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
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 ;)
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. :)
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)?
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.
I'm still confused about the way it presented, but documentation and suite itself look quite decent.
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.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/
It fetches images from HTTP every half hour and shows them.
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.
[1]: https://projecteink.com/products/e-ink-newspaper-art-display...
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.
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.
It’s very cool what you have done, let’s maybe collaborate or join forces?
My product is an e-paper calendar:
https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...
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?
Something like this for (e.g. Kanban card-based) project management would be cool, though the contrast at a distance.
The PineNote is a 9" eInk development device; 3287cm/3 for $400. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote
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
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...
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).
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?
I feel really old now.
Eink feels close to paper, regular LCD's or OLED's do not.
Not to mention that OP wants a big poster-size screen, so your suggestion comes a few inches short.
- the display size is 6x
- no need to DIY
“ (U+201C : LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK {double turned comma quotation mark})
″ (U+2033 : DOUBLE PRIME {seconds, inches})
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.
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.
1) Place a camera + display somewhere in an urban area of the world so that random pedestrians can come and watch the display, will be on camera.
2) Place any number of these identical setups in other areas of the world.
3) Arbitrarily feed the camera from one to the display of another (shuffle every 24 hours?).
You get people seeing/reacting to others seeing/reacting ... possibly to them, possibly to others who are seeing/reacting to....
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.
The eink display looks gorgeous, by the way. But it's not a computer monitor and doesn't claim to be.
Example: https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Portals/14/EasyGalleryImage...
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.
That’s also why, admittedly, my calendar has a much smaller display than this newspaper.
(It’s this: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...)
Still a lot, but not "even pricier than a colour-accurate monitor for creators" a lot.
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.
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.
[1] https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/31.2''Monochrome...
Does that mean this device can completely stop working on the whims of a third party?
[1]: https://buy-lcd.com/products/largest-312-inch-e-ink-big-scre...
I could pay for this and notice very little difference in my financial life.
But I balk heavily at the $3k price tag and ask myself “what do I _really_ get out of this?”
The answer is “nothing of value except a reminder of how much I spent on something of very little life value.
You'll only see it at the offices of companies that want to pretend they're indie and hackery.
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
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).
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?
If so I will order right away
Open source, wake-up timer on set interval, connect to Wifi, fetch URL, display image, go back to sleep.
Or have it permanently connected to Wifi and POST a URL to the controller any time to fetch a new image.
That way you could control the full stack and do not need any subscriptions or rely on external companies.
I'm curious what URL serves the current front page of a given newspaper though that you can point these at.
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.
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
What you are describing is closer to Panic’s old Status Board.
But for that I guess I would have to give that thing access to my wifi? I wouldn't want that.
Any ideas if such a product exists and how one could use it shielded from the internet?
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
Have it display a random XKCD every day....
Also, I would need strong guarantee in Long Term Support and reading that it uses a proprietary backend doesn't seem to go in that direction.
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.
Sarcasm aside, thanks for sharing! The largest display I’ve seen has been 11” until now.
I worry though, because IMO newspapers aren't dead because of the medium; they are dead because journalism itself is dying.
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.
But I wouldn't mind big reasonably priced piece of e-ink on the wall that I can put stuff relevant to me on.
