Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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-...

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.

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" :/

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

I really like it, but not that much!

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com