E Ink’s color ePaper tech gets supersized for outdoor displays
newatlas.com
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What mainly limits the applications for this tech is that full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly, so it prefers static content. For public spaces this could mean a greater emphasis on graphic design quality as well, since you'd probably only want to refresh out of sight of customers, e.g. outside of business hours.
The problem is that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print. Overall my gut feeling is that the economics just aren't quite there yet without some more effort put into changing the equation.
For examle - I think that E-Ink should actually kind of try making the refresh experience have its own aesthetic. Right now the refresh on the Spectra panels looks like the panel is having a seizure. If they could make it look cool (e.g. doing it a fancy geometric pattern or something), it might make it OK to refresh while being seen.
Bus advertising. According to people I worked with back in 2010 that were working on LED panels for buses[0], changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days. Which is a long time for a bus to be out of service.
An e-ink panel is a great solution - lightweight, zero power use until it needs changing, and the refresh rate doesn't really matter.
[0] Didn't succeed because LED panels at the time were big, low-res, bulky, and extremely power hungry.
That sounds like wrapping a whole bus with an ad. Hardly something an LED or e-ink display could replace.
Those panels might very well be vinyl for outdoor durability, but I don't see why they'd take 3 days to swap out, unless it's a scheduling/transport issue, for example a bus operator needs to drop off day before, so the ad company doesn't have to schedule around when the drop off happens, and the bus operator picks up the bus the day after, because they don't want to schedule around when the ad company finishes; now your one hour swap is a multi-day production.
A full wrap, could be a 3 day process though.
They were talking about the standard landscape side panels. Didn't make much sense to me either but that was why the bus companies were throwing money at them to get LED panels working (aside from the financial bonus of being able to book multiple ads for the same bus, obvs.)
(As an example of how efficient TFL's advertising swapping was - there was a poster at Deptford Bridge DLR advertising a Gorky exhibition in 2010 that wasn't changed until late 2017/early 2018. And all that involved was opening the street-level case to put in a new poster!)
It's very useful to get lost.
(I may be wired weird; I'm also happy when I see signs on stuff saying it's been financed by Local Program X, Subprogram Y, with support from EU Program A, Subprogram B, Function C, blahblah. Unfortunately not everyone cares to make those look aesthetically, given that the information is only placed because it's a condition of the grant, but it usually looks OK and IMHO sends a positive message.)
EDIT:
Trams here have been seen carrying exterior ads for private businesses every now and then, less so now than in the past; these days, it's mostly either default coloration or some temporary "this train is new and awesome" ad.
Bus stops, however, are another matter.
As for internal screens, sometimes ads find their way onto the "bus TV" and "tram TV" displays. Most of the time, it's a mix of tourist trivia, air quality report, PSAs (safety warnings, transit etiquette), and transit org's own ads (showing off new eco-friendly fleet, job ads). There's a separate set of screens that show a map (OSM!) and the route with upcoming stop markers, but unfortunately, half the time they're broken - either the map or route indicator is frozen, or they get desynced from each other, or reality. Voice announcements seem to be a separate system and are usually reliable, though every now and then they desync from reality too.
I sometimes wonder who's maintaining this and if they'll take a volunteer (or part-time contractor) to help them keep the indicators working.
Do they also carry the name of the local politician who runs the program? That should raise some eyebrows...
They were in 2010 with the panels we had running in New York. I think at any one time, >50% were off the road with issues (dirt, vibration[0], temperature, power supplies, etc.)
[0] e.g. the CF cards holding the OS would eventually just work themselves out of their slots.
If what I see on busses around here (York, UK, and occasionally other cities) is anything to go by, bus-side advertising is dying on its arse. Most of the busses I see are carrying adverts for sales that ended months ago of films “in cinemas now!” that stopped playing on the big screen a year or more ago. If bus-side adverting were in a healthy state I'd have thought new content would have replaced those long ago.
Non-problem in my view. Today's 'ugliness' is tomorrow's nostalgia.
On the contrary I would imagine that 99% of information displayed in outdoors is static in nature and does not need something in the range of 24fps.
After all once upon a time 100% of the world's outdoor displays were static, and things were fine. Time Square should not be a benchmark.
What's the point of running the display on a battery if you need power for the "quality lighting"?
Browsed aliba and price difference between those rollup lightboxes vs similar size outdoor LCD advertisements wasn't that big ~$200-$400 for lighbox and maybe $400-1000. Wouldn't be surprised if advertisement companies can also ask more money for ads on digital screens compared to printed ones. Payoff period might be shorter than you think. But it would be nice to hear from someone in business who knows more accurate numbers.
As for refresh ugliness in case of advertisements it might be considered a feature even without fancy effects -> blinking attracts attention. And once you unavoidably turn your head to take a look at what's blinking in the corner of your eye the add has already changed. As long as it isn't too frequent maybe once every 3-5 minutes it will probably be considered acceptable. The giant LCDs with annoying videos area already sufficiently big eyesore.
Another complication might be that e-ink by itself is not visible in the dark, though it isn't a problem to add lights. However, that could again be a benefit.
Personally I would love a ban on ALL advertisement in public spaces, even print. Some brave politicians have done it on a city level, and the citizens just love it. Banning moving images and lights for advertisement would be a compromise, e-ink screens could then still be allowed.
I find more so, especially when it happens in my peripheral vision. It can be irritating enough for me walking past overly animated displays in shops, I bet it could be dangerously distracting for some drivers (who aren't always giving as much attention to the road ahead as they should be anyway) going past street or shop window signs.
> though it isn't a problem to add lights.
Does backlighting eink work? I think all the hand-held displays I've experienced have been lit from the sides. That is probably practical though: the old posters-on-a-roll setups seen in highstreets were often lit that way and with modern bulbs it wouldn't consume as much power these days.
> Banning moving images … e-ink screens could then still be allowed.
I would be wary of that loophole. I've seen some impressive displays of quick refresh rates for e-ink, so playing distracting video content would be perfectly possible assuming those techniques scale to this size, and if advertisers can do it they will whether it is good for anyone else or not.
The human brain has cognitive subsystems devoted to detecting motion that seems non-random, that is, that seems to move with deliberate purpose contrary to other motions like leaves or ripples. It's important for predation on both sides—for the predator or the prey.
That's also exactly why advertisers love it and will continue using it. They will buy any politicians who look likely to ban moving images or lights.
The tech is awesome, but the E-Ink company is holding it back.
We would have had large and cost effective displays well over a decade ago if E-Ink (the company) didn't patent patrol the technology. It's impossible to do anything in this space without touching their patents, and so independent of their direct involvement and licensing, there's no third party innovation or competition happening.
These displays have had so much promise, but they've taken decades to evolve into diverse shapes and sizes. And they still cost an arm and a leg relative to other display technologies.
Other commentary:
One example I particularly liked is Mirasol, who was abandoned despite being owned by Qualcomm out of all companies (HIGHLY unlikely to be scared by a patent troll, considering Qualcomm could be arguably described as a patent troll themselves).
It's simply ridiculous to think that eInk would torpedo their own technology out of incompetence/malice/whatever yet these ideas keep being parroted here without _any evidence whatsoever_ as if it was gospel from the gods.
The real reason, of course, is that this technology is hard (plain physics), and that there's little investment because most consumers could not care less. The supposed advantages of eink are paper-thin at best (contrast sucks and keeps getting _worse_ after each generation, and that is without taking into account the color ones), customers have a hard time distinguishing it from other technologies such as reflective/memory LCDs (which practically beat them in every metric you can think of, even power usage -- except for long enough periods of idleness which are not of interest to any consumer), and at the end of the day most people will choose a backlighted LCD over all these alternatives anyway...
See Garmin, which started with reflective LCD watches for outdoor usage, and the moment they experimented with a plain old fugly backlighted LCD they decided to replace most of their series, _even the ones for primarily outdoor usage_, with backlighted LCDs (e.g. Fenix 8). Customers just buy shiny flashy screens more, what can you do about that?
eInk survives because they're actually one of the cheaper techs, which is the only reason talking about "billboards" is even remotely plausible, and even then they're having a hard time.
Eink B&W screen contrast has been improving dramatically with every generation, but there was a significant backward step in the jump to color eink screens (due to how the current Kaleido technology works). The Gallery technology does not suffer this lack of contrast, but the trade-off is that screen refresh times are slower than 1st generation e-ink panels.
Garmin still uses reflective LCDs, even on the Fenix 8. The AMOLED is a separate SKU.
Eink is superior to transflective LCDs in terms of power use as it only needs to be refreshed when content changes; an LCD must be refreshed multiple times per second. Only bistable LCDs can display an image without power but this comes at the cost of resolution and contrast.
No: https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2021/01/20/contrast-on-e-i...
Ever since Carta it has been stuck at 15:1 and it is trivial to see that e.g. Remarkable has better contrast than the newer (B&W) Kobos.
As I said, this has _nothing_ to do with the color screens where the contrast is even further reduced, _even_ in Gallery (by eink's own specsheet, as well as by plain observation on a newer remarkable color).
> Garmin still uses reflective LCDs, even on the Fenix 8. The AMOLED is a separate SKU.
No. The _reflective LCD_ one is the one which has become the different SKU (it is now called the 'solar'; the main series now all use backlight), and guess which new SKU is neither stocked nor displayed on stores. It used to be that "Epix" was the AMOLED version of the Fenix, but now it has replaced the mainstream Fenix. As a fan of the reflective LCD garmin watches (since the 1st generation Fenix), the writing is on the wall.
> Eink is superior to transflective LCDs in terms of power use as it only needs to be refreshed when content changes; an LCD must be refreshed multiple times per second.
However eInk requires _significantly more_ power when refreshing than an LCD, not to mention a more complex controller, while at the same time the power required for refresh by a memory LCD is practically negligible. So, as I said, unless your usecase involves the eink panel staying static for _days at a time_, LCD will win.
And no customer really wants a screen that is only refresh once every week; it defies the point of a screen. I could even say the same of a "dynamic" billboard. There's a reason even price stickers at shops use LCDs.
Is there nowadays at least some eink watch that can surpass the battery life of the reflective LCD Garmin watches? (measured in months even with at least one screen refresh per minute). Note that many "eink" smartwatches actually use memory LCD, and not a eink panel, behind the scenes. (e.g. Pebble). Furthering my "users cannot even distinguish eink from reflective LCD" argument.
This is false. Carta is the B&W family of eink Panels...The most recent one (the Carta 1300) has significantly improved contrast over the 2021 era panel, the Carta 1000. It's trivial to see that, and nobody looking at the most recent Kobo B&W would claim that it has less contrast than a 2021-era device. The Remarkable 1 uses a custom co-developed version of the Canvas panel which has reduced the thickness of the touchscreen layers and other layers above the eink panel, which is the primary cause of reduced contrast in e-ink devices (including the Remarkable 1). (Remarkable 2 uses a custom co-developed version of Gallery, which has greater contrast and amazing color but slower refresh times than Carta or Kaleido.) If you ever get your hands on the eink hardware itself, you would be amazed at how much contrast even the 1st gen panels have...and how much contrast you lose to all the layers that get added above the panels to make them durable and usable in handheld devices.
The _reflective LCD_ one is the one which has become the different SKU... and guess which new SKU is neither stocked nor displayed on stores.
Both the AMOLED and the Solar Watch are separate SKUs with the display in the name. There is no "base" Fenix 8 anymore. And on that note, the closest 5 Best Buys and REIs to me all stock both SKUs for immediate pickup.
So, as I said, unless your usecase involves the eink panel staying static for _days at a time_, plain old LCD will win by far.
This is also false. There have been a number of transflective ereader devices on the market. They get worse battery life and have significantly worse contrast (without backlighting) than their eink counterparts. Seriously dude, if tranflective LCDs got better battery life and had competitive contrast to eink panels, do you really think that every ereader company including Amazon would still be using eink panels over cheaper transflective LCD panels?
Well, I have linked an article making such claim. But how much has Carta 1300 improved the contrast, exactly? eink has stopped publicizing the contrast ratio on the public specs, just the marking BS that says the contrast ratio is improved (over what?), so I'm fearing the worst. I bet you it's still 15:1 (as Carta was on 2013) on paper or rounding-error level close to that, which explains why most users would see contrast as becoming worse.
> The Remarkable 1 uses a custom co-developed version of the Canvas panel [...] has reduced the thickness of the touchscreen layers and other layers above the eink pane
This is marketing BS. No such thing as canvas panel. It's Carta.
Also, RM1 has no other layers. Stylus input is wacom (below substrate) and there is no frontlight. On RM color pro they made stylus input capacitive AND added frontlight which may arguably have increased touchscreen layer thickness, leading to the perceived reduction in contrast. But ironically enough even eInk spec says Gallery has lower contrast than Carta (around 1:12 for Gallery 3), so no comparison is needed there. Unsurprisingly, all reviews say contrast has taken a hit.
> you would be amazed at how much contrast even the 1st gen panels have
The early panels were utter crap. There's a reason you couldn't not even put glass on top of them and things like "infrared touchscreens" were a thing on ancient e-readers (google for them, if you're curious). The improvements since ancient panels have been significant -- they used to have contrast ratios worse than 8:1, and Pearl and Carta raised that to 15:1. However, it is still ridiculous compared to contrast in most other screen technologies (even memory LCD can reach 20:1 https://www1.futureelectronics.com/doc/SHARP/LS013B7DH03.pdf). And has it improved at all in the last decade?
Not blaming eInk: there is a physical limit to contrast for their tech.
> Both the AMOLED and the Solar Watch are separate SKUs with the display in the name. There is no "base" Fenix 8 anymore
If you google, or if you click on the product, you or if you choose the cheapest one, or if you walk to a physical store... you will be offered the AMOLED one. It used to be that you had to go out of your way to get the AMOLED line. Now it's all in your face. I do not have product sales numbers but it's still rather obvious to me they're focusing on the AMOLED one.
> Seriously dude, if tranflective LCDs got better battery life and had competitive contrast to eink panels, do you really think that every ereader company including Amazon would still be using eink panels over cheaper transflective LCD panels?
Memory LCD panels are _not_ cheaper, and most definitely not at this size. I'm not even sure they are manufactured at such sizes, either.
ebooks are the only thing that defies the overall trend, maybe because e-ink practically defines the product line; but they are becoming even more of a niche market -- most people seem to have no problem doing their reading on a backlighted LCD iPad.
even memory LCD can reach 20:1
For a screen 1.25" diagonal. Not competitive unless your ereader is dedicated to haikus. Carta 1000 was 15:1, Carta 1200 claimed a 20% improvement, and Carta 1300 claimed another 15% improvement, which puts Carta 1300 at a 20:1 ratio, which is about right based on real-world reviews of the most recent Kobos. And this is for devices with 7 to 13 inch screens, not 1.25 inch screens. Kaleido adds a color layer on top, which reduces contrast in Kaleido devices. Gallery has higher contrast when using color (but you would be correct that when sticking to B&W only Gallery has lower contrast).
And has it improved at all in the last decade?
Yes, significantly. You have decided it does not and reject all evidence to the contrary.
If you google, or if you click on the product, you or if you choose the cheapest one, or if you walk to a physical store... you will be offered the AMOLED one.
Definitely false. REI will try to sell you the Solar one (for obvious reasons). Best Buy will sell you whichever one you want, but will try to steer people toward cheaper watches like the Forerunner or Instinct that people are more likely to actually buy.
Memory LCD panels are _not_ cheaper, and most definitely not at this size. I'm not even sure they are manufactured at such sizes, either.
Alibaba says otherwise, and that's just a 5-second search. It appears that I can order 10 10-inch transflective displays for $200....which is about what it costs to acquire a single 10-inch Kaleido 3 screen. Or in other words, transflective screens are about 1/10th the cost of a comparably sized e-ink panel. Which brings us back to this: If transflective LCDs were actually superior to eInk panels for the e-reader use case, why is every ereader company sticking to eink? Why is notoriously cost-conscious Amazon sticking to eInk, when transflective LCDs would be far cheaper to make at scale? (Hint: it's because eInk is better for the ereader use case.)
> Alibaba says otherwise, and that's just a 5-second search. It appears that I can order 10 10-inch transflective displays for $200....which is about what it costs to acquire a single 10-inch Kaleido 3 scree
Do not confuse memory LCDs with generic reflective LCDs. Memory LCDs are the ones I mention as having lower power usage during refresh, as well as the ones I mention as having higher price than eInk, as well as the ones I mention as not even being available in larger sizes AFAIK.
> Yes, significantly. You have decided it does not and reject all evidence to the contrary.
What evidence? The only thing I have explicitly discarded is PR's "XX% improvement" messaging because it is imprecise and has been wrong in the past. For example, Gallery 3 contrast ratio is around 11.7:1 ( see Table1 of https://confit.atlas.jp/guide/event-img/idw2022/EP1-02/publi... ) , significantly worse than Carta . I cannot find a similar measurement for Carta 1300, so I am at a loss, and since the last published number is 1:15, and reviewers mention the new screens as being _worse_...
> Definitely false. REI will try to sell you the Solar one (for obvious reasons). Best Buy will sell you whichever one you want, but will try to steer people toward cheaper watches like the Forerunner or Instinct that people are more likely to actually buy.
Sigh... What point are you trying to make here? You do not agree that Garmin is pushing the AMOLED ones over the reflective LCD ones? Do you realize the Forerunner and the Instinct series are also AMOLED or getting replaced by AMOLED? You disagree that Garmin 's trend is clearly towards AMOLED? In that case, you should definitely go and extinguish a couple fires happening on the Garmin user communities...
> Which brings us back to this: If transflective LCDs were actually superior to eInk panels for the e-reader use case, why is every ereader company sticking to eink?
Because e-ink is cheaper! I have said it even on my original post: eink is the only one who survives because they're the cheapest one. Plus, I believe, because e-readers are anyway becoming a niche mostly tied to e-ink, and getting utterly displaced by, e.g., phones and tablets in the market.
Except the funny cat ones.
In Brazil, one town banned all advertising hoardings (back when they were just posters), and observed multiple changes in how people felt about the space, including the fact that they were hiding entire favelas ("shantytowns"), that many locals were not really aware of.[1]
It's been a while since I subscribed to Adbusters magazine[2], but I do believe in their central premise that advertising, whether it be in public spaces or online, is harmful to mental health and society, because it perpetuates an unhealthy consumerism, and it distorts truth.
So, I say, don't just make advertising a bit more subdued than an LCD (but not as sustainable as recyclable paper which was fine for a long old time): let's just get rid of it.
And we can work together: I don't have time to knock on doors for civil rights or go count lesser-spotted newts, so I'll thank you for what you're doing to make our society better, and I'll go do some lifting on this bit, 'k?
The mere-exposure effect (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect>) is all that is needed.
If ads were "completely fucking irrelevant" then companies wouldn't be spending the large amounts of money that they do on it. I agree that ads are a nuisance, but they're not going to be easy to simply get rid of, as long as money is involved. And considering how tightly coupled finance is with policy nowadays, I find it highly unlikely legislators would pass bills banning public advertisements. Especially when sometimes the government itself is the one getting paid to promote goods and services.
Finally, the issue is also defining what constitutes an advertisement. How do you draw the line between advertisement and free speech? If, theoretically, a very passionate citizen, enjoyed a product so much that they simply wanted to publicly express their satisfaction with it, posted a sign of that expression, does that constitute an advertisement?
If it does, and gets removed, then I'm afraid that's no different than some dystopian form of censorship.
If it doesn't, then it would be trivial for companies to continue advertising, because then every ad could just be re-framed to be the personal expression of an individual.
Second, the contrast is bad. Most colors wind up looking washed out. It can be nice for reading, but advertisers want their ads to pop.
I don't see this taking off for advertising at all, because advertisers won't like it. What it does seem more useful for is informational signage. Building directories, maps, etc. Because those don't need to be lit, and the e-ink can be a lot higher resolution than a lot of jumbo LED displays.
The tech will continue to improve if it finds its niche. Dynamic, low power, color informational signage displays are a big enough market by themselves to adopt and support enough product cycles to address shortcomings that advertisers have.
The potential for no mains power (e.g., small solar panel or a vibration energy harvesting power source) means virtually any flat wall could be turned into advertising inventory. Do accident lawyers need their ads to pop or just be displayed over and over again?
Unfortunately, advertisers prefer the most distracting light intensity they manage. Only regulation can solve that.
Advertisers will buy it because the seller can make the physical ad spot N times cheaper by showing N different ads during the day.
It's between glowing LCD panels and e-ink.
Advertisers are already cycling their ads on LCD panels at bus stops, on the subway, etc.
Going to e-ink just makes the advertisement much dimmer, it can't handle video, and it becomes washed out. Why would avertisers ever prefer that?
- This 13.3" panel cost ~$420 to make https://www.printables.com/model/1189455-waveshare-133e-6-co...
- This 7.3" panel cost ~$150 to make https://www.printables.com/model/1189420-waveshare-73e-6-col...
This includes shipping the panel from waveshare.com, paying taxes, adding a raspberry pi zero w2 + a sd card, and printing a case
Anything can become a "best seller" if you are able to arbitrarily lower the price by multiple orders of magnitude -- $500 luxury cars would fly off the lot but would not be profitable.
This was recently shared here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137513
This is still a black and white panel, but it's not that different with the color ones. Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
I’ve been (slowly) working on a similar project and it’s been easy to get it running on my desk hooked into power but much more difficult to elegantly frame the panel that can just live on a wall.
I find it wild that you used a dev board because the LDOs on them are most of the time very bad and you do seem to use 5V instead of bypassing that. The type you get normally uses 1mA just sitting idle.
Why did you use an external RTC instead of just soldering a 32.768khz crystal to the esp32? Okay if my assumption above is correct that answers that. but the external wakeup has no real advantage in power draw.
The relay eats some current and a mosfet in its place would probably be better. I assume you added it because the e-ink hat has no proper shutdown. From the looks of it you can just bypass the BUCK converter on it so just run it off 3.3-3.6v. There is a smaller BOOST converter in there that might still waste power so the mosfet might still be needed. This beings me to my next point:
you can completely do away with the DCDC boost converter by using a LiFEPO4 battery. All you need extra is monitor the voltage and have your display warn once it falls below 3V.
Anyway 9-10 months is remarkable for the LEGO approach.
This particular external RTC has very low power draw, and it allows me to put the esp32 into a deeper sleep state and turn off the entire RTC and RTC memory mini-MCU in the entire esp32. It does make a difference.
> I assume you added it because the e-ink hat has no proper shutdown. From the looks of it you can just bypass the BUCK converter on it so just run it off 3.3-3.6v. There is a smaller BOOST converter in there that might still waste power so the mosfet might still be n
Aye, the controller board isn't designed for a battery-based application and has an idiotically high idle power draw, even not taking the always-on power LED into account I could have taken out, so I'm only powering it up to do the update.
And yeah, I'm sure a MOSFET would do this fine.
> Anyway 9-10 months is remarkable for the LEGO approach.
The LEGO approach is partly because I kept shifting the goal posts - originally I wanted to forego controller board entirely, and directly drive the e-ink waveforms from the MCU with the help of an op-amp (there's some prior art and reverse engineering available for this). This is partially why I picked a dev board with a big external PSRAM for a trial run. The controller board has its own SPI memory to hold the large framebuffer, but I was originally going to park this with the esp32 and have the lob of memory hooked up there :-)
My other plan was actually ordering a custom PCB that has it all in one place (this is the main reason why I didn't bother to solder anything to a perf board).
But then I had a little daughter and plans changed, so I shipped the mockup to production. Since it's holding up pretty well I'm quite happy with how it turned out anyway, but I absolutely agree a cleaned-up "v1.0" of this thing would be really nice to do at some point.
Also, do note that I'm mainly a software engineer and have no formal training or background in EE, so partly I do these as little hobbyist learning projects and to do something with my hands. If your day consists of Alt-Tabbing between your EDA and your Mouser/Digikey order tracking I'm sure you'd approach this very differently and iterate it much more on the screen first :)
I somehow put a short on the design so my JLCPCB PCBA order is worthless. The short only appears when soldering the ESP32 down and I’ve tried three different boards with three different ESP32 C6 modules and it’s present in all of them.
I would have been much better off prototyping with LEGO parts first.
You inspired me to redo mine since I saw a new type of colour e-ink display (Spectra C6)
But if you just want to get going, you don't really need to go through that sort of trouble. You can just buy a panel + controller board via a retailer like e.g. Waveshare, and hook them up to a computer. Quite a few of these controller boards even have HDMI input, or come with SDK code for e.g. Raspberry Pi if they use SPI over GPIO. You can tinker quite a bit without things getting more challenging, and if you can arrange for wired power you may not really need to optimize anything.
The spectra color displays seem to be available cheaper than I expected ($250). Note that the refresh cycle is really long on these though.
I'm now tempted to put something together.
look at the names of the shops
The shop on the left, where is that dress? Inside or outside? The window to the left of the dress with the white rectangle outline is in front of the dress at the top of the picture and behind it at the bottom of the picture.
If the Kaleido 3 Outdoor is similar to how the Gallery 3 panels work, image refreshes are very slow compared to the standard Kaleido 3 panels (which can't do vivid colors): on the order of seconds. This is acceptable for displays that change every few minutes or hours, but would be unusable handheld devices.
It's interesting that they've chosen to continue the Kaleido lineage rather than make a stronger push for Gallery.
Still, there's a lot of details to consider and trade-ofs to make wrt/ content, and Spectra refresh is also dead-slow.
Perhaps to their credit, E-Ink isn't even trying to hide the refresh in their marketing material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr_EQaqTK0M (second half has a lot of examples of poster-sized Spectra 6 and Spectra 3100 panels).
It should be used for billboard advertising. You don't even need that many PPI pixels per square inch because of how high above it is, and it would save ginormous bucks on printing canvases and technicians changing the ad. Not to mention, timed advertising.
When i read this comment i had to go look at the product because i was expecting 10-20k. Looks very reasonable to me. The most expensive is only $2500? and the cheapest only $600? Seems super inline with what I would expect to pay for art.
Also, with e.g. an oil painting on canvas, the cost of producing that is the time of the artist to paint it by hand. I don't think 10-20K is anywhere reasonable for e.g. a mass-produced inkjet-printed thing. Likewise 10-20K for a PNG file would be even more insane.
https://www.waveshare.com/product/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-...
I just went through the process and made this for myself: https://www.printables.com/model/1189455-waveshare-133e-6-co...
The total price was around $420. This includes shipping, taxes (to Belgium), a pi zero w2, a sd card, and printing a case.
Are you happy with the quality?
Compared to the previous gen e-ink (7-color ACeP), the contrast and the colors are so much better. I also have a bunch of 3-color (black/white/red) panels - video and more pictures on https://frameos.net/ ) - and the contrast is similar, but the colors are obviously limited.
So yeah, I'm definitely happy.
Being able to control the time of day that your ad is shown is a pretty big deal. Being able to edit or take down a poorly considered ad campaign very quickly is also a pretty big deal. Coordinating paper ads and other media is tricky, because the companies that manage the advertising display inventory only have so many workers and therefore only so much capacity to do changes.
That's why they have to tout other benefits like being "eco friendly".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
interesting!
I don't have one, but it's closer to what you mention.
All they need is to come out with a product that covers billboards in real time.
uBlock Origin for real life.
https://github.com/bart-ai/bart
Ideally, one would use something like this on an AR headset/smart glasses and block unwanted stuff from their view
What are its advantages then?
Would be cool to have a color option too
> Kaleido 3 is good to used as Digital
I first thought it was a mistake from New Atlas, but it is actually on the main eInk site:
https://www.eink.com/brand/detail/Kaleido3-outdoor
They are a Taiwanese company, but a fairly major one, so mistakes like this are a bit jarring.
Advertisements are a fundamental part for a company. Depending on the type of company , it would still make sense for bill boards to be put out.
Hot take , but advertising onlines are a threat to security unlike bill boards , most online ads actively try to promote malware simply because of how easy it is to create an ad (google ads , more like yeh you can promote your spyware for homebrew by paying us a buck or two from the money you scam by your infoware)
I also don't like ads , simply because they don't understand me. But some do , there are many ads from my country that I & many others do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVvmLakUtXE
see this , an ad for bike in indian economy
Try to guess the number of views , seriously , I am talking to anybody reading this , to genuinely try to guess the number of views for a video whose length is exactly 1 minute.
Its 8.3 Million
Some people compare it to be a better song than many cinema movies songs for which you go to and pay with your cash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGwIFVUK7M
This ad is by Jindal , I got this in my recommended , yes a ad as a video shoved in my recommended.
Some commentors comment how they saw this ad in their movie cinema before the start of movie. And they said , that they felt that the movie they spent on the cinema was already worth it because of this ad alone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvGwIFVUK7M
This has 20 Million Views !
I am sure that many american / other countries also have such advertising. But I don't like apple like advertising / bland .
Maybe its just me , but I like the old style so much more. Filled with emotions and art , yet it doesn't cross a line of being over. It just fits in perfectly.
I am 16 years old and though I don't use twitter , though I don't use facebook / I was never in the time for my space.
I still feel nostalgic for that era. I like how old twitter looks. I like how myspace functioned. In fact I created an account on spacehey just for that.
I like the old style liked videos , square box , it makes me feel as part of something greater , a bit nostalgic.
Also just remembered hamara bajaj ad which is also really nice.
from the hero splendor ad that I linked in first link
Tu hai toh main hu aur manjilo ka ghar aana chalta rahe
A very rough english translation would be
You are therefore I am , and let the dreams come to our house. Lets keep going.
It captures emotions perfectly.
I have spent 15 minutes writing this post & I have no regrets.
Thanks for reading.
Reverse solipsism?
I personally watch such ads like men will be men etc. because they have literally been part of my culture now.
Pyaar ki raha mein chalta rahe.
"watching the ads if they have nothing else to watch"
There are so many interesting things to do, feel and experience in a life that watching just for the sake of watching is essentially a sign of bad mental health / depression.