Seems to be a colour display, probably also with high refresh rate. Can I please have an ebook-grade (~1Hz grayscale) eInk display for a lower price?
I'd love to have a few of these in my home and then have them change the photo each night. Much easier than changing out prints of my photos.
Not quite UHD, but more than HD.
Such devices have been on the market for years.
I've owned an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi (13.3" e-ink Android tablet) for nearly 3 years now. Monochrome 16-shade greyscale (with dithering for better presentation of images). It's excellent for reading straight text, line drawings, and most webpages, though a pagination-based navigation is much preferable to scrolling.
Refresh is ~8--16 Hz, though that varies by display mode. It's possible to view video on the device, though you'd generally prefer not to. Animations are generally annoying A.F.
Higher power requirement of course but would be really cool for art.
That's great for a one-off enthusiast project, and make a blog post and video about it.
Or, if it's instead tech industry SOP: Tie it into a subscription cloud service for updating the signs (initially free), with a tablet UI for the independent cafe manager, and enterprise management dashboard for chains of cafes with mass-produced homey feel, and also run display ads for whatever revenue, and spy on all the business's data that goes through it, to sell the surveillance data to whomever will pay.
Back to the original inspiration: maybe the artist enjoys drawing the signs, and can do it in a more appealing, humanized, genuine way, so automating it would be counterproductive, at least for independent cafes.
You know, that almost sounds like eInk ;)
That being said, if you don't need a lot of color, the Kaleido 3 eink devices are very good and very fast. I've had a color Boox device for the past year (with their GPU-driven refresh technology) and it's quite zippy on the refreshes. The color is filter-based, so not so vibrant, but it's great for highlighting (looks sort of like newsprint in terms of color and sharpness) and for me, is "enough" color w/o giving up anything.
Calling them patent trolls seems especially weird since since the Eink company actually produces a lot of stuff.
I guess it's okay here though, because [passionate story about side project idea using eink that could be tinkered on but never actually idealized into something].
If the real problem is the first one, then implicitly there is a need to propose something that works better. And that is no obvious (but it's obviously not simple).
Every new generation of LCD and OLED has plenty of patents, and there are affordable products eventually. OLED in particular started out very expensive and now is everywhere.
E-Ink is just tough.
Overall you can argue they as a company would have done better to allow the tech to broaden and reap licensing fees, but you can't argue that it isn't their decision to make. Or, you can, but you aren't arguing against these guys but the system of IP laws in general.
I've heard that Eink is notoriously hard to work with and as an outsider looking in, their product development is frustratingly slow, but it's a public company (acquired by a Taiwanese company a long while back), and looking at their financials over recent years, their operating margins seem to be 10-15%, which I guess beats a lot of other display companies, but still doesn't seem so impressive vs other semi/tech companies. That no one's disrupted them over the past few decades I think speaks to how it's more than just an IP moat at play.
From whom? I asked someone who commented this on HN and the person replied saying that they had refused to help him debug his 3 display project. So yes, any display company is notoriously hard to work with if you're not buying a reasonable quantity of their product. It is like saying Samsung Displays is notoriously hard to work with as they're not helping my startup debug our problems where we've bought a grand total of 3 displays this year.
Where? How? Please share some evidence so that your claims can be verified.