Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

eliot.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 211 posts

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#161

Post by mahdi7d1 »

xnx wrote: post #18

Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP... (minimum order 3) 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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#162

Post by wayfinder »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #147
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 n…

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 i…

Not OP but what you’re saying is absolutely true.

But first someone has to invent it. Nobody’s gonna spend a few thousand or million dollars to invent something unless they get their money and more back, so that’s the point of patents.

And if they patent something and don’t capitalize on it enough, that’s their loss, because they had to detail their invention in their patent application and that’s public information. Patents last only 20 years and for most industries, that’s not very long.

(That said, I think software patents are a different beast. Because 20 years in software engineering is like 100 years in civil engineering, for example, since software engineering is like a few thousand years younger discipline than civil.)

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#163

Post by herpderperator »

xnx wrote: post #18

Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP... (minimum order 3) 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.

Where does it show the minimum order is 3?

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#164

Post by lostlogin »

BoorishBears wrote: post #91
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure the ad-driven subsidy on TVs plays a huge part. TV prices have declined as “dumb” TVs have been phased out of the market. A more niche tool like a large e-ink display might not make as much sense from to price this way since ad systems need large networks of users to be relevant.

people underestimate how long e-ink stagnated: it seems hard to imagine an alternate timeline where e-ink had taken the place of current LED outdoor billboards for example... until you realize we were decades away from LEDs being cheap and robust enough for outdoor signage when eInk was already fundamentally similar enough the tech we have now The company that owned the e-ink patents couldn't scale properly until the…

Those outdoor LED billboards can burn in hell. They are distracting when driving and are awful when a pedestrian.

If I knew an easy way to disable them, I’d be doing it.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#165

Post by dontlaugh »

BoorishBears wrote: post #118
solardev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example. Can you talk more about this? My phones and laptops are still as bad as ever in direct sun. Did I miss some major development...?

You should upgrade your phones and laptops then: Apple just released a phone that does 2000 nits outdoors, and similarly the MBP can dip into its 1000 nit sustained HDR brightness rating for SDR content if in direct sunlight In reality this is one of those slow burn deals where the improvements in anti-glare coatings, bonding between digitizer and displays, and brightness come slowly enough that it's easy to take for…

It’s better than it used to be, but I don’t think it’s because of higher brightness. No amount of it can make blacks visible in direct sunlight.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#166

Post by 4death4 »

bigfudge wrote: post #54
huehehue wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They look cool. Would be great to have an oled version without a backlight.

The individual pixels (other than the black ones) would still emit light so it wouldn’t be convincing. A normal picture doesn’t emit any light.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#167

Post by 4death4 »

xnx wrote: post #123
pama wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LED on oled stands for light emitting diodes, so they are a backlight.

"An OLED display works without a backlight because it emits its own visible light." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED

While true, I think the original complaint about the backlight was more about the fact that the TV is emitting light, which a picture doesn’t do. OLEDs don’t solve that problem unless you want to display a black square.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#168

Post by ghusbands »

schlarpc wrote: post #45

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: ha-card::after { content: ""; background-image: url(/local/visionect-dither.png); background-repeat: repeat; position: absolute; height: 100%; width: 100%; display: block; mix-blend-mode: multiply; } The dithering texture used i…

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.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#169

Post by pseg134 »

squigz wrote: post #129
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 n…

> 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 ma…

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#170

Post by bmitc »

mrd3v0 wrote: post #158
xnx wrote: post #18

Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP... (minimum order 3) 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.

The E-ink patent holder is one of the most egregious cases of patent trolls. They won't lower the prices.

When do the patents end? They've been around for a while now.
Post reply on HN