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Digital Ink On Billboards
cdneng2 writes "The New York Times has this article on
a revolutionary new billboard. It uses digital ink, versus the typical CRT,
LCD, Neon, or Plasma displays that are so prominent on the newer billboards that
wastes electricity. From the article: 'By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to
reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink
can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens,
rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink
executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.' The billboard
can display images at 70 frames per second." You can find more articles on the billboard technology on the Magink website.
5mm =
The smallest frame size is 1m x 2m, so that would be 200 x 400 pixels, bigger than a Palm Pilot and bigger in pixel count but less square than a Zaurus.
4096 colors is low compared to a modern PC.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The day advertising and the military merge, we'll be in a world of hurt.
Wake up dude. That last 3 US wars (Iraq, Afganistan, Iraq) have been full-on media circuses.
video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice the speed needed to produce smooth, cinematic motion
Thats all very well but what are the response times like? Practically all LCDs have a 60fps refresh time, but with a respone of 30ms or more, fast moving images would look horrid, leaving lots of streaks. The article doesn't mention the dot-pitch specs of these digital ink screens either, I'd like to see what sort of resolution and at what size these things could produce. If it had a fast enough reponse you could play Quake III on a 70ft screen!!!
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
Wake up dude, if you think Desert storm was the last war America faught in before it's afgan killing spree.
One is that a billboard ad is seen by people in passing. If you glance up from your car and take in a tenth of a second from an animated ad you may miss the whole point. A static ad at least has the brand logo on it at all times, which means it impinges on some part of a viewers mind.
The second reason is that angling for animated ads would probably put Magink out of business. Anytime the car crash statistics rose even slightly the public would blame those annoying animated ads. Bylaws would have them out of the cities for good. Joe may tolerate tobacco that gradually kills him, he may tolerate a cell-phone he chooses to use that distracts him at a critical moment, but if a supermodel flashes twelve-foot breasts at him just before a car accident, you can damn well believe Joe will blame the ad in his post-accident fury.
Same reason you don't have back lighting on a book: it is an absorbtive, not emissive, technology. The coloured elements seem to be opaque, so backlighting wouldn't work.
There seems to be no reason why they couldn't scale the technology down to PC size. But I think they have targeted the big-ticket applications for their first market - not a stupid idea. If they can replace "million dollar" displays with "80,000 dollar" ones, there are some *big* shot term profits to make the money to fund the mass production line to manufacture cellphone displays at the millions/month level you need to get the costs down.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:
- 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit.
- 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm
- the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish
- cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.
Yes, looks good!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
>> Why is it that nowadays, any new cool thing is invented either for military or advertising use?
;)
> Porn...
What, you mean to tell me that porn doesn't depend/use advertising for its own existence?? No...I couldn't believe it!
Porn has stopped using new innovations (and pushing for more) compared to a few years ago. It essentially only advertises like mad (hasn't stopped), and of course sites cross-advertise for each other...
(As a side note: I'm sure the military "use" porn too...
Great idea - make a display that's cheap because it doesn't require lighting and then light it.
In other words, they failed to get the resolution high enough for use in displays and standard digital paper, and now they only thing it's good for is billboards. Cool, but not nearly as cool as what all the digital ink companies promised we'd have by now.
This can be a little dangerous, if placed near to highways.
If you live in NYC, and have driven down the west side high way, there's a billboard, a tv billboard, which you see when you drive south around 23rd street in Manhattan. Am I the only one who gets a little distracted by these things? Anytime I pass by, I have to make a concerted effort NOT to have my eyes flit back and forth.
What about the ones in Times Square you may ask? They are MUCH MUCH higher up, out of line of sight for drivers. This one is about 3 stories high at about a few hundred feet away from the road. Ideal for drivers watching.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Shades of Minority Report...
But imagine the possibilities.
A series of sci-fi books by Stephen Baxter (The Manifold Sequence) describe technology like this.
They use flat, flexible view screens that can be used anywhere.
This is very exciting.
But of course it will be used for advertising...
I remember seeing this technology well over a year ago (maybe 2 or 3) where they were using this "smart paper" for electronic price tags in stores. As prices changed (e.g. for a sale) the store computer would simply send a signal to the paper to change the content.
This was only available in black and white (well black and light grey anyway) but they were discussing how to do colour back then. This is mealy an extension of that technology.
This will be interesting for making redundant traditional billboards as they it will reduce the costs involved in bill posting (at the expense of jobs (I imaging) but that's technology) and obsolete billboards which display multiple adverts (usually by having a motorised system of rotating panels). Never the less I can't see it replacing certain screens in Time Square and London's Piccadilly as motion video still packs a greater advertising punch.
Now the only question is that when the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) complains that an adverts content is too raunchy and should be removed (e.g. those wonderbra adds that allegedly caused car crashes through driver distraction), can be removed as soon as the decision is taken which will either cause a reduction or a dramatic increase in shock advertising).
Oh well time will tell.
Just my 0.02
If you get modded down for a first post... What do you get for a last post?
Based on that DPI, at the size of a billboard, i don't know of any videocard in the world that could drive something like that. for example. create a document say: 5 * 15 feet (and that's being nice). Fill it up with random stuff. Print it off as an uncompressed postscript at 300 dpi. Examine file size... if you can.