Originally published at: You can now buy your own 32" e-ink newspaper display | Boing Boing
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Super cool, but the use-case escapes me. How much does it weigh? You’re not gonna sit with that giant thing in your lap reading the paper, and you’re also not gonna stand in front of a wall reading the paper. So… conversation piece, I guess? Art?
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Newspaper HQ lobby art? As long as those still exist
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One of the major newspapers adopted color right on time for the (1991) gulf war. Somewhat overexposed color photographs of white sand. How thrilling.
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It’s baffling. The advantage of e-ink being the low energy usage - but if you’re going to mount it on a wall, you might as well use a regular flat screen. For a tenth the price, you could find a conventional display that could do a pretty good black and white image, I’d think… certainly good enough for the cursory glance that is the most this would get.
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That seems like a really bad sign (pun not intended but recognized).
If you were buying direction from Visionect you could certainly be more or less happy about having to tithe to the man just to continue using your display; but at least they’ll take your money.
In this case you’ve got a 3rd party licensee preloading a relatively thin skin of configuration and presumably bundling some period of use into the $500 price bump; but that raises the distinct risk that you won’t even have the option to shove money at someone if the little teeny VAR dries up and blows away.
At least an unsupported embedded webkit build will be virtually certain to make the thing rootable, so there is that.
It’s a pity, really. A typical display standard is a terrible fit for the characteristics of e-ink displays, so just demanding displayport would be a questionable move; but something like this is basically certain to get stabbed in the back by its software years too soon; and driving e-ink displays is considerably weirder than dealing with LCDs, so a brainstem transplant will be nontrivial.
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Described in this atlas obscura article as a “The finished, 600-pound bookwheel, complete with books”
I could imagine such a device it working for atlases and other genuinely cumbersome books, but it the finished product does look a bit cramped.
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The first time I ever heard about e-ink in the 90s(?), the imagined use case was an all-in-one newspaper. Like the Dynabook (which manifested as the laptop), it’s still a high-water mark of tech for me. I actually can’t wait to have a true newspaper-like tablet. So when I read…
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So true, so true… And always a bit sad.
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I’m a huge fan of e-ink. Meaning I’ve been waiting 20 years for a magazine form factor that supports a few colors at a price I can live with if I’m disappointed and don’t use it.
One day.
For those among us who’ve always lamented how difficult it is to get a proper paper cut from the soft, cottony edges of newsprint.
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