This screen comes with a subscription based cloud CMS. The only way to pass image to this display semms to be through a proprietary application which is this so called CMS. There are no other connectivity options mentioned.
You are unable to use this screen if:
- subscription is not paid
- company decides to terminate your subscription under any condition of your contract
Hey! It's Jay, I'm a journalist and developer and I've done most of the work on the front and backend of Project E Ink. Happy to answer your questions!
So what we've done: we're indeed running our own Visionect servers these devices connect to. We've build a friendly and news-centered frontend so the display shows news, updates on new editions (or a user-set timeframe), or forgets about newspapers altogether and displays HTML on any URL you provide.
If we were to sunset or go MIA or anything else unforeseen and unlikely you will still have an awesome display that you can configure to connect to any other Visionect server in the world. And indeed: these servers are Docker-images you can deploy yourself https://hub.docker.com/r/visionect/visionect-server-v3/
So the deal is: a screen and our software. If you don't like our software you'll still have an awesome screen that'll work as long as there's Docker and TCP/IP ;)
Hey, thanks. Yeah it seems it could be run just fine without some cloud based third party paid services, and the suite is nice and accessible, that's cool. I am just really confused by Visionect product page I guess.
Who is the target demo? I'm old enough to have had actual newspapers appear on my doorstep. I ever saw anyone mount them on a wall, at least not in a private home. I would think a table/tablet orientation would be more appealing than an awkward wall mount. Is this thing meant to be art, a bit of faux-nostalgia decoration?
I think it's not that dissimilar to people who have a rotary telephone in their kitchen in 2023, use records, play tapes, hack Commodore 64 systems, or who use old Panasonic handhelds. There's a degree of personal expression in vintage technology that exceeds mere nostalgia.
I can't speak for this creator, but often these niche products serve a community of like-minded, or in fact are the mechanism or way to find and connect with a community of like minded people.
I think of folks doing projects around old technology paradigms as similar people to those who grew up building hot rods and find building cars to be greatly satisfying. Hacking a newspaper on your wall is similar, but in more of a dick tracy watch ethos.
I think people definitely do mount significant newspaper and magazine covers. The advantage of this, of course, is that it changes daily.
It's part function, part art piece imo. I can imagine somebody who's fairly well off drinking their morning coffee whilst reading this on their wall. A statement piece for the guests at their fashionable dinner parties too.
Yeah, my initial thought when someone said people don't mount newspapers was that yes, they do, even if not always in a personal or home context. It's exactly the type of thing you might see at certain bars, and there's no shortage of interesting famous front pages to display[1]. They're often about disasters, but there's notable very positive ones as well, such as the announcement of peace and the end of WWI and WWII, the famous newspaper announcing we arrived at the moon, etc.
Or you could just have it cycle through the most outlandish front pages from the Weekly World News about the latest exploits of Bat Boy[2]. Or switch to whatever your tastes are for the day! :)
If it is going to be art, I'd use some more creative content than daily newspapers. A series of fictional newspapers would be better. I would much rather it display a the front page of the Gothem Times with the latest Batman v. Joker news. Even realworld historical headlines would make for a better conversation piece. Older monochrome front pages would also probably look better on such as display.
If they got the actual newspaper animations and such from the movies, THAT would sell. An e-ink Harry headline, or wanted poster, would be something that any potter fan would seriously consider.
Hey Jay, thanks so much for your work! The screen looks very beautiful but for me personally it would be much more attractive if it could also be used for reading the entire newspaper, not just the front page. Any plans to include (tiny) buttons to switch pages?
In this case, during breakfast I could put the screen on a stand on my table, and read the news without having to resort to a backlit screen / news app on my phone. Though, maybe 32" would be a bit big for my breakfast table, not sure. :)
> connect to any other Visionect server in the world
Okay but what if, like a sane person, I don't want to give it direct internet access and have my own data I want to put on the wall? Can I pay less to get less (e.g. just the screen with an HDMI or DP connector so I can connect it to literally any raspi, picture frame, nuc, etc. etc. in my house)?
A pi in hostapd hotspot mode should work fine, right? Anyways I would guess most of the (“insane?”) target users of this device probably don’t want to mess with any of that.
Why doesn't it have a way to directly push an image to the screen like a $30 router from worst buy? It looks like the software to push an image to a display can be run on your own device but then you need an $80 box and if I read this right you need to pay $72 a year forever.
Well if you’re sold on paying 2000 euro for the display it’s a drop in the bucket. Who reads newspapers in 2023 anyway? Why not just get a subscription to a newspaper for like $50/yr? Then you can sit and read it instead of standing facing a wall. I don’t get this product. A solution in need of a problem
If you or some future buyer want to keep it for 20 years and want to run your own hardware to deal with it you will probably end up sourcing at least 2 single board computers for around $160 and paying $72x20 adjusted up for inflation or 1440-2160. You will spend at least 30 minutes picking out a machine and some number of hours over the years managing each machine.
This is of course assuming it doesn't actually stop working or some aspect of the process isn't broken.
All this so you can run a docker container with postgres instead of pushing an image to an endpoint on the local network. It's both bad and unimpressive engineering.
Furthermore if it did need central management for business purpose THAT would be something that consumes the same simple process for showing something on the screen.
<COMPLEX SOFTWARE> => posts image => shows image
This would trivially allow you to build on the simple process if that is all you need. It's not so much bad engineering as gross engineering its engineered to be complicated to they can insert themselves into the process to stick their hand in your wallet.
Because the Visonect devices and software are meant for commercial and business customers as information displays that are centrally managed, not for use as a consumer product, and is designed around those use cases. That somebody bought one and repurposed it for a hobby art project doesn't change that.
Docker is not magic, just extract the contents an OCI image[1] and run it with your favorite container runtime, like cri-o[2]. Or use the docker or OCI inage with podman[0].
And if containers are the problem then unpack the image into it's contents, take the binary, relink it and run it on bare metal.
I would like to caveat that a bit. I'm running two Visionect screens at home (I really do love them, hardware-wise especially) from a similar setup (local Visionect server running on Raspberry Pi).
As far as I understand though, they have stopped offering support for non-subscribers, and they also seem to have stopped producing builds for ARM devices a couple of years ago (but the server software works even with new firmware versions). I am still betting on them supporting local installs for a while (based on my understanding that at least some of their corporate clients would want an on-prem solution), but am a little bit worried it might not be as openly available forever. I am therefore slowly researching my best migration path from a Raspberry Pi to some affordable and reasonably low powered x86 thing. Suggestions welcome.
P.S.: The biggest selling point for me compared with some other (more open) E-ink screens is the battery. I keep mine on the fridge with a magnet and can't really use one that needs to be plugged in all the time in the same place. If anyone knows of anything similar and controllable locally, I'd be very interested to read about it.
Thank you. I think their product page is pushing cloud subscription too hard, they call subscription the same way they call display itself, and subscription is paid and cloud based. Product page says: "Place & Play devices work on a subscription basis. Select a plan here.", and "A license is needed for every device." while describing software suite.
I'm still confused about the way it presented, but documentation and suite itself look quite decent.
You may be confusing purchasing hardware and cloud subscription from the vendor producing the e ink display (Visionect) with the Project E ink device itself, which merely sources it's hardware from Visionect. The linked page is about the Project E ink device (https://projecteink.com/products/e-ink-newspaper-art-display...).
The only place that page mentions a subscription is in reference to news paper subscriptions.
This is a product page I looked at. Hard to interpret "Place & Play devices work on a subscription basis. Select a plan here." near "Add to cart" button.
I also run visionect locally to power a couple of displays around the house. When I recently went to go buy a few more - it was clear that they require a subscription. I emailed them and they confirmed that they now require a subscription.
It’s a bummer because I don’t think there are as good quality displays to replace visionect with, but the subscription was far too much.
That’s OK though right? As long as you know that going in you can decide if it’s worth it for you. Personally, I’d rather have something that works out of the box in exchange for a bit of money and risk that the company will go out of business one day than something that I have to spend time tinkering with to get and keep working.
It's not OK in my opinion to have perfectly capable hardware and software be obsoleted by circumstances outside of your control. I consider it to be wasteful and unnecessary. It don't have to conflict with convinience and services provided by cloud CMS.
As we've figured out in other thread this is not an issue with this particular display - apparently, you could make it work without touching external networks, and it's decently supported by Visionect way of doing things.
> As long as you know that going in you can decide if it’s worth it for you.
But it looks like there's no way to know that going in? I have checked the product page and found no information that the CMS is paid.
Based on the current description ("Comes with personal online portal to set up and change the content of your screen." [1]) I wouldn't expect an additional subscription.
I have taken a look at the protocol between the software and the display and it is straightforward to hack, but the docker image is lightweight and reliable enough that I don't see the need to.
I'm a news junkie, and the power and allure of a newspaper's front page have always fascinated me. When I stumbled upon an article written by a Google engineer who had built an e ink device with the front page of his favorite daily newspaper prominently displayed on his wall, I was a bit jealous. So, I worked with a e-ink company called Visionect in Slovenia to build a version that comes shipped ready to put on your wall. The screen isn't cheap ($2500) because it's a huge 32" e-ink display. The beautiful glass screen is connected to wifi and we made it easy to choose your favorite newspaper frontpages to put on display. It's a bit like an ever changing artwork.
It does look cool, but I think the last thing I want on my wall is yet more 'news'.
I was about to say something similar about the price; for that money I can just stick the newspaper itself up on the wall.
OTOH if the display is already 2300EUR, I can't see how the OP can possibly make any money on this, especially with free global shipping, returns, etc, etc.
> OTOH if the display is already 2300EUR, I can't see how the OP can possibly make any money on this, especially with free global shipping, returns, etc, etc.
I don't think they are making money out of this. The display is 2300€ without VAT and the OP is selling them with 2783€ with 21% VAT, so it's exactly the same price.
You may be missing the purpose of this item. The price is high, but it is really not for a picture of the paper. It is for the 'look','old feel, while still clearly being very modern'. In other words, it is trying to be closer to art; so its about being cool in an understated way with unnecessarily expensive things.
Also the fact that it can be anything that fits the aesthetics. I have been drawn to this E-ink concept for many year and other than waiting for a drop in price, I would love it to be available in color and use it to dynamically change between vintage movie poster, hell maybe even pull the one for the movie that I'm watching in my media server.
Other commenter [1] mentioned that there's a subscription required. I found no pricing link, but saw a subscription on the parent page [2] listed at 60 per year. So if we're talking 10 years, then it's closer to 3000.
Depends on the person but it doesn't seem completely impossible - ignoring inflation, $250/yr for <5mins a day (part of an existing delivery route, so no worrying about the commute time except from front door to wall hanging location - realistically could be 2 mins rather than 5 but say 5 to be conservative) is ~30hrs for 365 days, so ~$8/hr.
If they can manage it in 3min rather than 5, it's up to $13.70/hr.
Where I am (UK) I think most newspaper delivery people are aged 13-18, and while there's far less of them about than when I was a kid, I wouldn't be surprised if >50% would be willing to do it to earn an extra $4.80/week.
Of course, you also need to trust the person to come into your house every day, either giving them a key or being available to let them in each time; and while I skipped over inflation it's likely that $250 in ten years has devalued a lot - but maybe you could get a yea for just $150-200/yr at the start to have room for annual increases...
So I don't think your curt dismissal adds much to the conversation.
And that's feasibility thinking about US/UK people, as konart points out in their comment there are countries where $250/yr stretches much further than in wealthy, high-CoL countries.
You have conveniently left out the cost differential for the printed edition, and you are conveniently pricing the trust/risk/hassle that comes with it at 0. And even in this case I doubt the USD 5 pw is the market price, you are basically assuming there is a kid, who values extra pocket money.
The assumption about a kid for pocket money is relevant because a) lots of people doing the job of delivery papers are kids already and b) even if they're not, they're some doing the same job for minimum or less than minimum wage so presumably have similar desire or need for earning money for simple work.
And as mentioned, the person who suggested it being possible was talking about using an existing physical subscription not paying for that within the $2.5k
When I was 13 I delivered newspapers, two of the people with subscriptions on my route, both >70 (not sure exact age), one asked me to take their bins out to the street once a week, the other wanted company and hoped I'd come in for a drink every time. They both offered to pay, my mum wouldn't let me accept money from them but I was still happy to go inside both of their houses each week to be friendly. I'm pretty sure I'd have said yes to hanging the front page every day for whatever was worth $5 of 2023 money back then a week extra!
Sure, most people wouldn't want that, and most people wouldn't want to spend $2500 getting a newspaper they'd already paying for to be hung on the wall. But that's not the same as "no you couldn't [do that at all]".
Yes, it's absurd. But for most people paying this amount of money to get a single page of a newspaper on their wall for however long the screen and cloud service work is also absurd. Despite looking extremely cool, it's a pretty small group of people this is targeting.
Then let them have their fun? I’m not sure what the issue is here. Just seems like folks working on their tight 5 and announcing to everyone how shrewd they are for declaring how dumb they think this product is. Feels like I’m back on reddit already lol
The person you're replying to was just making a sensible observation that was relative to the conversation - I don't see any problem with what they said, nor relevance to Reddit's typical comments.
You on the other hand haven't added to the discussion but instead broke one of HN's guidelines:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Maybe worth checking the whole page out, then you can help keep HN comments as high quality as possible to avoid other people feeling the need to compare to Reddit! <3
We all make childish or otherwise foolish comments sometime (most of us probably quite often - I definitely do), worth trying not to as often as possible but no big deal slipping up :)
Also, in my country minimal salary this year is 180$/month. So I can realistically find a person to change newspapers full time every workday for a year, for those money. I rather think there will be a a queue of candidates for this, as compared to loading cargo or or giving out flyers on the street for the same sum. :)
I think you've overlooked the realistic useful lifetime of the product, and how long the novelty factor would last -- if you price it according to that duration I think that you'd find the hourly rate to be far higher.
Heh I just had a bored few minutes outside with a cigarette, but I didn't find writing that comment interesting enough to want to turn it into a new career :)
I think you're massively underestimating a) the amount of poverty even in the US (or whatever country you're thinking of) yet alone in places where the mean salary is only a couple of hundred bucks, and b) the limited options for making more money for the type of person who does paper rounds (often but not always <18yo, but always in a situation where they need/want the work of delivering newspapers for a low hourly rate and for likely less than a few hours a day).
My 13 y/o son delivers newspapers, he earns £24 per week for 6 mornings. He delivers around 16 newspapers a day. (£24/16)/6 days = £0.25 per paper.
365 days per year at £0.25 per day is £91.25 per year.
The most popular printed newspaper is the Daily Mail, I have no idea what the wholesale cost is, but the retail price is £30.33 per month So, worst case is £363.96 per year - but my expectation is that it is half that.
$2500 USD is currently £1946.66
£91.25 + £363.96 = £455.21
So, you totally can get the paper delivered by a 13 year old boy for ~4.25 years, by which time he'll retire off to college. However, if my premise is that wholesale cost of the paper is half what I thought it is, then 10 years sounds about right.
EDIT: I checked with him, and if you live close enough he'd be willing to come in and stick it on your wall every day, as long as he can get home in time for school.
I live in India. My newspaper costs ₹230 a month. That's ₹2,760 a year and ₹27,600 for a decade (not factoring inflation). At today's conversion rates, that's $333.58 for entire decade.
If I pay the remaining amount of $2166.42 to the delivery person over 10 years, that's about ₹1493 per month, which is over 6 times the cost of newspaper subscription. For that amount, yeah, they'll be happy to hang the paper on a wall.
I've just done that in reply to your previous comment, but will add here: they said "pay the person who delivers my daily newspaper", so it's $2500 on top of an existing delivery, not $2500 including paying for a new subscription & deliveries.
$250 is a tad lower than the median monthly salary in India. I bet you can find hundreds of millions of people willing to earn a cool $0.7 a day doing something as easy as this. That’s a meal or two for a poor person.
With millions of people living in conditions where even safe drinkable water is not something you are guaranteed to get - 250$/year equivalent seems wild.
Hi! This looks like a useful product at a good price point. Are you based in Germany? How come you only ship to Australia, Canada, China, India, UK and USA?
Also, you should look through your privacy policy. Its straight up copy/pasted from Shopifys template now with all the "ADD CASES THAT APPLY FOR YOUR STORE", "REMOVE THIS TEXT IF THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO YOUR STORE" text remaining. And apparently you sell your customers information to display targeted ads?
Thanks for the answers! I hope that you will be able to sell in the EU. CE is good consumer protection but it is unfortunate that it creates such a hurdle for small companies to sell their products.
Please let us know if/when you can sell it locally. I'm very interested in getting one for my kitchen wall.
Can you disable the online integration features? Ie no google login, just be dumb and display what i tell it?
Second question, any thoughts on if this could run off of battery? Eink tends to be so low power, i'd love this type of product with a wallhang and periodic charge. Thoughts?
Batteries drive up the cost for certification and shipping. I think a battery works better together with a bigger, more expensive display, where these costs are less of a concern and which you cannot place on a stand.
(Even though you can definitely hang my display up on the wall and if you don’t have a socket nearby, you can plug it into a battery pack)
Sorry if that’s a lot of text but I think about this stuff every day :D
> You still need to in to the companion app because the device needs the online backend for computing the render.
Right, but that could be fully in my network if i understand correctly.
> But on iOS you can log in with apple. And there is no need to pair with google calendar if you use the image url feature:
This works, but i'd really like a way to do this without any cloud-y features. As dumb as possible. Especially for low cost devices like this where i'm paranoid of it being "cheap because they sell my data" sort of thing.
> (Even though you can definitely hang my display up on the wall and if you don’t have a socket nearby, you can plug it into a battery pack)
This is exactly what i was hoping for! I don't mind buying the battery pack separately. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't hard wired to a wall plug, etc.
In the future if you could try to allocate space or hooks or anything to support this use case that would be amazing. Ie some little hooks on the back where a user could ziptie a battery back to it would be great!
I think i'm going to give one of these a try. If it works well for my headless use case i'd probably love a handful of these things, they're very close to what i've wanted for years. A lot of little low power displays around the house that work like picture frames. A hybrid to "modern life" and "old life" if you will. I love Eink
Thank you for your comment, it made me notice that I sold out. I just added some more inventory, but it may take a little bit longer to ship than usual, because I still need to assemble those units...
Hmmmm, trying to see your point of view, what I would do differently....
If one is going to use plywood for the frame, maybe a nice "multi-ply" plywood (Europly, Apple Ply, etc.). The Japanese kids make speakers from plywood and love to show off the "plys" because they use the good multi-ply stuff.
Frame could be cut with more CNC precision? (Looking at the inner cut in particular).
Maybe the stand should be cut from extruded aluminum of some interesting cross section rather than the Scrabble-tile-holder-like block of wood.
Given those changes I would raise the price as well to $199 and think nothing of that.
(Also, would like to dial down the refreshes — or at the very least, not refresh if the pixels are unchanged. Unless somehow they are able to do invisible refreshes on the e-ink display — 'cause e-ink refreshes sure can be distracting and ugly.)
The cable looks cheap indeed, although otherwise you have the trouble of keeping it charged. But other wise "cheap"/simple look imo is a selling point.
But it's not going to look as nice as a 32" e-ink display on the wall.
Is there a yellow backlight, or a blueish backlight?
Is there a low-cost way to make a solar roof that varies in solar reflectivity? FWIU e-ink only requires voltage to cause the e-ink particles to flip over? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink
> Why do larger e-ink screens cost more to produce?
Last I knew the bulk of cost for e-ink displays was just due to the patent holders decision to charge a lot, which is disappointing, but can't go on that much longer...
This is a myth that people keep repeating. E-ink prices have very little to do with patents.
E-ink displays are more expensive because they are utterly niche compared to LCD screens (there are over 6 billion smartphone users in the world right now, and plenty of people own a smartphone, laptop, desktop, TV, tablet, smartwatch, then use a computer at work, interact with a self-checkout kiosk at the supermarket, etc).
There are basically two common use-cases for e-ink right now: e-readers (and nowadays 'e-notes', which have stylus input), and smart-pricetags in supermarkets. Neither of these require large e-ink screens, so there's no existing production line to feed these 32" monitors off. The 32" screens are created by hand-fusing 4 16" screens together, IIRC. This isn't automated because there's not enough demand to automate it.
The reason there's no demand for e-ink screens is that the technology just isn't very useful - I love e-ink, but it's not particularly flexible and can't be used in general-purpose devices that need to display video. It has its niches, but they're niche.
It's lower battery usage is due to low refresh rate, which is inherently incompatible with displaying video -if an e-reader refreshes once per minute and an LCD screen would have to refresh 60 times a second, then the LCD needs to refresh 3600x more often which means e-ink saves power even if the e-ink screen takes 10x or 100x the power per refresh. But if the e-ink screen plays video at 60FPS, then by definition it's refreshing 60 times a second and thus will use 10x or 100x the power of the equivalent LCD screen playing the same video.
If we want prices to drop substantially, we need more use-cases for e-ink. There's hope here, as the recent fast-ACEP tech (the Gallery 3) is color-tech that doesn't sacrifice half of your contrast and resolution (like Color Filter Arrays do), but is fast enough for an interactive device and is almost as fast to refresh as a monochrome screen (previous ACEP screens took min 7 seconds to refresh the screen, the new tech is amazing). With some refinement, it might be enough to bring e-notes somewhat into the mainstream.
So, all that said: e-ink screens that are 6" or less aren't really any more expensive than an LCD. It's only when you get outside of normal e-reader sizes that the price goes up like crazy.
...not to mention, e-ink isn't the only "e-paper" company - ReInkstone are making their DES screens, which dodge at least some of the patents on microencapsulated electrophoretic displays as their cofferdam tech doesn't use microcapsules at all and instead integrate the seals into the display.
Volume, Demand, IP, power utilization per real second
FWIU non-e-eink flexible display tech has advanced considerably.
Maybe there still is a market for huge broadsheet e-ink newspaper devices? How many flexible broadsheets of display would approximate the ux of a real newspaper?
The e-ink newspaper project comes up from time to time and I keep waiting for the prices to come down to Earth.
Guess I'm still going to have to wait, ha ha.
I did play around with an affordable (smaller) display and liked the result though (but since it was small I did not ry to emulate a newspaper but rather a vintage Mac).
yeah the displays are where the cost is, here, and until the company that makes these giant panels starts pricing them sanely, there won't be any products built with it which are priced sanely.
It's kind of sad that the newspaper format--which gradually developed over many many years due to how a human interfaces with the medium--is now so... quaint?... that it has entered the realm of "art."
All that inverse-pyramid, "Five Ws and an H," Journalism 101 stuff developed in part because of how newspapers were designed, typeset and printed. Now it's kind of like a Thomas Kincaid print?
That's pricey. Perhaps using a normal 4k monitor is a better option? It could even display video. You could couple it with a motion sensor to turn it off and save power when noone is around.
There are cheaper e-ink displays by Waveshare.
e.g. the WaveShare 13.3inch e-Paper e-Ink Display HAT For Raspberry Pi for 500€.
You can build a box to house the display and the Raspberry Pi for under 100€…
Add some scripts to download and display the news PDF and you can enjoy it for 1/4 of the price…
Is that really worth it, though? The 13 inch screen from this company is 899€ and already comes in a proper enclosure, and is wireless which seems important for this product. If your goal is to quickly manufacture reliable devices, partnering with someone that already sells a proper device seems totally worth the extra cost.
Not to mention that OP wants a big poster-size screen, so your suggestion comes a few inches short.
It is absolutely worth it! The Visionect display require a subscription to run properly: https://www.visionect.com/software/ .
60 Euro / year to run a display that I paid almost 1k for is not for private use.
I guess that's why the price for the 32 inch display is so high, the subscription is priced in.
I am simply not interested in that sort of limitation on a display device, regardless of the available work arounds. Just sell me an eink monitor and be done with it. This is digital sign technology as can be seen at https://www.visionect.com/products/, and has very little place in the home. It is a waste of resources in that location.
I don't think you can buy a large eink screen as a consumer anywhere because of the shenanigans of the company that owns the eink technology. I forgot the exact details, but it was discussed here several times in the past.
Could you give a few more details on this? While the 32'' screen is a bit too expensive for me, I would probably find interesting usecases for he 16'' version if there weren't the subscription requirement. I don't mind writing my own CMS as long as that's possible.
What are the requirements to make a system work with these? Do you at the end stream bitmaps to the device? Something else? Is there a documented interface?
That was exactly the reference I turned up—though I (shamefully) didn't read far enough to see the mention of proper foot and inch marks, only the initial recommendation to use straight quotes.
I came across this a while back wanting to make my own - thanks for this! I wound up deciding to just get an InkPlate because I also wanted something to take off the wall and review
Looks nice, but it's still just more news for the news addicted.
Silly idea dump: How about: A 4k TV in form of a window, which displays a live stream of a 4k camera of various places in nature. Lets say, in the middle of the forest, or a beach in italy. To have a window into another place, for some calm and mindfulness.
You might be a customer for Bob Shaw's fictional 'slow glass':
Travelling through a remote area, they find a place that sells panes of slow glass. This is glass that light takes a long time to pass through, even years, so that a pane of this glass shows a scene from the past. People buy slow glass that has been placed in picturesque scenery so that later they can enjoy the view in their homes or workplaces.
I have the same thing, gitlab job scheduled every 12 hours refreshes it using the visionect docker image, I have google calendar at the bottom, and currency exchange over the top left, localized weather on the right, countdowns to holidays, F1 schedules ect... I decreased the heartbeat timer and battery lasts about 2 months. I can't find an asian or european news paper that gives a good high res front page like the NYT. Waking up to read the US centric world view of the NYT gets old and the headlines are not so entertaining anymore without trump.
Let me know if you find a more global news source that has a good high res reliable front page dump without advertisements. There has only been one time where NYT had on the front page over ~2 years and that was some fake diamond company took out the entire front page.
Are (large) e-ink displays expensive because of lack of scale in manufacturing? Or is there something inherently expensive about them? This display is literally almost ten times the cost of a generic 4K monitor, which has color, a higher resolution, and a 60 hertz refresh rate.
The only advantage here is the reflective display and the ultra-low power consumption. I'm not saying that there aren't use cases where those could be critical/decisive, but given the cost differential it seems like the decision between the two is effectively automatic: the products don't compete, in the same way an SUV doesn't compete with a Cessna: if you need to fly, you buy the plane; otherwise the car is a no-brainer.
I ask because I would love to have a second monitor like this display: easy on the eyes, distraction-free, etc. But at this cost it's a ridiculous non-starter for that purpose.
I chatted with the guy from Visionect about this once and he said that it was basically all about scale. There is massive demand for the panels that go in those generic LED monitors and many huge factories dedicated to making them.
The eink display looks gorgeous, by the way. But it's not a computer monitor and doesn't claim to be.
You'd think there would be a large market for signage, and the process for manufacturing electrophoretic e-ink screens isn't that different from web printing (rotary presses), which is both mature and scalable (in size).
I think eink does not perfrom well in freezing temperatures which removes a lot of large format addressable signage market. Otherwise I'd expect economics to drive cheaper large format eink screens
To be fair it will have a good viewing angle even better than IPS as well as not shining a flashlight in your face with a terrible spectral power distribution but I don't expect a real analysis by someone who compares 2 watt power savings as if this is the bottleneck of display tech or anything close to it.
Would be interesting to me to have something like this, but in landscape mode, and with slowly changing blueprints of aircraft, rockets, ships, cars...
55” regularly goes for around $1100, which is only mildly pricey for a 4k QLED premium panel. Bonus for the mount being included, and the external input controller.
That would be cool. And simple to do in Python with a small display. There are a number of projects on GitHub that can be easily modified to pull this off.
How long do we need to wait until whatever patent encumberance that's keeping e-ink displays at these ridiculous prices expires and we can start to see affordable e-ink displays?
The price isn't caused by patent encumbrance, but by lack of demand for 32" e-ink monitors. They're hand-fused from 4 16" panes because there's not enough throughput to make it worth automating the process.
Reminds me of the eink calendar concept that has been bouncing around the web for some years [1].
There's also this project [2] based on the same concept. It seems to me though that these kinds of projects are always held back by the exorbitant costs of decently sized eink displays.
I think that's the wrong link, but I get the idea. Actually it might qualify as art even more, because in terms of functionality it would be borderline useless.
This looks neat at a first glance but who actually wants to read the newspaper standing up facing a wall? I personally prefer to do it sitting down in a comfortable sofa or outside on a park bench.
I actually replicated this myself, with one extra feature; I got the screen framed . The 'trick' is that there's no glass section of the frame, the wood just boxes the screen and hides the fact that the bezel is not all the same width. This only cost another £100 at a framer, and I really recommend it.
Interesting, another project by Alexander Klöpping (coincidentally also OP). I guess this guy is the definition of serial entrepreneur. He's founded (and sold) Blendle, which is kinda related to this product, but before that he'd already started tons of companies. He's somewhat famous in the Netherlands as he's often invited to explain the newest tech stuff on TV.
This display with regularly-rotating high-quality pencil art could be a neat business. The comparison to wall art makes the hardware price look more reasonable, and you could offer a subscription to curated pieces or a network of artists' output.
The display is still expensive. $1500 for the panel, $500 for the driver board.[1]
As a status symbol, it probably has a limited lifespan. When Bill Gates built his first big house, he had big CRT monitors embedded in the walls to display art. Had to have working corridors behind the wall for that. Now, anybody on here could have that, but the result would look like a sports bar.
I've been following the last 3 or 4 posts of people that have created these over the last few years, and I'm insanely jealous...so cool. I do agree with others that I already have too much news in my life and I don't think I'd really get real utility from this (which is important at a $2K+ price point). One thing that could be a really cool alternative is a version that displays a random Wikipedia article, or whatever Wikipedia article is "Today's Featured Article". Put that in front of your toilet, and it could be an evergreen source of entertainment.
€2,783 ($3,025) for this might seem like a lot, until you realize that the price of the 31.2" screen[1] alone is at least $1,200 + $200 shipping within the US. Wow.
I love the concept and I'd be willing to pay for the high price no questions asked if the device included all the backend needed to display images. Given the high price I'd expect this to be self sufficient. I truly hope a soon to come interaction of the product will include such a feature, so that setting the target URL by connecting to the device (via localhost or similar) will make this work.
My best scenario would be:
- plug it the first time, a new wifi network is made available
- connect to the wifi and visit the locally hosted config page, which includes the wifi network to connect to and the URL to fetch
- the screen restarts and connects to the wifi and, if internet works, fetches the URL
- at any time, the screen can be configured if connected to the same wifi network (might require an app)
- a physical button resets the screen to the factory config
What an amazing project. I will be copying or becoming a customer in the coming weeks. Lots of comments about the high price, I do wish large e-ink displays would come down in price the but for ~$3k this will look good on my office wall , how could I resist. It’s art it is not just tech.
That display looks great actually, I've been looking for something similar to build a home dashboard. It is unfortunate that it does not have a touch screen; are there large e-ink screens (>15") that do? Alternatively, can Visionect displays be reprogrammed?
I like this idea very much. I saw this concept in real life during a podcast event in "De Rode Hoed" in Amsterdam. I was amazed by the quality of the screen. It's a little expensive, but I'm sure there is a market for this.
>The Place & Play 32-inch screen is pricey (2300 euros ex VAT), but an exquisite piece of hardware. It is made of stainless steel with sharp edges and a glass panel on top. The USB ports are discretely concealed, and the device feels sturdy.
Thank you for confirming my first impression which is that this is just a massively overpriced novelty item (which I concluded when seeing how much work was put into the video after skipping over the content-free article, and especially noticing the high level of moire meaning it must be very low DPI but for some reason the word resolution is not mentioned anywhere on the page lol).
I think I'd probably go for this one[1] - smaller (12.5" vs 10.3") but just over double the pixels (1872x1404 vs 1304x894) and 16 grayscales for about the same price.
Nice looking screen! Is there a way to run it without the subscription though? Or any alternative? The 32" was a bit too pricey for me, but the 13" was more wallet-friendly (899 EUR excl VAT)
I'd love a 32" eink display for my wall, but even if the price halved that €60/yr subscription would put me off - hell, even a €6/yr would put me off since at the price of the screen (even if it were half the current price) I'd care more about not being stuck trusting a company keeps offering the subscription for it to work than about the annual cost itself.
Reminds me of the glass cases containing the sports section that bars occasionally put above urinals. Maybe that could be a good use case for a very fancy bar somewhere.
Hmm, I wonder how much of this could be recreated with a Remarkable 2 or equivalent tablet. Build a nice decorative enclosure with the charging port embedded in the frame, it has wifi out of the box, and you can change the screensaver with scp when it's awake. Perhaps just set a cron job to grab the latest image every 24 hours from a designated url? Obviously much smaller, but you get a tablet out of the deal too, at 10-15% of the cost.
Refresh is certainly the spec we are all watching to see when this becomes possible. It is getting closer every year, it seems like we are about 3 years away right now.
I would love to buy this so I can put up classic newspapers and read them. Such a cool idea.
A bit of a side tangent, but I have been trying to locate newspaper archives, and I just can't find them anywhere for download outside of newspapers.com, and even then they rate limit the hell out you. There is not effective way to bulk download these artifacts so I can peruse offline, which is typical :(
Does anyone know where to find bulk old newspaper downloads?
The mirror (reflective) is not what matters. Magic mirror is just a OSS dashboard with lots of modules designed to go on a screen. My question is can you load Javascript and things that refresh on this screen.
I use a lot of Visionect products for quite a few years now. I have deployed easily hundreds to many many office environments as both digital signage and meeting room occupancy displays. They are a fantastic company. They have b2b direct brand called Joan, check out getjoan.com.
I'm curious what URL serves the current front page of a given newspaper though that you can point these at.
Couldn't one use an old iPad for something similar?
I have this idea for some time: a simple SaaS where you create widgets (News headlines, Weather, Stocks, FX rates, Clocks, etc) in your account, then load a special page optimized for viewing on tablets from a few meters away, which is updated periodically.
Then you can find another cool use for old iPads by pointing them to this page, and mounting them on the wall.
You kinda can, but there are no 32" iPads and none will look like E-Ink.
The closest I think you could go for is to have a monitor with precise brightness control and measure the wall brightness and adjust the monitor brightness to fit. Something like this was posted once and I'm sure it was done by more people, but here is an example: https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels
The point of e-ink displays is that they only use power when changing what's displayed or refreshing, so they can stay on the wall for several months on just a small battery. And they look more like paper.
A possible DIY way is to use a e-ink display connected to a Raspberry Pi and build a script to display content stored on a usb-stick connected to the USB-Port of the Raspi.
If it could navigate the rest of the pages of the newspaper and was guaranteed to last at least 10+ years or had a long-term warranty provided by an established company, then I would consider buying this product as an alternative to traditional wall art.
On an unrelated note, we been seeing the promise of high fidelity color E-Ink displays for years. Anyone know what the hold up is on that? I'd love to see something like this that can actually display color
It would be cool if it was Archive.org scans of newspapers from 100 years ago. But I'd pay nearly as much as this costs to not have current news beamed into my brain by my home furnishings.
As someone reminded me on a very downvoted comment on another post, you're missing the point. :) It's about presentation or artistic value, not the contents of the image.
You can use an LCD panel to get a similar effect, but you'd need a reflective or transreflective display. Those aren't cheap either.
this is a project my girlfriend said yes to buying immediately. Until she saw the price. Its about $2250 too expensive. I know its cost and whatever. But to make this feasible for your average person it'd have to come down in cost ALOT.
love the ultra modern look combined with the nostalgia of a monochrome newpaper.
this makes me look forward to cheaper large format e-ink displays used in society.
side note - I could totally see this in some cyber-dystopian-future film set.
Reading the front page now shows me how good that kind of interface is. I can scan with my eyes for what's interesting to me, and then I can immediately start reading. Something about the haphazard grid too makes the process of searching a lot easier and more satisfying.
When I compare it to their digital front page there's really no comparison.
For the scan, the size of each item on the grid naturally draws your eyes to what are the most important things of the day. The text preview of the articles are a lot bigger. Just in general the actual newspaper uses the available space a lot better. It's huge! With that space they can do so much more. I love how the "snippets" aren't blurbs, it's simply just the actual article, along with an index to keep reading. That lets me read a little bit of all the important stuff before theoretically continuing.
The digital front page has huge empty margins on my monitor. There's much less indication to what is important from an editorial standpoint, because everything is the same size. I guess stuff at the top is supposed to be the most important, but it really seems to be what is just happening "live", so most recent.
Seeing them side by side really makes me think that maybe the problem with news isn't that people don't want to pay for it, but that the product just isn't there yet. It's honestly garbage in comparison to the analog newspaper. I would love for something digital in the same format as their actual news paper if there were hyperlinks, and it was no more than $5/mo.
Call me old fashioned, but I'd say that good old fashioned canvas or paper is the perfect technology for wall art. Do we really need to mine the Earth of god knows what just so the wall doesn't look bare? If everyone who bought this thing spent the money on some art from a local artist not only would the artist be over the moon, they'd help sustain their local creative scene and most likely make their communities a better place.
You are unable to use this screen if:
- subscription is not paid
- company decides to terminate your subscription under any condition of your contract
- company decides to sunset software or a product
- company doesn't exist anymore
- CMS isn't compatible with your device anymore