I remember that previous post, and was interested in building something similar. I got turned off by the high prices of large eink displays but I did build an amazon lambda to let me use that published PDF as a daily news-source. I really like not having an infinite scroll or any links to anything else. It's open if other people want to use it: https://nytonline.net
I wanted to see more pictures of the screen from the front dammit! I would like to know what it would look like if I were to just get up and stand in front of it as if I were reading it.
There's one shot that's almost 3m away. Then the rest are extreme close ups only showing half the thing at an angle!
I believe the author was concerned about the copyright infringement that might occur due to showing the entire front page. Seems he purposely made all text below the headlines unreadable.
Perfectly reasonable concern, although I too wish there was a clearer shot of the front. Dang copyright laws!
Same. Can it also show HQ black and white sketches? Or other artwork?
I remember getting a digital photo frame for my parents when I was like 14 and instantly (even with teenage sensibilities) being upset that it looked fake and tacky. If it looks like paper or photo or painting - that's great.
Yes, this is third time I'm sharing this link but I have a large format (A4) e-ink device and I actually love it for when it's just sitting on a stand and showing my chosen images.
I didn't expect the e-ink display to cost 2.3k Euro's, but I love the concept and it looks great.
If the price could come down I think a consumer product that can be pointed at any web page would have lots of amazing use cases - from dynamic picture frame, to news, stats, etc.
The primary blocker is the price. This use-case is going to be huge when the price falls enough. I can imagine using two or three in various contexts around the house/office.
Same and now I'm actually debating getting that 32" panel. I've longed for some sort of pinboard style display that I can put things like calendar and reminders on for years now.
I built one using raspberry pi and PaPiRus display. It's tiny but it suffices for a desktop notification system.
I also gamified it using a plant so that I would read all unread emails by the end of day (having it grow/die depending if I hit the goal). You should give it a shot.
I have been constantly hearing about eink getting cheaper/better for over a decade now, but the price that the author paid (2300 euros for a 32-inch screen) seems ridiculous. At that price point does it make any sense to not just get a regular LCD for a small fraction of the cost? Dimming the brightness and adjusting the color profile will get you pretty close in terms of experience. The few dollars a year in electricity savings isn't relevant either.
When I saw the article I thought that perhaps he found that well priced large e-ink display or pulled from a failed product, but turns out he just found a large one.
The difference between eink and LCD is big enough that it's not even worth doing without the eink. A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo. And it would very obviously just be a TV. While the eink looks amazing.
I think you either have to shell out the money for eink, or don't do it at all.
>A dim LCD newspaper on your wall would look really tacky, imo.
It really depends on how you do it. They sell TV's like The Frame[1] from Samsung ($599 for the 32" version) that look much closer to a picture frame and are designed for almost this exact purpose. If you are in some semi-permanent home (you probably should be before you spend $2.7k on an art piece) it isn't much work to mount it in a way that would hide the cables. From the looks of the photos in this article, the e-Ink version isn't event mounted flush against the wall and appears to be tilted downward. I don't love the way that looks given the cost. I would much rather spend half the money on that TV and a professional mounting.
The average power consumption of The Frame is 118 W (figure provided by Samsung). The average power consumption of an e-ink display that refreshes once daily and needs a single annual recharge is effectively 0 W. Using a rough price of electricity in San Francisco of just over $0.22/kWh, The Frame costs ~$230/yr to run.
I don't know if I could, in good conscience, countenance wasting that much electricity on running a TV 24/7 to show a static image that updates once daily. Yes, you'd have to be running the e-ink display for awhile to break even on the power costs, and you could save some money on The Frame by putting it on a schedule where it turns off at night, but it still seems overly wasteful.
Do you guys have variable rate plans? In Texas I pay spot rate updating every 5 minutes. There is a 3c/kwh fee regardless of price. Most of the time it's 2-3c/kwh however it occasionally goes to $1-9/kwh. At night it's usually .01c to sometimes well into the negatives where I get paid to use electricity. As you can imagine I charge my electric car at night and in average it only costs me about $2-3 per 1000 miles of range.
Oh, that is expensive. Here in northern sweden I pay $0.08 per kWh. However you guys plastered all your houses with solar panels a few years ago so I guess that helps a lot to keep the cost down by not needing to buy so much.
Last month, ConEd charged me 12.65¢ per kWh just for delivery (before taxes, surcharges, etc). Then my actual electricity supplier charged me a further 16.90¢ per kWh. Call it 30¢ / kWh.
Realistically, the kWh is used to determine cost of ownership by most people, not environmental impact.
230~ USD a year to run a 600 dollar product versus the initial cost of a 2300 dollar display with little to no electricity overhead -- and both have similar rates of failure with regard to non-display components.. AND that's disregarding 'Samsung Vs. Small-Company-From-Slovenia' being a factor in the purchase.
I understand eink is unique, but that characteristic has to be sold to people as a trait that is worth the difference..
That's a hard sell, if compared directly to one another.
(p.s. backlit displays are tacky, but my house is covered in them. I love it. I'm a tacky kind of person, though.)
Hey, don't hold our heritage against us and rather swing by our Valley office when C-19 allows us to meet.
On the subject of price - I fully agree with you - the price for sure can't be justified just by energy savings. It's a completely different product, with totaly different features and use cases. And yes, using it just for reading the news is costly.
I do like I how it looks tho, but that's just me. :)
I'm not sure where you are getting that 118W number. I can't find it on that page. The energy guide[1] states 87 kWh per year at 5 hours per day so roughly 48W per hour rather than 118W so drop that yearly cost down around $100. Also I don't want to sound like I am shilling for Samsung, but there are various power saving options on the device. I'm not sure if those are included in the estimate. Either way, even in the markets with the most expensive electricity costs, it would take several years if not over a decade for this approach to match the initial price of the e-Ink option.
Also both these options are wasteful in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the LCD option will likely be more wasteful than the e-Ink version, but neither is particularly justifiable if you are concerned about waste. I would also venture a guess that on the full spectrum of environmental waste those two options are much closer together than either is to just throwing up an old fashioned art print on your wall.
Again, why are you using 5 hours per day? When used as a photo frame, this is going to be on for a lot more than that. The pathological case here is it's on for 24 hours per day, not merely 5.
Because the 87 kWh total is based off the assumption of 5 hours per day. We need to use that to get to the actual wattage. Once I have the wattage, I can use that to get to the 24 hour per day 365 days per year usage of 418 kWh.
Another way of getting there is taking the 87 kWh estimate and multiplying it by 24/5 to get 418 kWh.
Ahhh, now I see what you're doing. I found a source that says 118 W though, so I guess it's just a case of dueling sources at this point. If someone owns one of these and has a Kill-A-Watt then we can find out for sure.
Where are you getting the 118 W number from? A LED TV this size will use a fraction of that (30-40 W max, and can be brought down further with power saving options).
> How much electricity does this all use, I can hear you asking. I haven’t tested that out myself, but we do have a note from Samsung. They say The Frame needs almost the same amount of electricity in Art Mode as in TV mode. In hard figures, external reports talk of 100 watts in TV mode and 60 to 130 watts in Art Mode, depending how bright the room is. While Samsung themselves give 118 watts as the average value, they don’t specify if this is while watching TV of admiring art. But we can safely assume this isn’t a top-scoring environmentally friendly product yet.
Well there is your problem. That review is not of the 32" version. A bigger screen is going to require more power. I can't tell exactly what size those power numbers are from, but it is at least the 55" version and not the 32" version that was used as a comparison to the 32" e-Ink display in the original post.
Well on the plus side we now have figures for the annual electricity cost of both the 32" model and the larger 55" model. $100/year is probably still more than I'd want to pay on a picture frame though, I gotta say. That's about the same cost as basic Netflix.
I am right there with you. I can't say I would jump to purchase either but the $600 upfront and $100 per year option is less outrageous to me than the one that costs $2700 upfront but is practically free in perpetuity.
But light box type backlit art just doesn't look right, it's a cool comparison and worth doing, but with e-ink you get contrast that is proportional to the ambient light (and unless art mode changes significantly the refresh which it might, I haven't checked, LCD screen will still not photograph or film well). It won't photograph as well with flash etc. either. And obviously most important: if you have friends who are pretentious enough to turn up at your house wearing sunglasses, it'll look good for them too...
I get it's sort of priced as an intangible piece of art, that is worth wildly different amounts to different people, but to the people it's worthwhile to, the difference is everything.
Yes, I'm also a sucker for e-ink. I just love the aesthetic.
Thanks for digging into the costs and info then, it's been an interesting conversation to follow.
meanwhile, the e-ink display is black and white, so for the newspaper or some other kind of art might be enough, but the lcd screen on the other side is much more versatile, It can even show animations and video.
To me, the poor look would be from the LCD being its own light source. The e-ink screen makes it look like a proper piece of paper since it’s illuminated by outside light. I think that really changes the concept. If I want a TV hanging on the wall, that’s easy enough (as you say). If I want a daily newspaper hanging on the wall looking like the real thing, I bet e-ink looks a lot better.
In the showroom The Frame looks indeed quite good, but I'd be worried about how it looks in less optimized spaces (i.e. dimly, unevenly lit). And they reserve the "Art mode" adjustments to their specific app for it, so you're very limited in using it for your own content.
I was in the mall just a few minutes ago, and while I was waiting for a coffee I was standing next to one of those movie-poster billboard things that have TV in them. Every few seconds a poster for a movie, or cleaning product, or some store would pop up, each had some subtle animation. They were really high res, 4k perhaps. Really nice and crisp.
Anyhow, I was thinking how great the images on them were.
With a light sensor you could adjust the colour of an LCD display so it exactly simulates the light reflected by paper. I don't understand why nobody did it before. Now you can't patent it though because this comment serves as prior art :)
I've also noticed this on my Google Home/Nest Hub, where it has an effect where it adjusts the image on screen to match the color temperature of the ambient light. It makes for a really weird (albeit pleasant) effect that to my eye makes the image look more like a printed/reflective image. I've long wondered if you could duplicate that effect by replacing the backlighting in a junk LCD with something that can adjust color temperature and adding a color sensor, but haven't had time to try it.
Yes, these sorts of things are common in photography workflows. There are color profilers [ex: 0] that update your monitor's profile in real time to maintain a consistent profile given ambient light changes.
They're usually used as part of a larger calibration workflow, for example: calibrating your monitor and printer so that what you print with a specific ink/paper combination looks exactly like what you see on the screen. (Or, as much as is technically possible to do so.)
The total absence of a backlight is hard to replicate the experience of in real life. Spending $2500 on this is also not for me, but I just spent a couple minutes playing with the contrast and brightness on my high-middle Dell monitor and I couldn't get anything that was convincingly "closer to paper than to a computer monitor".
Having to run a hidden wire to it is another downside, but 500 euros probably covers that job in most cases.
I wonder if one of those non-backlit memory LCDs could do the trick. (The kind of display used on the Playdate console, and I believe most Pebble smartwatches.)
1. LCD does not run on a battery, like this. Greatly improves aesthetics and flexibility of placement
2. LCD will never look the same. You can dimm it all you want, but in evening you'll still have a backlight. I have Samsung Art Frame TV, which tries to do the same. It's closer than most things, but nothing like an e-ink display. It's night and day compared my (2) eInk tablets
I'm fairly sure 32" and above has only been available for 3 or 4 years. With a low volume, niche product 2300 Euros is really not unreasonable, particularly in a commercial setting
It is really difficult to describe the benefits of e-ink vs. even great displays. The closest perhaps is the oled of my iPhone with the automatic color adjustment. But for emulating the look and feel of paper, e-ink cannot be beaten. I just basically replaced my iPad Pro for note taking with the reMarkable 2, and it is amazing what a difference it makes. Besides the textured surface, it just looks like paper with ink on it. The iPad is great, but always looks like a screen.
if it’s obvious that you shouldn’t spend $2300 consumer electronic being relegated to an art piece using almost none of the utility it is capable of, then dont do it
if the answer isnt so obvious then it’s still interesting and viable
Scale matters a lot. e-ink form factors that are used in consumer products have gotten much cheaper.
The smaller 2-3 inch ones (like what some stores use for their pricetags) are only a few dollars. You can find tablet sized displays for ~50 dollars. I eink is often the best choice, especially if you care about power consumption (like a hobbyist project on batteries) and a less obnoxious aesthetic (backlights in dark rooms are annoying).
I've thought about making an eink calendar before, but since the cost is so high I wondered if it would be cheaper just buy 31 2 inch screens and somehow connect them.
The screens usually have at least 1-2mm border around them, plus driving complexity will go over the roof. But it's a great tinkerers project - go for it!
Since our software allows tiling we've built some test large scale composite screens out of our 6" and 9" devices - I think maximum was around 25-50 screens combined in a big virtual surface, with resolution over 10k x 10k pixels. So sure, it can be done, but is a pain to setup and run.
e-Ink really does look very different. Especially if you are hanging it up in a bright, sunlit room, it is a world of difference from LCD. In fact, the sunnier it is, the better your e-Ink displays look, while the worse your LCD displays will look.
Also, e-Ink displays don't emit light so they are extremely pleasing to the eye, and don't light up your bedroom at night, if you want it in your bedroom. They also can maintain an image with zero power, which is great if you're conscious about energy usage.
The 2300 euro price of this display is a bit beyond my personal budget for projects, but if you're happy with 13.3 inches you can try this Waveshare display:
If you want a clean construction with all the electronics in one piece, another option you might consider is to hunt for used, 13.3 inch older Boox tablets, which run Android, and just write an Android app for them to do whatever you want them to do.
If you're looking for a less hacky version that still looks good (similar to the OPs 32" display) and is simple to build upon - you can use our 13" touchless variant.
The Joan line is fully productivized and you can use our hosted service to connect to any HTML source (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-13/).
Before the Coronavirus, I'd still see people reading the physical New York Times on the subway.
Some people were amazingly good at one-handing it too—they could turn the page while still holding onto the pole with their other hand. Don't know how they did it, really.
Currently, BOM cost is higher than that, I believe. But we can hope that with devices like the Remarkable bringing larger format e-ink that the pricing can be driven down with process improvements that come from scale.
The screen itself _is_ a commercial product. The custom software to run this is only a few dozen LoC on a server and you could probably work out how to hack it directly with the Visionect software.
Thank you so much for that link! I just got my reMarkable2 (which I adore) and this is quite useful. Both by itself as well as for hacking pointers. Being able to use my reMarkable as a static eInk display of a content of my choice is so useful, something I always missed with my kindle.
Ahh this is super cool! Looking at the Visionect product line and their website isn’t entirely clear - do you need to pay a subscription fee for the cloud service that manages the device settings? This would be a great piece of office art but will be a much harder sell if there’s a paid cloud component...
I'm surprised that NYT still offers these PDFs unauthenticated. If enough people build these displays, they will eventually take notice and turn them into (literal) paywalls.
I love the idea of an e-ink display as an art piece, but does a dedicated display for news headlines really operate in the spirit of calm technology, given the current political climate?
I think this varies a lot from person to person - I love being up to date and knowing what's going on in the world keeps me 'calm', just to give perspective.
As an art piece, this certainly keeps itself in the background and never tries to get your attention, instead just catches your eye, which might fit the 'calm technology' paradigm a bit better.
Neither being obsessed with the news nor being completely away from it will bring calm. You need to give yourself "just enough" time to process what's happening and yield control to the world.
Of course, this is easier said than done and I'm failing terribly at it.
And, I think the idea of just having the front page of the New York Times on your wall, which will only show a set number of stories and will only ever update once per day, could be a great moderating force!
Interesting thought. On the one hand, its lighting (or lack thereof) causes it to visually blend in with its surroundings; it doesn't stand out at all and functions as a piece of art. But its content can metaphorically yell at a person.
I think calm technology is characterized by tech which is easily ignorable/does not outwardly communicate unless the user wants to interact with it. Given that the display effectively functions as a piece of art unless someone decides to look at and read it, I don't think it would contradict with this characterization. The stress that would be responsible for violating the spirit of calm technology only exists after a person decides to read the display.
One of the key technologies of surveillance in the novel is the “telescreen,” a device very much like our own television.
The telescreen displays a single channel of news, propaganda and wellness programming. It differs from our own television in two crucial respects: It is impossible to turn off and the screen also watches its viewers.”
Well, it’s only halfway to 1984, since it doesn’t look like it has a camera. Let’s call this a 992 technology.
For New Yorkers, walking out of the flat and being bombarded by a loud presentation of news was part of the experience for over 100 years, ever since newsstands have been around.
But the difference here is instead of being bombarded with 7 or 8 differing dailies headlines, you get exactly one. The NYT. That’s a bit Orwellian.
For some reason, the story of the man who ate nothing but McDonalds for weeks straight popped into my head.
That's definitely a matter of perspective, once you consider it as an art piece you should consider the pricing in terms of how art is priced. It's approx $800 per sq ft, which certainly wouldn't be considered expensive in the art world.
Of course galleries usually take about a 40% cut, so the retail price would probably end up north of $5,000, probably more if the artist wants to make any money too. Which definitely moves the price per sq ft up.
Yeah, and frustratingly or fortunately (depending on how you look at it) that board has a full Linux/WiFi/Bluetooth stack on it so you don't need/can't use a ESP32/Whatever.
Oddly, I got this flash message after adding a screen to my cart:
31.2˝ monochrome ePaper Display [VA3200-QAA]【Display Module Only】
PLEASE NOTE:
(I) THE PRODUCTS ARE NOT CONSUMER PRODUCTS INTENDED FOR PERSONAL, FAMILY OR HOUSEHOLD PURPOSES; AND
(II) PURCHASER IS PURCHASING THE PRODUCTS FOR COMMERCIAL USE AND/OR IN A BUSINESS CAPACITY. ORDERS PLACED BY CONSUMERS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED
Seems a bit harsh, and it wouldn’t be for regulatory reasons, would it?
The spec sheet on that link says '2x FPC interface', what does that mean? When I google 'fpc to hdmi' I get a bunch of generic hdmi cables. Is 'FPC' just a form factor to transfer an hdmi signal? More to the point, how would I hook up a display like this to an RPi, and how would I hook up 3 to anything without using a GPU with 3 outputs?
eInk displays are really quite fun to work with. Pre-pandemic shutdown, I was working on a custom work badge holder that was primarily an eInk display to show my picture and daily work calendar.
A little Arduino can easily pull down my week's schedule from Outlook, then update the screen for the current day, then put itself in a deep (extremely low power consumption) sleep until it's time to update with the next day. Wake up, update display, go back to sleep - all in a few seconds with minimal battery use. And any time I re-sync via USB, it updates the schedule and the display, plus charges a small LiPo battery that runs things.
Is it super useful? Eh no, everything it has is on my phone already. Is it fun tech to work with? Most definitely.
PS
Probably most people know this but in case not, once you set an eInk display, it requires no power to maintain the image. I've got a few small ones I put images on a few years ago that are still just fine.
You could probably improve upon this with an ESP8266; built-in WiFi and the ability to deep sleep should allow for completely wireless operation for a couple weeks / months.
In a similar vein, someone previously created a "Very Slow Movie Player" using e-ink.[1] I always thought this would make for a nice little art piece in a room.
I posted a few days back that I was putting together one of these, very similar to the one described in that story.
The e-ink screen I was waiting for (this one: https://www.waveshare.com/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm) arrived literally days after I posted that comment, about a month earlier than expected, and I now mostly have an initial version of the project working.
Some comments: A nice 6” screen for $70ish is a pretty great deal, although I’ll confess that I’m thinking about upgrading to their similar 9.7” screen, which is about double the price.
A full frame update takes about half a second (but the whole screen does flash white during it, so it definitely draws the eye if you have it anywhere in your eyeline when the frame update happens. In theory the display supports partial updates, but I’m not sure it supports them in greyscale display modes; I haven’t investigated that yet)
One gotcha which I hadn’t planned for is that even when fully blank, the display isn’t really white. I’d say that it’s maybe a 30% grey, so the movie frame can often appear to just be a big black rectangle, unless the room lighting is really good. And if you’re framing the display with a white mat around it (as I did), then that’s just going to make it look even darker again. I think I’m going to have to cut a new mat from a darker material. And in the meantime, I’m boosting brightness and contrast of each extracted frame before converting to greyscale, and that’s helped a lot. (In the medium story, Bryan is using a 3D printed frame in black without a mat, which strongly mitigates the contrast issue)
Another gotcha I ran into is that the frame I bought to put the project in (an Ikea Hovsta) turns out not to be deep enough to house a pi + the hat which controls it, so I’m probably going to need to buy a deeper frame (right now I have the pi hanging out the back while the frame sits on my desk). You might be able to squeeze everything into the frame if you used a RPi Zero and wired the connections individually, instead of connecting via the HAT.. but I’m not sure whether an RPi Zero will be able to keep up with decoding a HD video stream and dithering and displaying frames even at a 2.5 minutes/frame speed. (I haven’t tested at all; it might be totally fine!)
32" eInk wall art, or a 16-core Ryzen 9 workstation with 128GB of RAM. Let me think, hmmm, I guess I can't really put a price on impressing my hipster friends.
Where can you get a workstation like that for $2,300? Is that building it yourself out of parts? Last time I looked into getting a machine like that it seemed to cost more like $4,000+.
I was just thinking how cool it would be to have a colour e-ink display showing something like the current New Yorker cover. They do exist [0] but are likely significantly more expensive again than monochrome, and the 32" panel listed on the site is only 720p.
A yearly print subscription is probably only a couple bucks more per month when added to the monthly digital you’re paying for.
Get it in paper at your doorstep and save a bunch of money? Or hang it on the wall daily? If you want to read more just... turn to the right page!
Edit: I understand it’s not as fun or as arty to do this. I get why the OP is doing it, but $2700 seems like a lot. You could automate 25 kindles and a raspberry pi to create a collage (or show 20 different front pages?) for that kind of money.
It's wall art, not the news. The author reads the news just fine with their news subscriptions.
The form is more important than the function, at least to the author. Of course it can be achieved in any number of ways, but the author chose this way because it is pleasing to the eye.
For a cheaper version of this (400 vs. 2300 Euros) on the reMarkable tablet, see remarkable_news[0], which runs as a systemd service and periodically refetches the URL of choice.
I bought a 7.5-inch eink screen from Amazon, put it in a photo frame, and programmed it to show my todo list so that I could check the list without turn on my laptop.
It is pretty good. The only thing that annoys me is that when it refreshes, the screen flashes (in back and white) multiple times, which disturbs me.
Usually the e-ink screens which flash multiple times during an update are tri-color screens; most commonly either black/white/red or black/white/yellow (and other colors are apparently available, but much less commonly seen in the wild!)
Every display like that which I’ve used could be put into a display mode where it shows only black/white, which will make updates a lot faster and result in the screen only flashing once per full update. For example, I have a very small black/white/red display which takes about six flashes and 15 seconds to complete a display update, but if I put it into black/white mode (i.e.: disabling support for red), then the update takes less than a second and only one flash.
That might be an option for you if you don’t mind giving up the third color!
I read the first few paragraphs, then searched for a dollar sign, which did not come up, nor did a euro sign, because oddly the author chose to write out "2300 euro's" [sic]. So a little bit hard to find the buried price for people who aren't interested in reading the whole column.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] thread(One bug I found; I think you're using GMT time, so right now as of 4:30pm Pacific, its going to the day after, so the 12th, which is 404ing).
There's one shot that's almost 3m away. Then the rest are extreme close ups only showing half the thing at an angle!
Perfectly reasonable concern, although I too wish there was a clearer shot of the front. Dang copyright laws!
I remember getting a digital photo frame for my parents when I was like 14 and instantly (even with teenage sensibilities) being upset that it looked fake and tacky. If it looks like paper or photo or painting - that's great.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/jem97h/most_of_m...
If the price could come down I think a consumer product that can be pointed at any web page would have lots of amazing use cases - from dynamic picture frame, to news, stats, etc.
I also gamified it using a plant so that I would read all unread emails by the end of day (having it grow/die depending if I hit the goal). You should give it a shot.
I think you either have to shell out the money for eink, or don't do it at all.
It really depends on how you do it. They sell TV's like The Frame[1] from Samsung ($599 for the 32" version) that look much closer to a picture frame and are designed for almost this exact purpose. If you are in some semi-permanent home (you probably should be before you spend $2.7k on an art piece) it isn't much work to mount it in a way that would hide the cables. From the looks of the photos in this article, the e-Ink version isn't event mounted flush against the wall and appears to be tilted downward. I don't love the way that looks given the cost. I would much rather spend half the money on that TV and a professional mounting.
[1] - https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...
I don't know if I could, in good conscience, countenance wasting that much electricity on running a TV 24/7 to show a static image that updates once daily. Yes, you'd have to be running the e-ink display for awhile to break even on the power costs, and you could save some money on The Frame by putting it on a schedule where it turns off at night, but it still seems overly wasteful.
I think the tiers are ~ 0-300kwh / 300-1200kwh / 1200kwh+ per month
Last month, ConEd charged me 12.65¢ per kWh just for delivery (before taxes, surcharges, etc). Then my actual electricity supplier charged me a further 16.90¢ per kWh. Call it 30¢ / kWh.
230~ USD a year to run a 600 dollar product versus the initial cost of a 2300 dollar display with little to no electricity overhead -- and both have similar rates of failure with regard to non-display components.. AND that's disregarding 'Samsung Vs. Small-Company-From-Slovenia' being a factor in the purchase.
I understand eink is unique, but that characteristic has to be sold to people as a trait that is worth the difference..
That's a hard sell, if compared directly to one another.
(p.s. backlit displays are tacky, but my house is covered in them. I love it. I'm a tacky kind of person, though.)
On the subject of price - I fully agree with you - the price for sure can't be justified just by energy savings. It's a completely different product, with totaly different features and use cases. And yes, using it just for reading the news is costly.
I do like I how it looks tho, but that's just me. :)
Also both these options are wasteful in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the LCD option will likely be more wasteful than the e-Ink version, but neither is particularly justifiable if you are concerned about waste. I would also venture a guess that on the full spectrum of environmental waste those two options are much closer together than either is to just throwing up an old fashioned art print on your wall.
[1] - https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/PVI/20200606/common-e...
I said in my post I'm using 24 hours per day, not 5. Multiply your figures by 24/5 to see the 24/7 costs.
> 48W per hour
1 W = 1 J/s. 48 J/s/hr would be some weird kind of accelerating power consumption, which is I assume not what you meant here.
87 kWh = 5 hours per day * 365 days
87000 Wh = 1825 hours
87000 Wh / 1825 h = 47.7 W
47.7 W * 24 hours per day * 365 days = 418 kWh
418 kWh * $0.22 per kWh = $92
Another way of getting there is taking the 87 kWh estimate and multiplying it by 24/5 to get 418 kWh.
$10/year over $.12/kWh over (5hours/day*365days/year) is roughly 46W for the 32" version.
https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy_US/images/produc...
if you had only these panels in your house, no other electrical use, you would pay:
[ pg&e: 0-300kwh @ .24, 300-1200kwh @ .31, 1200kwh+ @ .38 ] it gets pricier with time of use + summer up to .48/kwhIt also shuts off when folks leave the room. I assume it has a passive IR motion sensor.
“Art Mode: [...] Set the Motion Sensor timer, so when you leave the room, the screen turns off automatically to save energy.”
32" Class The Frame QLED HDR Smart TV (2020) - QN32LS03TBFXZA | Samsung US https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...
https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/the-exciting-bit-is-when-you-...
I get it's sort of priced as an intangible piece of art, that is worth wildly different amounts to different people, but to the people it's worthwhile to, the difference is everything.
Yes, I'm also a sucker for e-ink. I just love the aesthetic.
Thanks for digging into the costs and info then, it's been an interesting conversation to follow.
This embedded imac also has the cool feature of never changing if someone is looking at it.
https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels
However, it uses an equivalently expensive piece of hardware, right? The LG 5k from Apple is $1300.
Anyhow, I was thinking how great the images on them were.
They're usually used as part of a larger calibration workflow, for example: calibrating your monitor and printer so that what you print with a specific ink/paper combination looks exactly like what you see on the screen. (Or, as much as is technically possible to do so.)
[0] - https://www.xrite.com/categories/calibration-profiling/i1dis...
In fairness, any display of a newspaper who so bombastically trumpeted the US into war with Iraq is kinda tacky.
Having to run a hidden wire to it is another downside, but 500 euros probably covers that job in most cases.
See e.g. this teardown: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Pebble+Teardown/13319.
2. LCD will never look the same. You can dimm it all you want, but in evening you'll still have a backlight. I have Samsung Art Frame TV, which tries to do the same. It's closer than most things, but nothing like an e-ink display. It's night and day compared my (2) eInk tablets
I'm fairly sure 32" and above has only been available for 3 or 4 years. With a low volume, niche product 2300 Euros is really not unreasonable, particularly in a commercial setting
It does involve some manual work, though.
https://www.howtogeek.com/414647/how-to-build-a-smart-mirror... https://www.electricmirror.com/smart-mirror-savvy/
if it’s obvious that you shouldn’t spend $2300 consumer electronic being relegated to an art piece using almost none of the utility it is capable of, then dont do it
if the answer isnt so obvious then it’s still interesting and viable
The smaller 2-3 inch ones (like what some stores use for their pricetags) are only a few dollars. You can find tablet sized displays for ~50 dollars. I eink is often the best choice, especially if you care about power consumption (like a hobbyist project on batteries) and a less obnoxious aesthetic (backlights in dark rooms are annoying).
Since our software allows tiling we've built some test large scale composite screens out of our 6" and 9" devices - I think maximum was around 25-50 screens combined in a big virtual surface, with resolution over 10k x 10k pixels. So sure, it can be done, but is a pain to setup and run.
Also, e-Ink displays don't emit light so they are extremely pleasing to the eye, and don't light up your bedroom at night, if you want it in your bedroom. They also can maintain an image with zero power, which is great if you're conscious about energy usage.
The 2300 euro price of this display is a bit beyond my personal budget for projects, but if you're happy with 13.3 inches you can try this Waveshare display:
https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat.htm
Or this 10 inch version for less than half the price of the 13.3 inch one, which I have:
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...
If you want a clean construction with all the electronics in one piece, another option you might consider is to hunt for used, 13.3 inch older Boox tablets, which run Android, and just write an Android app for them to do whatever you want them to do.
The Joan line is fully productivized and you can use our hosted service to connect to any HTML source (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-13/).
Or if you'd like to tinker with the platform itself, then Visionect offers a fully customizable solution (https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-13/) with the same hardware.
We've had a lot of people take our 6" panels and build their own Home Automation controllers. Here are the instructions: https://getjoan.com/blog/diy-home-automation-system/
Some people were amazingly good at one-handing it too—they could turn the page while still holding onto the pole with their other hand. Don't know how they did it, really.
500$ would be a reasonable price .
if you were willing to make one to sell i would buy it.
[0] https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_news
EDIT: Answered my own question. The cloud software is included and you can run it yourself, they just optionally allow you to use their hosted version: https://docs.visionect.com/VisionectSoftwareSuite/Installati...
Here's today's: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/11/11/nytfrontpage/scan...
Modify the URL to get previous dates.
As an art piece, this certainly keeps itself in the background and never tries to get your attention, instead just catches your eye, which might fit the 'calm technology' paradigm a bit better.
Of course, this is easier said than done and I'm failing terribly at it.
I think calm technology is characterized by tech which is easily ignorable/does not outwardly communicate unless the user wants to interact with it. Given that the display effectively functions as a piece of art unless someone decides to look at and read it, I don't think it would contradict with this characterization. The stress that would be responsible for violating the spirit of calm technology only exists after a person decides to read the display.
One of the key technologies of surveillance in the novel is the “telescreen,” a device very much like our own television.
The telescreen displays a single channel of news, propaganda and wellness programming. It differs from our own television in two crucial respects: It is impossible to turn off and the screen also watches its viewers.”
https://theconversation.com/what-orwells-1984-tells-us-about...
Well, it’s only halfway to 1984, since it doesn’t look like it has a camera. Let’s call this a 992 technology.
For New Yorkers, walking out of the flat and being bombarded by a loud presentation of news was part of the experience for over 100 years, ever since newsstands have been around.
But the difference here is instead of being bombarded with 7 or 8 differing dailies headlines, you get exactly one. The NYT. That’s a bit Orwellian.
For some reason, the story of the man who ate nothing but McDonalds for weeks straight popped into my head.
There are a lot of RSS feeds for daily comics that you could feed into this - maybe a smaller eink tablet for a Calvin and Hobbes each AM.
Of course galleries usually take about a 40% cut, so the retail price would probably end up north of $5,000, probably more if the artist wants to make any money too. Which definitely moves the price per sq ft up.
what an awful comment to something so beautiful.
There is also a 4096 color 31" e-ink display available: https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%cb%9d-color-epaper-di... and a 42" mono display: https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%cb%9d-monochrome-epaper...
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-morning-paper-revisited-35b40...
And a frame, etc.
Competition in the space would be great.
Does this one require a driver board as well?
31.2˝ monochrome ePaper Display [VA3200-QAA]【Display Module Only】 PLEASE NOTE: (I) THE PRODUCTS ARE NOT CONSUMER PRODUCTS INTENDED FOR PERSONAL, FAMILY OR HOUSEHOLD PURPOSES; AND (II) PURCHASER IS PURCHASING THE PRODUCTS FOR COMMERCIAL USE AND/OR IN A BUSINESS CAPACITY. ORDERS PLACED BY CONSUMERS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED
Seems a bit harsh, and it wouldn’t be for regulatory reasons, would it?
This one is 12.5" [0] which might be large enough for a lot of use cases. If not I suppose multiple ones can be stacked right next to each other.
[0] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Large-12-48-E-Ink-dis...
A little Arduino can easily pull down my week's schedule from Outlook, then update the screen for the current day, then put itself in a deep (extremely low power consumption) sleep until it's time to update with the next day. Wake up, update display, go back to sleep - all in a few seconds with minimal battery use. And any time I re-sync via USB, it updates the schedule and the display, plus charges a small LiPo battery that runs things.
Is it super useful? Eh no, everything it has is on my phone already. Is it fun tech to work with? Most definitely.
PS
Probably most people know this but in case not, once you set an eInk display, it requires no power to maintain the image. I've got a few small ones I put images on a few years ago that are still just fine.
[1] https://medium.com/s/story/very-slow-movie-player-499f76c48b...
The e-ink screen I was waiting for (this one: https://www.waveshare.com/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm) arrived literally days after I posted that comment, about a month earlier than expected, and I now mostly have an initial version of the project working.
Some comments: A nice 6” screen for $70ish is a pretty great deal, although I’ll confess that I’m thinking about upgrading to their similar 9.7” screen, which is about double the price.
A full frame update takes about half a second (but the whole screen does flash white during it, so it definitely draws the eye if you have it anywhere in your eyeline when the frame update happens. In theory the display supports partial updates, but I’m not sure it supports them in greyscale display modes; I haven’t investigated that yet)
One gotcha which I hadn’t planned for is that even when fully blank, the display isn’t really white. I’d say that it’s maybe a 30% grey, so the movie frame can often appear to just be a big black rectangle, unless the room lighting is really good. And if you’re framing the display with a white mat around it (as I did), then that’s just going to make it look even darker again. I think I’m going to have to cut a new mat from a darker material. And in the meantime, I’m boosting brightness and contrast of each extracted frame before converting to greyscale, and that’s helped a lot. (In the medium story, Bryan is using a 3D printed frame in black without a mat, which strongly mitigates the contrast issue)
Another gotcha I ran into is that the frame I bought to put the project in (an Ikea Hovsta) turns out not to be deep enough to house a pi + the hat which controls it, so I’m probably going to need to buy a deeper frame (right now I have the pi hanging out the back while the frame sits on my desk). You might be able to squeeze everything into the frame if you used a RPi Zero and wired the connections individually, instead of connecting via the HAT.. but I’m not sure whether an RPi Zero will be able to keep up with decoding a HD video stream and dithering and displaying frames even at a 2.5 minutes/frame speed. (I haven’t tested at all; it might be totally fine!)
Buying a industrial printer refurb could even make sense economically at this point. With the added bonus of displaying the full week front pages.
Folks, an eInk display the size of a newspaper broadsheet costs 2300 euro, purchase ramen accordingly.
Example $2333 build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/t4FjZZ
What other iconic works are there that give you an idea of what's happening in the world?
Time, New Yorker, ...
[0] https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html
Get it in paper at your doorstep and save a bunch of money? Or hang it on the wall daily? If you want to read more just... turn to the right page!
Edit: I understand it’s not as fun or as arty to do this. I get why the OP is doing it, but $2700 seems like a lot. You could automate 25 kindles and a raspberry pi to create a collage (or show 20 different front pages?) for that kind of money.
The form is more important than the function, at least to the author. Of course it can be achieved in any number of ways, but the author chose this way because it is pleasing to the eye.
[0] https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_news
It is pretty good. The only thing that annoys me is that when it refreshes, the screen flashes (in back and white) multiple times, which disturbs me.
Every display like that which I’ve used could be put into a display mode where it shows only black/white, which will make updates a lot faster and result in the screen only flashing once per full update. For example, I have a very small black/white/red display which takes about six flashes and 15 seconds to complete a display update, but if I put it into black/white mode (i.e.: disabling support for red), then the update takes less than a second and only one flash.
That might be an option for you if you don’t mind giving up the third color!