Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I have been constantly hearing about eink getting cheaper/better for over a decade now, but the price that the author paid (2300 euros for a 32-inch screen) seems ridiculous. At that price point does it make any sense to not just get a regular LCD for a small fraction of the cost? Dimming the brightness and adjusting the color profile will get you pretty close in terms of experience. The few dollars a year in electricity savings isn't relevant either.

View on HN

The difference between eink and LCD is big enough that it's not even worth doing without the eink. A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo. And it would very obviously just be a TV. While the eink looks amazing.

I think you either have to shell out the money for eink, or don't do it at all.

>A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo.

It really depends on how you do it. They sell TV's like The Frame[1] from Samsung ($599 for the 32" version) that look much closer to a picture frame and are designed for almost this exact purpose. If you are in some semi-permanent home (you probably should be before you spend $2.7k on an art piece) it isn't much work to mount it in a way that would hide the cables. From the looks of the photos in this article, the e-Ink version isn't event mounted flush against the wall and appears to be tilted downward. I don't love the way that looks given the cost. I would much rather spend half the money on that TV and a professional mounting.

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

You compare a lcd tv with eink....apples <--> oranges.

I am comparing the use case and not the technology. I am comparing one art piece to another art piece.

The average power consumption of The Frame is 118 W (figure provided by Samsung). The average power consumption of an e-ink display that refreshes once daily and needs a single annual recharge is effectively 0 W. Using a rough price of electricity in San Francisco of just over $0.22/kWh, The Frame costs ~$230/yr to run.

I don't know if I could, in good conscience, countenance wasting that much electricity on running a TV 24/7 to show a static image that updates once daily. Yes, you'd have to be running the e-ink display for awhile to break even on the power costs, and you could save some money on The Frame by putting it on a schedule where it turns off at night, but it still seems overly wasteful.

Damn, electricity is expensive in SF.

What's your local rate?

Expensive? Electricity is dirtcheap is the US. Try Germany, i pay 0.32 € per KW/h.

$0.1038/kWh where I live in the states.

Do you guys have variable rate plans? In Texas I pay spot rate updating every 5 minutes. There is a 3c/kwh fee regardless of price. Most of the time it's 2-3c/kwh however it occasionally goes to $1-9/kwh. At night it's usually .01c to sometimes well into the negatives where I get paid to use electricity. As you can imagine I charge my electric car at night and in average it only costs me about $2-3 per 1000 miles of range.

In Southern California, I paid about $0.32 per KwH.

It is expensive comparably. In Seattle, the winter starting price is 0.096$ per KWH, after exceeding a certain limit it goes to to 0.10$ per KWH.

Germany's high costs are a result of their shift to "renewable power" sources.

Renewable Russian gas, more precisely :)

0.05$ per kW*h in Russia.

Oh, that is expensive. Here in northern sweden I pay $0.08 per kWh. However you guys plastered all your houses with solar panels a few years ago so I guess that helps a lot to keep the cost down by not needing to buy so much.

That's what you get for shutting down nuclear plants that were already built and functioning just fine.

California is pretty expensive. PG&E is .24/.31/.38 per kwh - (punitively?) tiered depending on monthly usage.

I think the tiers are ~ 0-300kwh / 300-1200kwh / 1200kwh+ per month

You should try NYC.

Last month, ConEd charged me 12.65¢ per kWh just for delivery (before taxes, surcharges, etc). Then my actual electricity supplier charged me a further 16.90¢ per kWh. Call it 30¢ / kWh.

Realistically, the kWh is used to determine cost of ownership by most people, not environmental impact.

230~ USD a year to run a 600 dollar product versus the initial cost of a 2300 dollar display with little to no electricity overhead -- and both have similar rates of failure with regard to non-display components.. AND that's disregarding 'Samsung Vs. Small-Company-From-Slovenia' being a factor in the purchase.

I understand eink is unique, but that characteristic has to be sold to people as a trait that is worth the difference..

That's a hard sell, if compared directly to one another.

(p.s. backlit displays are tacky, but my house is covered in them. I love it. I'm a tacky kind of person, though.)

Hey, don't hold our heritage against us and rather swing by our Valley office when C-19 allows us to meet.

On the subject of price - I fully agree with you - the price for sure can't be justified just by energy savings. It's a completely different product, with totaly different features and use cases. And yes, using it just for reading the news is costly.

I do like I how it looks tho, but that's just me. :)

I'm not sure where you are getting that 118W number. I can't find it on that page. The energy guide[1] states 87 kWh per year at 5 hours per day so roughly 48W per hour rather than 118W so drop that yearly cost down around $100. Also I don't want to sound like I am shilling for Samsung, but there are various power saving options on the device. I'm not sure if those are included in the estimate. Either way, even in the markets with the most expensive electricity costs, it would take several years if not over a decade for this approach to match the initial price of the e-Ink option.

Also both these options are wasteful in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the LCD option will likely be more wasteful than the e-Ink version, but neither is particularly justifiable if you are concerned about waste. I would also venture a guess that on the full spectrum of environmental waste those two options are much closer together than either is to just throwing up an old fashioned art print on your wall.

[1] - https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/PVI/20200606/common-e...

> 87 kWh per year at 5 hours per day

I said in my post I'm using 24 hours per day, not 5. Multiply your figures by 24/5 to see the 24/7 costs.

> 48W per hour

1 W = 1 J/s. 48 J/s/hr would be some weird kind of accelerating power consumption, which is I assume not what you meant here.

I am no expert so it is entirely possible I am making a mistake with my conversions, but here is my math:

87 kWh = 5 hours per day * 365 days

87000 Wh = 1825 hours

87000 Wh / 1825 h = 47.7 W

47.7 W * 24 hours per day * 365 days = 418 kWh

418 kWh * $0.22 per kWh = $92

Again, why are you using 5 hours per day? When used as a photo frame, this is going to be on for a lot more than that. The pathological case here is it's on for 24 hours per day, not merely 5.

Because the 87 kWh total is based off the assumption of 5 hours per day. We need to use that to get to the actual wattage. Once I have the wattage, I can use that to get to the 24 hour per day 365 days per year usage of 418 kWh.

Another way of getting there is taking the 87 kWh estimate and multiplying it by 24/5 to get 418 kWh.

Ahhh, now I see what you're doing. I found a source that says 118 W though, so I guess it's just a case of dueling sources at this point. If someone owns one of these and has a Kill-A-Watt then we can find out for sure.

The energy star rating gives you the power use when on.

$10/year over $.12/kWh over (5hours/day*365days/year) is roughly 46W for the 32" version.

https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy_US/images/produc...

wow in california this will bump you into the next tier.

if you had only these panels in your house, no other electrical use, you would pay:

  # | monthly
  -----------------------
  1 | $108
  2 | $238
  3 | $371
  4 | $530
  5 | $689

[ pg&e: 0-300kwh @ .24, 300-1200kwh @ .31, 1200kwh+ @ .38 ] it gets pricier with time of use + summer up to .48/kwh

Re: power saving

It also shuts off when folks leave the room. I assume it has a passive IR motion sensor.

“Art Mode: [...] Set the Motion Sensor timer, so when you leave the room, the screen turns off automatically to save energy.”

32" Class The Frame QLED HDR Smart TV (2020) - QN32LS03TBFXZA | Samsung US https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...

Where are you getting the 118 W number from? A LED TV this size will use a fraction of that (30-40 W max, and can be brought down further with power saving options).

> How much electricity does this all use, I can hear you asking. I haven’t tested that out myself, but we do have a note from Samsung. They say The Frame needs almost the same amount of electricity in Art Mode as in TV mode. In hard figures, external reports talk of 100 watts in TV mode and 60 to 130 watts in Art Mode, depending how bright the room is. While Samsung themselves give 118 watts as the average value, they don’t specify if this is while watching TV of admiring art. But we can safely assume this isn’t a top-scoring environmentally friendly product yet.

https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/the-exciting-bit-is-when-you-...

Well there is your problem. That review is not of the 32" version. A bigger screen is going to require more power. I can't tell exactly what size those power numbers are from, but it is at least the 55" version and not the 32" version that was used as a comparison to the 32" e-Ink display in the original post.

Fair. I'll admit that I spent about 1/50th the time Googling it as we've now spent so far discussing it.

Haha, no problem. You had me flashing back to college wondering how I screwed up my unit conversions again.

Well on the plus side we now have figures for the annual electricity cost of both the 32" model and the larger 55" model. $100/year is probably still more than I'd want to pay on a picture frame though, I gotta say. That's about the same cost as basic Netflix.

I am right there with you. I can't say I would jump to purchase either but the $600 upfront and $100 per year option is less outrageous to me than the one that costs $2700 upfront but is practically free in perpetuity.

But light box type backlit art just doesn't look right, it's a cool comparison and worth doing, but with e-ink you get contrast that is proportional to the ambient light (and unless art mode changes significantly the refresh which it might, I haven't checked, LCD screen will still not photograph or film well). It won't photograph as well with flash etc. either. And obviously most important: if you have friends who are pretentious enough to turn up at your house wearing sunglasses, it'll look good for them too...

I get it's sort of priced as an intangible piece of art, that is worth wildly different amounts to different people, but to the people it's worthwhile to, the difference is everything.

Yes, I'm also a sucker for e-ink. I just love the aesthetic.

Thanks for digging into the costs and info then, it's been an interesting conversation to follow.

meanwhile, the e-ink display is black and white, so for the newspaper or some other kind of art might be enough, but the lcd screen on the other side is much more versatile, It can even show animations and video.

For reference, home delivery of the NYT is $10/week...$520 a year.

That does include more than just the front page though ;)

To me, the poor look would be from the LCD being its own light source. The e-ink screen makes it look like a proper piece of paper since it’s illuminated by outside light. I think that really changes the concept. If I want a TV hanging on the wall, that’s easy enough (as you say). If I want a daily newspaper hanging on the wall looking like the real thing, I bet e-ink looks a lot better.

In the showroom The Frame looks indeed quite good, but I'd be worried about how it looks in less optimized spaces (i.e. dimly, unevenly lit). And they reserve the "Art mode" adjustments to their specific app for it, so you're very limited in using it for your own content.

I've seen this hack in person and it is very convincing. The way to avoid the backlight problem is to frontlight the whole scene.

This embedded imac also has the cool feature of never changing if someone is looking at it.

https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels

That is an incredible artwork (the device). I only caught the right one on the second viewing of the light changes.

However, it uses an equivalently expensive piece of hardware, right? The LG 5k from Apple is $1300.

Yeah minimum $1300 and you're cutting a hole in your wall.

And it uses a few hundreds bucks of electricity per year to run it 24/7, depending on your electricity cost anyway (I'm using CA here).

I was in the mall just a few minutes ago, and while I was waiting for a coffee I was standing next to one of those movie-poster billboard things that have TV in them. Every few seconds a poster for a movie, or cleaning product, or some store would pop up, each had some subtle animation. They were really high res, 4k perhaps. Really nice and crisp.

Anyhow, I was thinking how great the images on them were.

With a light sensor you could adjust the colour of an LCD display so it exactly simulates the light reflected by paper. I don't understand why nobody did it before. Now you can't patent it though because this comment serves as prior art :)

The Samsung Frame TV does this already, to some success.

The comment is sarcastic I think. This has been done by many companies.

I've also noticed this on my Google Home/Nest Hub, where it has an effect where it adjusts the image on screen to match the color temperature of the ambient light. It makes for a really weird (albeit pleasant) effect that to my eye makes the image look more like a printed/reflective image. I've long wondered if you could duplicate that effect by replacing the backlighting in a junk LCD with something that can adjust color temperature and adding a color sensor, but haven't had time to try it.

Yes, these sorts of things are common in photography workflows. There are color profilers [ex: 0] that update your monitor's profile in real time to maintain a consistent profile given ambient light changes.

They're usually used as part of a larger calibration workflow, for example: calibrating your monitor and printer so that what you print with a specific ink/paper combination looks exactly like what you see on the screen. (Or, as much as is technically possible to do so.)

[0] - https://www.xrite.com/categories/calibration-profiling/i1dis...

That's really cool! Thank you!

> A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo.

In fairness, any display of a newspaper who so bombastically trumpeted the US into war with Iraq is kinda tacky.

The total absence of a backlight is hard to replicate the experience of in real life. Spending $2500 on this is also not for me, but I just spent a couple minutes playing with the contrast and brightness on my high-middle Dell monitor and I couldn't get anything that was convincingly "closer to paper than to a computer monitor".

Having to run a hidden wire to it is another downside, but 500 euros probably covers that job in most cases.

I wonder if one of those non-backlit memory LCDs could do the trick. (The kind of display used on the Playdate console, and I believe most Pebble smartwatches.)

Pebble was actually e-ink

No, it wasn't. It was low-power memory LCD, advertised as "e-paper" (note that it's distinct from e-ink).

See e.g. this teardown: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Pebble+Teardown/13319.

No idea on cost, but here's a 32" reflective LCD panel: https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/technology

1. LCD does not run on a battery, like this. Greatly improves aesthetics and flexibility of placement

2. LCD will never look the same. You can dimm it all you want, but in evening you'll still have a backlight. I have Samsung Art Frame TV, which tries to do the same. It's closer than most things, but nothing like an e-ink display. It's night and day compared my (2) eInk tablets

I'm fairly sure 32" and above has only been available for 3 or 4 years. With a low volume, niche product 2300 Euros is really not unreasonable, particularly in a commercial setting

It is really difficult to describe the benefits of e-ink vs. even great displays. The closest perhaps is the oled of my iPhone with the automatic color adjustment. But for emulating the look and feel of paper, e-ink cannot be beaten. I just basically replaced my iPad Pro for note taking with the reMarkable 2, and it is amazing what a difference it makes. Besides the textured surface, it just looks like paper with ink on it. The iPad is great, but always looks like a screen.

I was interested until I saw that price. I'd rather just buy the paper and tape it to the wall each day.

Your solution will be cheaper, higher-resolution, and offer you more actual utility, as the whole newspaper will be available to you.

It does involve some manual work, though.

e-Ink really does look very different. Especially if you are hanging it up in a bright, sunlit room, it is a world of difference from LCD. In fact, the sunnier it is, the better your e-Ink displays look, while the worse your LCD displays will look.

Also, e-Ink displays don't emit light so they are extremely pleasing to the eye, and don't light up your bedroom at night, if you want it in your bedroom. They also can maintain an image with zero power, which is great if you're conscious about energy usage.

The 2300 euro price of this display is a bit beyond my personal budget for projects, but if you're happy with 13.3 inches you can try this Waveshare display:

https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat.htm

Or this 10 inch version for less than half the price of the 13.3 inch one, which I have:

https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...

If you want a clean construction with all the electronics in one piece, another option you might consider is to hunt for used, 13.3 inch older Boox tablets, which run Android, and just write an Android app for them to do whatever you want them to do.

If you're looking for a less hacky version that still looks good (similar to the OPs 32" display) and is simple to build upon - you can use our 13" touchless variant.

The Joan line is fully productivized and you can use our hosted service to connect to any HTML source (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-13/).

Or if you'd like to tinker with the platform itself, then Visionect offers a fully customizable solution (https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-13/) with the same hardware.

We've had a lot of people take our 6" panels and build their own Home Automation controllers. Here are the instructions: https://getjoan.com/blog/diy-home-automation-system/

Scale matters a lot. e-ink form factors that are used in consumer products have gotten much cheaper.

The smaller 2-3 inch ones (like what some stores use for their pricetags) are only a few dollars. You can find tablet sized displays for ~50 dollars. I eink is often the best choice, especially if you care about power consumption (like a hobbyist project on batteries) and a less obnoxious aesthetic (backlights in dark rooms are annoying).

I've thought about making an eink calendar before, but since the cost is so high I wondered if it would be cheaper just buy 31 2 inch screens and somehow connect them.

The screens usually have at least 1-2mm border around them, plus driving complexity will go over the roof. But it's a great tinkerers project - go for it!

Since our software allows tiling we've built some test large scale composite screens out of our 6" and 9" devices - I think maximum was around 25-50 screens combined in a big virtual surface, with resolution over 10k x 10k pixels. So sure, it can be done, but is a pain to setup and run.

That sounds really cool. Any public links to it?

Another direction to take this would be to include in a smart mirror

https://www.howtogeek.com/414647/how-to-build-a-smart-mirror... https://www.electricmirror.com/smart-mirror-savvy/

only you can answer that

if it’s obvious that you shouldn’t spend $2300 consumer electronic being relegated to an art piece using almost none of the utility it is capable of, then dont do it

if the answer isnt so obvious then it’s still interesting and viable

When I saw the article I thought that perhaps he found that well priced large e-ink display or pulled from a failed product, but turns out he just found a large one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com