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.
Every couple of weeks I find myself wondering: "It's (insert year here), why no e-ink picture frames yet?".
Much as I like tinkering, I don't want a cobbled together raspberry pi plus lower power mamagement module with some alibaba special screen, all wrapped together with duct tape. I just want a nice looking consumer grade device, maybe 8x6" or thereabouts, reasonable resolution, grayscale is fine if necessary, an sd card slot where I can stick a load of jpegs and let it run with a photo change or two a day, with about six months in between recharges.
Is that too much to ask?
I'm sure the first company to do this is going to make a killing.
I’m torn between thinking this is a performance art piece commenting on the consolidation of media outlets, and a Cramer piece from a lost Seinfeld episode (“Jerry, you gotta see this. It’s great. All the news, all the time, you never need to leave your apartment. Think of the money you save on shoes...”)
What about a physical front page that gets printed daily using something like an HP Designjet T210?
You can mount it (it's wireless) and it can print 2' wide from a roll of paper. You feed the paper into a custom frame (add margins to the PDF -> JPG script) and then add a slightly sharp cutting edge at the bottom of the frame so that every day the previous day's frontpage will come out from the bottom of the frame and you can tear it off (reuse as needed).
You would need to pay for something like a 700' roll of 24" butcher paper for $18 and ink (yes I know HP is a terrible company on ink) but it might be even more realistic!
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 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
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...
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...
> The Place & Play 32 inch is a pricey (2300 euro’s) but very beautiful piece of hardware
You can get the ENTIRE paper delivered, to your door, every day, for how many years with 2300 Euros? :D
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.
Why is everyone so obsessed with what this costs? I'd imagine a lot of us have couches with a similar price tag, despite much cheaper options being available.
This is likewise part of someone's living room, they can spend whatever they like on it as a matter of taste.
I was expecting something of a « hack » and was a bit disappointed to read once again that eink is still so expensive.
Buying a industrial printer refurb could even make sense economically at this point. With the added bonus of displaying the full week front pages.
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.
[1] https://medium.com/s/story/very-slow-movie-player-499f76c48b...
Newseum used to print these front pages and display them selectively along the side walk, it is closed now but it publishes the front page of major papers around the world in PDF. https://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/. You could make it I refresh local newspaper, or WSJ, i.e. https://cdn.newseum.org/dfp/pdf11/WSJ.pdf
It would be really cool if it is not $2500 though
It's not at this large scale, but I have an Onyx Lumi, and somehow my favourite thing about it is that I changed all the lock screens to pictures from the Moomins, and it sits on a stand on my office desk [1].
The Lumi is capable of playing video in e-ink, and I actually had a desire to see a classic newspaper like this, but with small videos instead of images, I love that old new tech concept as simple as a newspaper with moving images (on click probably, more than constantly aminating).
I also use it daily as a practical device and it's only a 13" size (A4), so substantially smaller, but people would still question how much I paid, and probably question me even harder if they new I'd also got a ReMarkable 2 on pre-order.
I just love the aesthetic of e-ink so much. I previously submitted a post about the Dasung Paperlike monitor[2], and I actually bought it years ago and sold it because I couldn't handle the refresh rate, but I was interested to see they are still going and still the best in class for that use-case. The Onyx Lumi actually also works as a second monitor so my dream of working outside on sunglasses might still happen.
I love this use of e-ink as wall art, and I have hoped for years the technology could become more ubiquitous outside of e-readers.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/jem97h/most_of_m...
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?
Just noting that this is based on a previous project[1] which used a slightly less costly ($1500 vs $2300) e-ink panel: https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%cb%9d-monochrome-epap...
There is also a 4096 color 31" e-ink display available: https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%cb%9d-color-epaper-di... and a 42" mono display: https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%cb%9d-monochrome-epaper...
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-morning-paper-revisited-35b40...
eInk displays are really quite fun to work with. Pre-pandemic shutdown, I was working on a custom work badge holder that was primarily an eInk display to show my picture and daily work calendar.
A little Arduino can easily pull down my week's schedule from Outlook, then update the screen for the current day, then put itself in a deep (extremely low power consumption) sleep until it's time to update with the next day. Wake up, update display, go back to sleep - all in a few seconds with minimal battery use. And any time I re-sync via USB, it updates the schedule and the display, plus charges a small LiPo battery that runs things.
Is it super useful? Eh no, everything it has is on my phone already. Is it fun tech to work with? Most definitely.
PS
Probably most people know this but in case not, once you set an eInk display, it requires no power to maintain the image. I've got a few small ones I put images on a few years ago that are still just fine.
Discussion of the mentioned Display: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323
Looks cool. I've wanted a Google Calendar integrated e-ink screen device for awhile.
Imagine waking up one day and half of that frame is "We value your privacy, please accept our cookies" and the other half is "you ran out of free articles for this month, please sign up for a subscription here". Might be more realistic as well.
I would pay for a commercial version of this project .
500$ would be a reasonable price .
Hmm.. not 100% sure but I see 2 bugs in the PHP script: 1. the src of the image in the HTML is the local path on the hosting server (it would become src="/var/www/nyt/nyt.jpg" ) 2. The v= parameter always uses current date, even if it downloaded yesterdays image. I assume it is being used to prevent caching, but thus doesnt really work. I'd use either an hash of the file or store the date used for the download in a variable and use that.
Love this. The price tag may seem high but it's competitive for wall art.
What other iconic works are there that give you an idea of what's happening in the world?
Time, New Yorker, ...
Off topic but interesting: Every New York Times Front Page Since 1852 in Under a Minute — https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/02/the-rise-of-the-image...
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.
That screen looks absolutely amazing; $2500 is an incredibly steep price for what would be a sick art piece.
I would like something like this but with the actual news/blogs that would interest me day-to-day. Then I could make it a ritual/rule that the only information I can consume would be from this display away from my office whilst standing.
Then I will block all news sites from my computing devices.
In similar vein, I'd always thought to use the daily APOD (astronomy picture of the day) photos with or without the accompanying summary (have not thought out the project any farther than this) for any sort of similar, daily refreshing piece.
I don't care too much how janky it is: raspi, Chinese lcd, barebones/no casing, etc etc.
If someone created a dumbed-down tutorial to make this happen, I'd be really inclined to recreate it. (And perhaps, there already are a dozen such tutorials out there ready to make me eat my words.)
I have been looking for a small eink screen solution to put next to my screen to show my google calendar (agenda) and maybe the time.
Does anyone have recommendations of devices that would make that easy?
Check out Inkplate [1], which is an ESP32 based 6.5" E Ink display, refurbed from a kindle. It has everything to build a wall mounted screen, that can update itself over Wifi or Bluetooth with battery for weeks.
They Croatian company [2] is already working on a 10" model.
You can probably buy an e ink display on Alibaba for less than $100 if you negotiate enough.
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...
> As more and more connected devices arrive in our homes, it’s a good time to remember the principles of Calm Technology, first formulated at Xerox PARC in 1995. They talk about how technology should respect our attention and remain in the background most of the time, how relevant information should be presented calmly and make use of the periphery.
From what I can tell, https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/07/06/nytfrontpage/scan... is the earliest instance of the page. I was really hoping to go way back.
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.
A few years back an artist did a LCD piece that used the daily NYT front page image as the seed for a generative painting:
The New York Times should sell this. I wouldn’t mind having the daily newspaper on my wall.
Very cool. I'm considering replicating this, cycling through https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers
Hm. Cool. Expensive.
What about a projector that shoots an image to a persistent sensitive surface. That would be reinvention of photography! Let's say, reset with one frequency of light, then flash with an image that holds for > 24h.
Hm!
The finished product looks like a muggle version of The Daily Prophet
Does it pop up and ask you to subscribe if you look at it? :D
Is anyone else receiving when trying to open this link?
Cloudflare Access Forbidden You do not have permission to view this page Ray ID: 5f12f738eb06e839
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.
I wish newspapers in the UK would provide APIs to download scans of their front page like the New York Times do.
It’s a cool thing but come on, you bought it, you didn’t build it. Why are people proud on things they bought?
€2300 is too rich for my blood, but I would totally buy something like this if it was more affordable.
I choose to believe that the juxtaposition of Aperol and The New York Times was intentional
Absolutly lovely. I wan't it
Instead of NY Times homepage, I will customize it to something like iGoogle
this would be nice for arxiv prints too.
Props for the Lapierre Morgon!
Cool idea
WTF would you want the Lying Fakestream legacy ' news ' as art work
Here is a novel idea
GET OUT SIDE
Go walk in nature
Visit a park
awesome technical work, but why would you want to stare at lies & political propaganda all day
I'm too cheap. I would see a paywall.
I will pay money for this if you make it for sale. So will my friend. Take my money!!
How many people today even know what "an unfolded New York Times" means?
Founder of Visionect here. I'm so happy when these kinds of posts surface as this is exactly how we've envisoned our platform to be used - by tinkerers builidng interesting ideas.
I do see a lot of comments regarding the price, so it's best if I do the general disclaimer. E Ink screens are very pricy (compared to LCD). The driving is even pricier. And since this is not a mass-mass produced product (at least not in a sense of your 75" OLED TV) you get to the price that you have. We've worked for years on getting the price down for the E Ink screens (trust me on this), but there is a question of critical mass. E Ink in the non-reader, non-shelf label applications is still a very niche solution, that will command very high price. I hate to say it, but the only way we could have brought the price down with current quantities is if we built an inferior product as the price right now is the function of Bill-of-Materials.
We tried a lot of applications, some covered previously here on HN, we currently see that there are just two other avenues where E Ink is being used and has the potential for mass depoyments in the near future.
1. In offices it can be used as interactive signage - we've built a very successful solution for meeting room booking around it (see http://getjoan.com).
2. The market for outdoor displays - especialy smart bus stops that run on solar - is starting to ramp up. Check out what our partners are doing in this space (a recent live deployment https://www.visionect.com/blog/coimbra-the-city-of-the-stude...).
If anyone would like to get more information about E Ink, please shoot - we've tried every E Ink display out there, played with color display and probably seen every E Ink application out there. You can also shoot me a direct mail to luka.birsa AT visionect.com.