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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

To spend $2500 on this is a bit outrageous. You can't carry it with you or fold it up. Who reads a newspaper standing in front of a wall... Unless you're at a urinal?

The price needs to come down to make this useful.

It's $250 a year for a daily paper subscription to the NYT. I could get it for ten years for the cost of this tech.

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I would love to have something of this kind as a calendar and agenda on my wall, but as you mentioned the price is currently ridiculously oppressive. Can't wait for the patents to expire so competition in this space becomes viable.

My understanding is the patents aren’t the major obstacle today. There just isn’t enough volume yet to drive down production cost. LEDs used to be real expensive too.

Which companies other than EInk are making these displays? Displaydata might but I can't tell.

This is the comment I was thinking of from the founder of visionect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25067824

That's really interesting.

Hello, I work for Visionect, the company that makes the hardware. We have a wireless e-ink based product that does exactly what you want. Check out Joan at https://getjoan.com

Joan doesn’t have the 32” display though, right? I’m in the same boat as GP, but I want the giant display. Pinboard style.

Edit: since they’re the same company, can the Joan software be run on the Visionect hardware?

Hi. Yes, we have a 32" Place&Play product but currently can't be used as a replacement for the Joan product line. On the other hand, we have smaller 13" Joan devices available.

At $899 for a 13" display, the price doesn't seem to scale down well to the smaller area. The 32" display is more than 5 times the area, but less than 3 times the price.

Waveshare has a 13" link display + Raspberry Pi hat for $445. That's pretty bare bones — but you could have a go at DIY and save.

I was referring to the Joan display mentioned, but Waveshare is another interesting option. I assume you're referring to this[0] product, which would still require a Raspberry Pi, so $445 is not the total cost to get something working. Of course still much less than $899 when you throw that in.

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

They have many more options. If you go down slightly in size, it's less than half that price: https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm

I would love to experiment with some of the hardware, but it is just too crazy expensive. If the company would be willing to part with some blemished, damaged, or returned product or components for a more modest price, I would be happy to buy those. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.

I love this idea for a lot of things, and I think it beats the "smart mirror" trend in aesthetics and energy, but the price is a definite roadblock.

It’s art! It looks great. It happens to also be useful but that’s not the main reason to buy it.

Well, as an actual newspaper indeed this approach is not handy. But if the author of the blog-post is a journalist, editor or a writer (in a newspaper) I totally can see this as a show of his "works" on a wall of fame in his office.

Agree. It's too expensive. I rationalized it as art and less expensive than most NFT's. As an art piece I do expect it to be good discussion piece and the construction makes me think that it'll last for 10 years without issues.

My initial thought was to turn this into a product but the cost of eInk at this size would need to drop to the $500-800 range to make it reasonably viable.

Agree. My thinking was... Hey it's art, somewhat functional, fun and much cheaper and more practical than many NFT's these days.

That said... I did feel a bit price gouged. There's not enough of a market to drive the price down. It's not really a consumer product and the company reached out and was somewhat surprised that I bought one.

> Who reads a newspaper standing in front of a wall... Unless you're at a urinal?

You answered your own question — and I think like that idea a lot.

there are companies making android-powered (not eink, but regular LCD) screen urinals to sell advertising now...

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/ewfzup/t...

I am not sure this is the future I wanted.

also, how many years until this no longer retrieves security updates, gets pwned, and displays goatse at random intervals?

Oh no, ads! Ruining everything (of course).

It is absolutely ridiculously expensive. You can get an amazing 65" OLED 4K display for that :P

However, maybe he was able to buy it on his company or something.. Part of office decoration expenses? If you're a software integration business I could imagine that would impress potential clients.

I have a 65” 4K OLED. I would not want to use it in this situation with the risk of burn-in from static content. Moreover, any LED consumes way more energy to keep the display always on, and in my mind that quality is a requirement for something like this. (Yes I know the Samsung Frame exists but I don’t think you can customize your content in Art Mode like this)

No, I didn't mean for that purpose.

I just mean it's exceptionally bad price/performance for a display.

I think a Samsung Frame would probably be the closest replacement.

$600 for the 32" version. $1,900 for the 65".

Not really there either. The 32” is 1080 instead of 4K. The cool/warm backlight is nice but you’re still working with a QLED (phosphors respond to a blue backlight, instead of white LED). You’ll still have a bit of black light leak. Still looking for reflective displays, not transmissive.

Is there anything inherent to the manufacture of large eInk displays that causes them to be expensive?

AKA, is this a $2,500 product because it's a niche with comparatively low demand, or would it still cost $2,500 to produce even at much larger volumes?

> AKA, is this a $2,500 product because it's a niche with comparatively low demand, or would it still cost $2,500 to produce even at much larger volumes?

Because it is niche and hand made. You can probably buy the fpl material for dollars per square inch but when you don't have a high volume fully automated factory you'll have yield losses when you laminate with TFT and all the various layers. If everything is fully automated, then yields go from like 10% success to 90% success and prices fall correspondingly. I suspect the unsurmountable problem is more likely to be that large eink displays will never be able to beat large lcd displays so they'll never get to high volume.

I remember reading there was a lot of defects in eInk displays? So the bigger the screen, the bigger the chance of defects, hence the exponential price increase.

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