, but also because I'm tired of charging it every 1/2 days even though I barely use it.

I stumbled upon the Lightphone II (https://www.thelightphone.com/), a gorgeous slab-looking phone, with an eink display, and I realized this was the way for me: battery life for days/weeks, minimal functionality, good looks.... unfortunately the price (350$) is way too high at the moment, I can't afford to put that much money into something that ultimately isn't that important.

I wish technology would improve though, because I'd really love to have a simple phone like that. No need for Android, only something like KaiOS would be more than enough.

Could you sell a home Joan? We have those at work and I find myself wanting that form factor with WiFi, but instead of scheduling I’d put my own content on there.

They sell this now! https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-home

just a heads up, the page you linked seems to hijack the scroll bar on safari and is generally unusable (clicks not working, etc). it appears to be your bundle.js coming from assets.ubembed.com that is causing all sorts of issues.

might be something to look at.