Very much on the DIY end, but I made a similar e-ink art piece that shows off the currently playing song on Spotify. I used a 3 colour display to add some flair :)
It’s not the easiest to set up yourself - need to generate Spotify API keys and build the unnecessary separate binary for dithering, but here’s the project if anyone is interested!
Try to find a Raspberry Pi lately though, most places are currently either out of stock or selling them at a higher price since the supply can't meet the demand.
I was moderately excited when I saw the photos, but wow those prices! 900 € for a 13 inch screen? For comparison, you can get a 55" Samsung Frame TV for cheaper than that. Digital photo frames are under $100.
They are expensive compared to traditional LCDs, you can easily buy a portable 13" 1080p monitor that includes all the parts to hook it up to a computer, a plastic case etc. for less than $200. Heck you can even get a 2560x1600 one for less than $200 taking a quick peek at Amazon.
The economies of scale applies here: E-Ink panels certainly don't have the same scale in term of sales compared to LCD though, and I don't see this changing at the consumer level.
I am curious what volumes you are buying and which panels and how you're judging whether something is expensive or not.
> I believe that it’s heavily patented and only one or two places produces the panels.
I would ask that these repeated claims would come with some evidence. The previous times I asked the respondents just did patents.google.com/search?eink and treated that as evidence.
For an analogy, if I said something like:
Coca cola is just really expensive right now. I believe that it’s heavily patented and only one or two places produces the syrup.
or
Windows is just really expensive right now. I believe that it’s heavily patented and only one or two places produces the operating system.
Seems pretty obvious that it's expensive compared to the alternatives. Which in this case are regular LCD panels. Yes I know, the use cases are slightly different, power consumption is much lower, etc. etc. Doesn't matter - most people want to use an e-ink display to... display stuff on a screen, which they can get in the LCD variety for a fraction of the price.
> Seems pretty obvious that it's expensive compared to the alternatives.
That statement is not obvious to me.
You are comparing electrophoretic panels to LCD panels. Both are display technologies. But that's where the similarities end. The volumes are many orders of magnitude different. LCDs would be billions of displays per month. Electrophoretics would be at best 20 million displays a YEAR!
> Which in this case are regular LCD panels. Yes I know, the use cases are slightly different, power consumption is much lower, etc. etc. Doesn't matter - most people want to use an e-ink display to... display stuff on a screen, which they can get in the LCD variety for a fraction of the price.
Yes, you can get coca cola for a fraction of the price of a Chablis wine. But you realize why one costs more than the other right?
I think most people here just aren't taking time to understand the display industry.
No, because Coca-cola isn't expensive - it costs about as much soft drinks produced by other companies. Furthermore I don't believe that there are any relevant patents left - its formula is a trade secret. IMO if this was the case with e-ink - we would see much better adoption and prices.
Is Windows expensive right now? I don't know how much exactly vendors pay to install it on hardware before sale. But I do know that Windows beats free alternatives (FreeDOS, Linux), so it's at least not unreasonably/prohibitively expensive. Furthermore Windows price is justified by its great advantage over competitors - huge ecosystem of software. Can the same be said about E ink? It's worse than literal paper for static images, worse than LCD for dynamic content. There is a niche for content that sometimes has to change, like on price tags, but those screens are significantly cheaper than what we're complaining about in this thread.
> IMO if this was the case with e-ink - we would see much better adoption and prices.
It is unclear what you mean. I already asked which specific patent needs to be canceled for your belief (hope?) to become true. I hope you don't give the same answer others here gave in the past. Which was: all of them. That just indicates a lack of understanding of the underlying physics of electrophoretics.
> Can the same be said about E ink? It's worse than literal paper for static images, worse than LCD for dynamic content. There is a niche for content that sometimes has to change, like on price tags, but those screens are significantly cheaper than what we're complaining about in this thread.
Yes. But how is that related to what I asked about? OP said it was expensive, and mentioned patents. I asked what OP meant by that. Because expensive based on what calculation? Just relative to LCDs? That's like saying a bottle of Chablis wine is more expensive than a bottle of coke. Sure. I agree 100% with that and I can only hope people understand why. It has nothing to do with patents.
> I already already asked which specific patent needs to be canceled for your belief (hope?) to become true.
Why do you find "all of them" answer to be unsatisfactory? Development of same or similar technologies by entities other than E-ink is possible only under one condition: those entities are safe from patent infringement lawsuit. With only a few specific patents expire/get knocked down somehow it would still be impossible to find investors bold enough.
> Yes. But how is that related to what I asked about? ... Because expensive based on what calculation?
You've made an analogy with Windows and I've offered an explanation of why OEM licence of Windows preinstalled on a notebook isn't seen as expensive, unlike e-ink screen of a €900 picture frame.
> It has nothing to do with patents.
Well, you might be right. Maybe it's impossible to manufacture e-paper screens at a significantly lower price point. Maybe it's inherent to this specific technology and no amount of competition and investment will be able to fix it. But we will not know it for sure any time soon. Because of patents.
> Why do you find "all of them" answer to be unsatisfactory?
You're making a claim analogous to saying "Microsoft is causing operating system prices to be excessive because of their patents". And when someone asks could you provide evidence for that, you just say "all of their patents". Can you follow why that answer is unsatisfactory?
It seems pretty clear to me that this claim that patents are the problem are coming from people who have no experience in the electronics industry or understanding of the physics of electrophoretic displays.
> Maybe it's inherent to this specific technology and no amount of competition and investment will be able to fix it. But we will not know it for sure any time soon. Because of patents.
difference between cola and eink might be that one was able to find market from get go and built business to industrialized scale, whereas, eink struggles to find a market at this price but won't also be generous with patent to make ROI work for other 3rd parties to make big investments.
> won't also be generous with patent to make ROI work for other 3rd parties to make big investments.
Which patent? Please help me understand by being specific. Which patent needs to expire or get canceled to enable something (which I also don't understand what that thing would be). See my past comments about the physics of electrophoretics being the limitation. I work in the display industry and to be blunt, I don't really have any idea what your comment means.
That's the problem. This is an obvious product. You've been able to buy digital picture frames at WalMart for a decade. But the price point for E-Ink displays is insane.
There's another persistent display technology, cholesteric displays. These seem to have disappeared. Sparkfun used to sell small ones.[1]
The ArtFrame 6":
- Has a 166 PPI 6 inch eInk screen
- Can store 150 pictures (let's be generous and presume it has 1 GB of internal storage)
- Costs €349
The Kobo Clara HD ereader:
- Has a 300 PPI 6 inch eInk screen
- Has 8 GB of internal storage
- Costs €140
I got a PocketBook e-reader with a 6" 300PPI screen for €100. You can add your own software to it (e.g. KOReader), and with a little bit of software to automatically change the pictures it would do exactly the same as this. You can get larger eReaders with similar quality for not much more. The only difference with this ArtFrame is that the frame around the display doesn't look as nice, but that's also a fixable problem with a minimum of technical chops.
6" is also really small for an art display IMO. Even 13.3" is kinda small. If they would be offering a much larger 40" art display I might consider it for €900, depending on picture quality. But at this price 150/166 ppi display is just bonkers.
I don't know if this would actually work but I've wished for years there were 24" full color e-ink books I could put on my coffee table and have them display coffee table books in full color.
I don't know how far away that is from (1) looking as good as color print (2) being relatively sturdy (3) being under $300 so I can buy several.
I got rid of all my books at one point and at the time I'd wished I could have scanned all the art books (didn't have the time to arrange it)
When can I get one that's several feet x several feet in dimensions, like an actual painting's canvas?
Eink has been around for several years now but apparently they are unable to just make a big panel? That combined with their idiotic pricing scheme makes me think their management is just stupid
If you want to shell out $1500 you can get a 31.2" display[1], $2500 for a 42" one[2]. There's a colour version of that 31.2" one for $2300[3].
The problem isn't inability to make them or "stupid management", just that there isn't a whole lot of demand for these sizes. E-ink displays are great but come with some serious limitations and trade-offs: colour displays are in its infancy at best and refresh rates are an issue. This limits its usage to cases where colour and refreshing isn't very important, but where good legibility and power usage are. The two most common are e-readers and store signage, but the demand for very large displays in that area is very limited.
For an art display the refresh rate isn't a big issue and low power would be a huge boon, but lack of good colour would be more of an issue.
> but apparently they are unable to just make a big panel?
Yes, that's how supply and demand works. Very few people are willing to buy big electrophoretic panels with all their limitations so there's no demand, so there's no volume, so there's no justification for a factory for it so the stackup for it is handmade, hand kerfed and such so the price will be high.
> That combined with their idiotic pricing scheme makes me think their management is just stupid
What pricing scheme are you talking about? I'd love to see the details you are basing your judgement on.
> Very few companies are making eInk like displays which is why prices are so high.
Very few customers are buying electrophoretic displays because of their many limitations. That's the real reason why prices are so high.
In 2006, a 6" display would have cost maybe 10 grand, maybe even more. Today it is in the order of $25 in volume and that's purely because of the volume behind it. Step off the volume path and into hand kerfed like the 42" you mentioned and suddenly it'll be $2000. It is all about volume.
If you want it cheaper, put an order in for a million displays and that'll justify someone's effort to build an actual automated production line for it and it will drop the price by an order of magnitude.
I don't think Sony was losing several thousand dollars on each Sony Librie and PRS-500 they produced.
I understand volume . Part of it is having competitors though. If there's literally 1 company making the display you want for your product they're only going to lower the price per unit so much. Where else are you going to go?
> I understand volume . Part of it is having competitors though. If there's literally 1 company making the display you want for your product they're only going to lower the price per unit so much. Where else are you going to go?
I don't understand the point you are making. There are many many materials, products where there are only single or a few suppliers in the whole world. Not just in the display industry, but even your software industry like Google, Microsoft, etc. Could you elaborate what exactly you're trying to say? It is completely unclear.
If there's multiple competitors for a product they compete and prices are lower overall? If there are no competitors you can charge a higher price. There really isn't much alternatives for eInk that don't totally alter the product. A Kindle with an LCD screen would just be a shitty limited tablet and so Amazon is forced to pay a higher price per unit for an eInk screen than a similar sized LCD.
> If there's multiple competitors for a product they compete and prices are lower overall?
Sure, race to the bottom, but that's got nothing to do with OP's original claim of "expensive", nor the costs to actually manufacture electrophoretic displays, nor patents. How many competitors are there for Microsoft Windows? How many competitors are there for Google search?
What price do you think is "not expensive"? How did you determine that price?
> Amazon is forced to pay a higher price per unit for an eInk screen than a similar sized LCD.
Again the comparison to LCD despite all my multiple comments to explain that the two technologies are no where the same in terms of physical stackup, and volumes of multiple order of magnitudes of difference. It is like comparing coca cola to wine, or a toyota corolla to feraris. By the way to claim Amazon is "forced" is ridiculous. In fact, Amazon's volumes is what has enabled electrophoretics stackup to seriously commerciallize and bring prices down at least by an order of magnitude.
OKAY. Monopolies aren't a thing in your book. Got it. Everyone always charges bottom dollar given enough volume despite the fact it might literally be the only option that meets the requirements.
Microsoft Windows is pretty expensive for an OS...its main competitors are literally free. But since they aren't a near-perfect replacement for Windows, Microsoft can charge more per unit. This is pretty similar to how LCDs are not a near-perfect replacement for eInk displays and that there's essentially only 1 mature supplier they can charge more per unit than an LCD manufacturer can.
Since again, the display tech is essentially what defines a Kindle Amazon is somewhat forced to use eInk displays despite their higher cost otherwise it would not be the same product.
> Since again, the display tech is essentially what defines a Kindle Amazon is somewhat forced to use eInk displays despite their higher cost otherwise it would not be the same product.
Since Again? Again. You didn't address any of the questions I asked about the justification for the claims about "expensive", "patents", none of which are substantiated. You've jumped again to this "somewhat forced" which I already pointed out is a ridiculous claim and "higher cost" despite what I already tried to clarify about how the display stackup and production volume is completely different. I've already rested my explanation, no point repeating myself.
You didn't point out how it's a ridiculous claim. You completely ignored my point how LCD is not replacement for eInk and just decided WELL THEY ARE DIFFERENT DISPLAY STACKUP AND HAVE DIFFERENT VOLUME.
Imagine this. There are 4 LCD manufacturers that combined make a total 1 million units a year. There is 1 eInk manufacturer that also makes 1 million units a year. Assume production costs are the same between the two. The LCDs are all essentially fungible. If a company wants to build a tablet with an LCD screen they can receive bids from multiple manufacturers who may be willing to reduce their margin per unit to land the client. For a company looking to build an eReader they only really have the choice of one company that's not willing to reduce their margin per unit because there's no point to. The eInk displays are more expensive because there is only one option to buy and the manufacturer is keeping a greater percentage as profit.
I do wonder what kind of 'contrast ratio' they can get. Though I am not quite familiar with how to measure and define 'contrast ratio' for print. I am sure its complicated.
Imagine a full, half or quarter wall size of e-paper that dynamically display all of your ebooks collection as if they are physical copies in your study room, main hall, etc.
The main different compared to the physical bookshelf is that it is always updating (round-robin, moving, rotating, etc) thus it can display all your books in a limited e-paper physical gallery space (depending on the installed e-paper size and dimension) but should cover all your ebooks over time.
I think at those price points I'd be tempted to just find something like a 10.3" Kobo Elipsa on sale and see if I could hack it to display a slide show.
Wouldn't be as pretty as this but it's much higher resolution at 227ppi.
Maybe that's the unique selling point of this; a nice presentable frame and photo matte.
eInk/ePaper displays aren't cheap and getting them cheap requires buying pre-loved devices. The only way to drive down costs right now is bulk ordering. Unless your time is worth less than say $25/hr, this is likely much cheaper than building.
I don't really think a person building this would factor wage since it - in my case at least - would be fore fun. That said eink displays are expensive but I feel like one could find one and come in to close to or under the cost of the ArtFrame. https://shopkits.eink.com - has some good options.
Not arguing my aunt would build this, just that a lot of the HN crowd could and often are of the tinkering type to find that sort of project enjoyable :)
This past week I setup an e-ink display using a 32” screen from Visionect. It displays the front page of the New York Times (setup by following this guide [1]).
The compliments from friends/family have been insane. It looks like I cut out the page and put it on the wall. Unfortunately the Visionect solution is fairly cost prohibitive and seems like ArtFrame is in the similar price ballpark.
I was recently searching for wedding gift for my photographer friend and found this. There does not seem to exist many other e-paper art frames and this one looks decent. It also has some open source software (https://github.com/framelabs-eu), but the firmware seems closed-source.
I'm feeling good tonight, feeling like wasting some money. When I looked at the landing page, I kept saying please be $200 or less, alas, it's almost $400.
I also tried to build this myself, and nothing happened but my Raspberry pi started to overheat
> Configurable via web interface, provided by the device.
Very much a plus. No cloud means these won't magically stop working at some random time in the future. Also means my picture frame is (probably) not spying on me.
Looking at the prices I wonder how long you have to wait until the electricity bill for sustaining an image on a normal LCD makes it economically justifiable.
don't you need to charge them eventually? so you end up taking them down a lot. they should think about wireless charging pads that can be installed into the wall for these sorts of things.
I wonder if trickle charging with a few calculator-type solar cells on each edge of the frame (not the face of the frame) would be feasible as well to prolong battery life.
But that requires a wire that goes from the outlet all the way to the charge pad though, right? I think the main goal is to have no visible wire when it's on the wall. On the other hand 7k image changes before going out of battery seems quite a lot. Just not sure if that's a representative number.
Even if you completely run out of power, the screen should stay on the last image it was showing. You might just see the same picture for days/weeks/several heat deaths until you decide to charge it again.
Just anecdotally I found it pretty fascinating that I bought a new Kindle some three months ago and it still hasn't run out of batteries (came with 76% and now at 16%).
My experience with Kindles is that the battery drain is all about wifi - if you keep it in 'airplane mode' most of the time (except to send new content to it / return library books early etc.) it can last for months on a charge.
Fresh art all the time
Don't have to print and change the artwork manually
No backlight - looks just like real art
No cord, battery-powered, lasts a long time
It’s not the easiest to set up yourself - need to generate Spotify API keys and build the unnecessary separate binary for dithering, but here’s the project if anyone is interested!
https://github.com/CampbellOwen/NowPlaying