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IshKebab • today at 7:38 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

This is their colour filtered black and white product. Quite muted colours in the past and it only really works well with a front light, which kind of ruins the point IMO.

I'm much more interested in their Spectra and Gallery displays which use color pigments. You can even buy e-ink gallery style displays for a totally unreasonable price!

https://inkposter.com/products/inkposter-tela-28-5?variant=4...

Actually to be fair that is not a totally crazy price.


Replies

zeeveener • today at 7:51 PM

I wonder how white balance is handled across these products.

I recently bought the InkJoy frame which is similar to what's sold at your link and the white balance is _awful_ and grey.

I naively expect these to reflect light like paper photos and be nearly identical in that regard when mounted beside each other on a wall, but I've been disappointed with the results so far.

Colour depth is not _as_ big a deal to me as the image simply looking natural among printed photos.

bhelkey • today at 8:26 PM

You can buy a 13" color e-ink display for ~$250, or a 7" e-ink display for ~$60. These can be placed in a frame for a couple bucks more [2].

Two things that I did not anticipate:

1: Refresh time is a lot longer for color displays (~20s) as compared to black and white displays (~0.5s).

2: Stock images tend to use cartoons. There is a reason for that. These displays require dithering which seems to work a lot better with a limited color palette, flat areas, and bold edges.

[1] https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-e.htm

[2] https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-photopainter.htm

torginus • today at 9:08 PM

I would also try going the other way, and build transreflective color LCDs - those don't have latency or refresh issues, like these weird hybrids.

They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.

pixelready • today at 8:10 PM

It’s requiring all my willpower not to take out a second mortgage and build a gallery wall filled with these. That image transition is gross but I guess it takes a lot more steps to move all those pigment layers around.