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Comment by jackgavigan | Hacker News Reader

There are also plans to use E Ink's technology for digital art: https://inkposter.com/

The price point is too painful for home use unless you place your frame high above inaccessible without ladders.

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.

> The price point is too painful for home use unless you place your frame high above inaccessible without ladders.

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.

You're not paying for art. You're paying for paper you can later display art on.

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.

The displays seem to be available for around $250

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

$250 is just part of the price.

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.

It's never as cheap as you think is it! I think fortunately I have most of the other bits lying around. Was planning on putting it in a wooden frame with a matte.

Are you happy with the quality?

Can't really complain cause there's nothing better right now.

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.

Priced between $600-$2000. It can be themed for particular occasions, great for places like corporate offices, hotels which already spend quite a bit to look chic.

Is the image fidelity really good enough for that? I thought color e-ink had pretty limited bit-depth and gamut.

It's not. They have 4k colors available. Good enough for an eink reader, not good enough for art display.

Not all art would work but you could definitely find works that could work within the constraints.

You could commission works that exploit the medium.

This sounds like the answer. Retro-looking CGI will be right at home on a canvas like that.

The Kaleido panels features in this article indeed do 4096 colors, but the Spectra 6 panels also from E-ink can be a bit more - they mix particles of 6 different primary colors, and with some advanced dithering in place you can get pretty impressive results that really look quite pleasing.

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).

Why art, I want to put photos on it that swap out every so often.

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