>For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140.
Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels at scale than E-ink film.
>It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.
I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality.
The FUD that large e-ink displays are expensive because of some patent conspiracy needs to stop.
Large e-ink screens are expensive because manufacturing yields are very low and so are sales volumes.
Source: worked with e-ink on products with big and small displays
Edit: So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it? Fine, then feel free to keep believing whatever you think is the truth. No point in discussing it further.
Question for you. I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them. Those companies are having issues manufacturing them so the price is high. But if more companies were allowed to manufacture them, wouldn’t we see more people solving production problems and lowering prices? If there is one company with low yields and high prices, if everyone is allowed to make them then there is a monetary gain for new entrants willing to solve yield problems. But if things are heavily patent encumbered then the whole world is at the whim of one organization to succeed or fail - there is no competition.
That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.
> I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality.
I've never quite understood this sort of thinking. Companies aren't perfect omniscient systems - the people in charge of various companies make poor decisions all the time, based on the same human biases we all have. So yes, it's entirely possible they could make more money that way, but executives simply hear "Lower the price" and run away. I'm not saying that's certainly what's happening, but this implication that a company could possibly only do the thing that's most beneficial to it is... strange, and very common thinking.
I didn't downvote... but if you're being downvoted it's probably for ignoring the flywheel effect needed to scale novel tech in the market.
Yes e-ink has high wastage, and yes demand is low, but having had a strong arming expensive patent holder didn't help the situation. The patents are actually expiring/expired but at some point the damage is already done.
A great corollarly to e-ink is 3d printers: they were very expensive, very low volume products that needed to recoup expensive development costs... but when the 200 lbs gorilla sitting on the market in the form of patents started to die down, a lot more players start to iterate, which unlocked advancements, which made things cheaper and more accessible, which improved demand, which then incentivized more advancements... and now we have $400 printers that outperform $10,000 printers from not that long ago.
Most display tech starts high wastage, low demand. Patents aren't a guaranteed death, but e-ink was just a bit too far off the path for absolutely required innovations to overcome the added resistance. In the mean time other technologies got better: sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example.
Now the moment has probably passed and e-ink is doomed to stay a niche sideline product as a result.
I didn't vote either way, but this is news to me. As long as e-ink has been around, all I've ever heard were the patent issues. If you're saying it's actually manufacturing difficulties, can you provide any links or additional info? I believe you, but as someone not familiar with the field, I'd love to learn more both to counteract the patent narrative and just for my own curiosity. What is hard about e-ink at scale that other products don't share?
I think it would be interesting to hear from an insider (with examples/evidence etc) what the mechanism is for eink to be more expensive. I/e/ the fundamentals for why this is the case beyond economies of scale. Given this history of the patent it looks to the outsider like this probably isn't the case and short sighted rent seeking is the problem. Would love to be wrong though, so if you do have a good explanation then here would be a great place to air it. I've not seen anything elsewhere...
You say that, but patents traditionally hold back progress. If you look at the amount of horse power generated by steam engines - it spiked after the patents expired.
There are probably many techniques and processes that would be tried and developed if it wasn't locked up by patents.
Sometimes patent holder enter into initial deals with manufacturers and then can't lower the royalty price for other manufacturers. Even if they'd make more from higher volume, the initial manufacture might be serving high-end customers and doesn't want other manufactures entering the market at a lower price. So they refuse to agree to a lower patent royalty even though it would save them money. It's counterintuitive, but rationale under certain circumstances. This is pure conjecture for the e-ink patent on my part, but I've seen it first hand for other products.
One thing I don’t understand - why are the iPhone screens that can run in display mode run at 1hz a feature - what’s hard about driving a display typically driven at 120hz(?) at 1hz to save on power difficult? Or it’s not and the it’s a differentiating feature price.
I didn't realize e-ink manufacturing was such a tricky process. I would think there would be a lot of applications for larger e-ink panels even if they had a number of stuck pixels.
> So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it?
Don't worry about that. Posts that go against the general opinion always get downvoted at first. But if it is insightful and not demonstrably wrong, the upvotes will win.
I've read (probably on prior HN discussions about this?) that the manufacturing process still has major yield issues— when you're making small displays, you can slice around the bad pixels and not have to waste as much, but making a large display requires a huge sheet to all be perfect.
Then again, if that was really it, surely there'd be a market for people who want a 42" e-ink display and are willing to accept some proportion of bad pixels in exchange for a deep discount. Which really shouldn't matter much, particularly for applications where distance-viewing is the expectation.
If it's a 4k TV it also has more pixels and better refresh rate. And color. But for that extra $2360 you get the feature that your image is still there when the power is off. I expect that feature would be substantially more costly regardless of the patent holder's extra.
EInk doesn't have a backlight. So it's easy to see in glaring light. It's also not disruptive if so, you want to use it as a digital picture frame and you don't want light from the display bothering your eyes day and night.
EInk is a more peaceful display technology, and some people put a lot of value on that.
> you get the feature that your image is still there when the power is off
How is that a realistic feature? Who is losing power and being happy that they spent a few thousand more, nearly 40x, than a 36" photo quality print, just so the image can remain while their lights are off?
Hmm. I wonder what the whole-sale price is? A TV with wifi is partly subsidized by the ads you see when you turn it on. This 2500$ display seems like it’s for small run signage, so they know it’s being sold for government/business use. Probably a bit inflated.
Does Rakutan/Amazon/Pocketbook really pay a similar cost/size ratio for the panels on their ereaders? I hope not!
>so they know it’s being sold for government/business use. Probably a bit inflated.
You just reminded me, a few years ago i wanted to buy a transparent screen for a DIY project. The company said they couldn't sell it to me because they're b2b.
I think it was both a volume thing and a tax thing.. and possibly a liability thing.
I guess people only care and notice theire own prefrences. I never thought about 42" eink display but I'm constantly wishing for the price of 10" and 13" modules to drop cause that's the usecase I'm interested in.
I think their demand would be much much more compared to a 42" panel (what even is the use of such thing) so they can benefit from scale.
Who is going to do the math and figure out how long you need to hypothetically have these screens on before the power costs of the TV actually make up the $2360 difference in price?
Awesome project! I'd strongly recommend swapping in some antireflective glass. There's a couple affordable options with less than 1% reflection [1][2]. Made a huge difference vs. stock acrylic on my frames that get lots of environmental light.
I second this recommendation! Frame manufacturers sometimes call these products "museum glass", which combines anti-reflective properties with UV filters, usually with price points at 70% and 92% filters.
Some E-ink panels can be somewhat susceptible to UV light and perform better under a filter. You will sometimes find warnings in data sheets about refresh performance in direct sunlight, and danger of long-term permanent damage. Some of E-ink's signage products have, I think, filter layers built-in.
But also if you're using a passepartout like in this project, and the frame will hang in sunlight and you're not sure how the paper will perform, it's worth springing for the UV protection to avoid yellowing over time.
I have a similar display, and also use blue noise dithering. Mine is driven in the backend by a web browser, which means I was able to abuse CSS and mix-blend-mode to do the dithering for me:
Looking at the example image in the article for the dithering, it does unnecessarily reduce the quality in some areas, like the water on the left, the buildings in the bottom left and the background on the right.
Usually something like volumetric data, animations, or other forms of data packed into something the GPU can swallow. I am not sure why you would apply the filters to those kinds.
Blue noise dithering seems to be a form of ordered dithering which is better than other forms of ordered dithering, but in terms of quality it is not as good as error diffusion dithering (look up the Wikipedia comparison on the statue of David). But blue noise dithering has the advantage that it can be implemented as a pixel shader, unlike error diffusion. So it can e.g. be used for video games. So I think for the picture frame error diffusion would have been a bit better.
It's called blue noise dithering because it's not ordered. Error diffusion dithering approximates blue noise dithering (poorly, I might add). What error diffusion has going for it is very low overhead, and built-in edge-enhancement if you pick your kernels right.
I have one of these, and only in a very specific environment is it convincing as not-a-TV (aside from the concerns of privacy and their proprietary app).
Especially at night, I find the backlight makes it painfully obvious that it's just a TV and I'd much rather have something like e-ink which blends into the surroundings.
A friend has the Samsung Frame and I think you can only interface with it via the Samsung SmartThings app. It's quite closed. So you need an online thing for the TV and then you upload it into their app.
Yep, it's very locked down, and Art Mode behavior is often anti-user to promote their $10/month Art Store subscription. There are limited matting options and I believe it intentionally crops photos incorrectly, even if you upload in the correct aspect ratio. It also takes about a minute to scroll down to 'User Art' sections with how slow their UI is.
They make it superficially closed but it's pretty simple to get around it with a USB drive. Really all you have to do is ignore their subscription system and size your images to match the screen.
The main tech is a very anti-reflective coating; the best I've seen on a mainstream TV. It is backlit but in Art Mode the backlight is turned down (you can control how much and there is an ambient light sensor that fine-tunes your choice). The combination of low emission, quite low reflection and static content is pretty compelling for me in a lit room.
I have the white frame on the bezel against a light-coloured wall and when displaying art it's much less imposing on the room than an empty black screen. Obviously it uses more power than standby but it's also quite a bit less than a dynamic screensaver.
Don't know that I'd get another one; the bugs in Samsung's software are annoying (I just want it to display the art, or a picture from a single HDMI input, how hard can they possibly make it?) but perhaps that's standard for modern TVs.
That's a very neat project. The only issue I have with it is that it's basically a passive energy waster. It produces images by burning GPU power, when it could instead curate art from an existing amount of art (of which there is more to ever go through, almost in any category). Some projects that use AI could be replaced with other tech and be much more efficient.
The cost (and environmental impact) of generated images is a rounding error compared to the $7,500+ project cost. As an aside, I wonder how much smaller and faster a diffusion model could be if trained (quantized?) to 4-bit grayscale images.
My home computer batch processing prompts thru Stable Diffusion can generate and then nicely upscale images at at rate of about 1 every 5 seconds. Or 360 per half-hour. Which means a newly image on the display every day to look at for a year in just an half hour of computation.
At about 300W of GPU + 120W of PC, that is 420W * 0.5hrs = 0.210kWhr. This is a rounding error on my monthly electric bill. About six cents.
I've spent more energy than that likely just sitting and reading HackerNews this week.
It doesn't take a lot of GPU to produce one image, and you could always just keep a single image on the wall for a longer time if you want to reduce that impact.
You can also have it not produce images at night or when you are not around the house.
Lots of ways to save energy. The impact of an image every few hours or whatever is nanoscule compared to your transportation and heating needs.
(Also if your apartment uses electric resistive heating, fire away with your GPU, you're just producing images in the process of producing heat instead of passing it through a resistor. It's no less efficient.)
You should upload a massively complicated where's waldo like scene and have waldo appear in different places each hour.
Have a portrait with lots of subtle details but they change slowly over time. Ex. girl goes from earing-less to small earings to big earings. Just have lots of small details subtly change but at a rate which makes them hard to detect.
I remember seeing those Thinkpad X230 mods with an eink display and how a challenge was availability of the specific discontinued e-ink screen of the right size.
Readit News
For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140.
It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.
Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels at scale than E-ink film.
>It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.
I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality.
The FUD that large e-ink displays are expensive because of some patent conspiracy needs to stop.
Large e-ink screens are expensive because manufacturing yields are very low and so are sales volumes.
Source: worked with e-ink on products with big and small displays
Edit: So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it? Fine, then feel free to keep believing whatever you think is the truth. No point in discussing it further.
That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.
I've never quite understood this sort of thinking. Companies aren't perfect omniscient systems - the people in charge of various companies make poor decisions all the time, based on the same human biases we all have. So yes, it's entirely possible they could make more money that way, but executives simply hear "Lower the price" and run away. I'm not saying that's certainly what's happening, but this implication that a company could possibly only do the thing that's most beneficial to it is... strange, and very common thinking.
Yes e-ink has high wastage, and yes demand is low, but having had a strong arming expensive patent holder didn't help the situation. The patents are actually expiring/expired but at some point the damage is already done.
A great corollarly to e-ink is 3d printers: they were very expensive, very low volume products that needed to recoup expensive development costs... but when the 200 lbs gorilla sitting on the market in the form of patents started to die down, a lot more players start to iterate, which unlocked advancements, which made things cheaper and more accessible, which improved demand, which then incentivized more advancements... and now we have $400 printers that outperform $10,000 printers from not that long ago.
Most display tech starts high wastage, low demand. Patents aren't a guaranteed death, but e-ink was just a bit too far off the path for absolutely required innovations to overcome the added resistance. In the mean time other technologies got better: sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example.
Now the moment has probably passed and e-ink is doomed to stay a niche sideline product as a result.
There are probably many techniques and processes that would be tried and developed if it wasn't locked up by patents.
Don't worry about that. Posts that go against the general opinion always get downvoted at first. But if it is insightful and not demonstrably wrong, the upvotes will win.
Deleted Comment
Then again, if that was really it, surely there'd be a market for people who want a 42" e-ink display and are willing to accept some proportion of bad pixels in exchange for a deep discount. Which really shouldn't matter much, particularly for applications where distance-viewing is the expectation.
Try $3000 :)
> Driving boards are not included in the display module package. E Ink Salt kit is designed to support this module
> Salt Driving Board - $500.00 - https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/SaltDrivingBoard
EInk doesn't have a backlight. So it's easy to see in glaring light. It's also not disruptive if so, you want to use it as a digital picture frame and you don't want light from the display bothering your eyes day and night.
EInk is a more peaceful display technology, and some people put a lot of value on that.
How is that a realistic feature? Who is losing power and being happy that they spent a few thousand more, nearly 40x, than a 36" photo quality print, just so the image can remain while their lights are off?
Does Rakutan/Amazon/Pocketbook really pay a similar cost/size ratio for the panels on their ereaders? I hope not!
You just reminded me, a few years ago i wanted to buy a transparent screen for a DIY project. The company said they couldn't sell it to me because they're b2b.
I think it was both a volume thing and a tax thing.. and possibly a liability thing.
Edit: Someone has your dream display already :) https://www.etsy.com/listing/1463146123/43-4k-dnd-tv-table
Transflective LCD is other option bit also pretty hard/expensive to get a big screen...
[1] https://www.groglass.com/product/artglass-ar-70/
[2] https://www.framedestination.com/prod/sh/ultravue-uv70-pictu...
Some E-ink panels can be somewhat susceptible to UV light and perform better under a filter. You will sometimes find warnings in data sheets about refresh performance in direct sunlight, and danger of long-term permanent damage. Some of E-ink's signage products have, I think, filter layers built-in.
But also if you're using a passepartout like in this project, and the frame will hang in sunlight and you're not sure how the paper will perform, it's worth springing for the UV protection to avoid yellowing over time.
Dead Comment
https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/
https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs/the-frame/highlights/
Especially at night, I find the backlight makes it painfully obvious that it's just a TV and I'd much rather have something like e-ink which blends into the surroundings.
Even the “explore technology” link has little extra detail. I don’t even know if it’s backlit.
I have the white frame on the bezel against a light-coloured wall and when displaying art it's much less imposing on the room than an empty black screen. Obviously it uses more power than standby but it's also quite a bit less than a dynamic screensaver.
Don't know that I'd get another one; the bugs in Samsung's software are annoying (I just want it to display the art, or a picture from a single HDMI input, how hard can they possibly make it?) but perhaps that's standard for modern TVs.
At about 300W of GPU + 120W of PC, that is 420W * 0.5hrs = 0.210kWhr. This is a rounding error on my monthly electric bill. About six cents.
I've spent more energy than that likely just sitting and reading HackerNews this week.
You can also have it not produce images at night or when you are not around the house.
Lots of ways to save energy. The impact of an image every few hours or whatever is nanoscule compared to your transportation and heating needs.
(Also if your apartment uses electric resistive heating, fire away with your GPU, you're just producing images in the process of producing heat instead of passing it through a resistor. It's no less efficient.)
You should upload a massively complicated where's waldo like scene and have waldo appear in different places each hour.
Have a portrait with lots of subtle details but they change slowly over time. Ex. girl goes from earing-less to small earings to big earings. Just have lots of small details subtly change but at a rate which makes them hard to detect.
The mfg from the article has a 13.3" screen that would be fun to try a mod with: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/13.3''ePaperDisp...
and impressive 1600 x 1200 pixels