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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

I feel like eventually this will put billboard sign replacers out of a job.

Not sure on that, but I am in favor of replacing the horrible current billboards utilizing LEDs. So much light pollution, and a imo adds another distraction from focusing on the road.

When you see these things switch especially at night in your peripheral vision, it can be a bit jarring, especially if you suffer from vision issues.

Animated billboards should be illegal.

Hell, make billboards illegal period, as a few New Wngland states do.

vt does this and it's so much better

For whatever reason I find billboard sized advertisements (printed) at street level unobtrusive, but the ones raised up to be quite obnoxious.

Living in Maine (and, well, rarely leaving...) I forget that they even exist! Funny how we get used to the norms around us.

Some states set limits on how frequently the image on a billboard can change, which eliminates animations, but still can be jarring, especially at night, if the switch between ads creates a large difference in light intensity.

I probably should have been clear. I count "show a different ad every 30 seconds" as animation. Basically anything that isn't a static image. Only allowance I would make is "one and done" updates, like a gas station sign with prices on it.

Grocery stores here use eink for prices. It appears sharp, need to look closely to observe. It kind of did not occur to me this could lead to dishonest behavior. Not sure why they use them even. Those Waveshare ones are cheap esp in bulk.

Oh yeah, when I first encountered them, my mind went to a Black Mirror-esque future where security cameras identify me as a high spender or stressed buyer and jack up listed prices according to what some neural net figures I'm willing to pay. It already happens online, now it can happen offline too.

I think it's baaaarely in the realm of science fiction right now, but I'm sure someone is working on it.

They're illegal in Alaska :-)

E-ink color is nowhere near vibrant or saturated or high-contrast enough, not in its current form.

Maybe it will be someday -- I'm not entirely sure if it's fundamentally constrained by the physics of it, or how much further engineering progress can improve it. Curious if anyone here knows.

I'd say the Posters in the display actually look very very close to it. I did a bit of hunting around on YouTube because I never trust marketing shots and I was actually impressed. First time I've seen a colour E-Ink display that doesn't look like someone had left it out in the sun for 15 years.

I would not think so at $3k per 25" but I don't know what the big LED billboards cost (+ power consumption) and you do see those more and more.

LED's are a good comparison point. They once were hyper expensive. The thought that we'd have billboards bedazzled with them would have seemed impossible.

It's probably just patents, just about every other display tech came down in price by a factor of 10 a few years after it was invented.

That is so much more than just patents. Vast engineering effort and process investment back up every "economy of scale". Unfortunately there is something about most e-ink designs so far that doesn't scale up in size very well. Really small ones are already cheap.

Back in the day, that was true of color LCDs monitors, until it was not

It's not patents, it's literally artisanal handcrafting prices - they produce these giant e-ink screens by fusing together 4 smaller screens, and they do so by hand because there's almost no demand for $1000 1Hz screens, so they haven't automated the process.

>just about every other display tech came down in price by a factor of 10 a few years after it was invented.

No, the successful display techs came down in price. The commercial flops that nobody hears about are the same price as always (i.e. astronomical), because they have no economy of scale.

Electronic stuff will be much more expensive to replace when vandalized than a sheet of paper under glass. At least for street level billboards.

A small billboard is around 4 meters by 3 meters in size.

We have a monochrome e-Ink billboard in our municipality and it's always breaking down...

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