Ask Slashdot: Where Are the E-Ink Dashboards?

fsck! writes "My office recently installed a pair of huge plasma TVs to display some metrics and graphs. They only update every 15 minutes or so, and I couldn't help but wonder, why can't this be E-Ink? I searched all over the place but couldn't find anything bigger than 9.5" (Amazon's Kindle DX). I want a >30" E-Ink picture frame with USB or WiFi. Can the Slashdot community find anything greener than these energy sucking plasma TVs that seem to be everywhere?"

Comments

Energy sucking plasma?

[Aranykai]

Seriously dude?

Most 60" LED LCD tvs can be run 24/7 for less than $75 a year. That is practically nothing.

Your office could easily save an order of magnitude more by turning the thermostat up 1 degree.

Units

[Kotoku]

It's funny when the editors don't catch unit typos in the summary. Feet instead of inches make me think a 9.5 foot display would be just fine. Only when you see they meant the Kindle display is the typo clear.

Re:Black white or grey

[ThePhilips]

Why would there me more or less need for a big sized display depending on how many colors it can display?
As long as the contrast is decent I would love a large eInk display

You alone do not make large enough market.

Large CRTs and panels, before becoming parts of consumer products, where literally exclusively used by businesses for marketing purposes (displays in shops, exhibitions and so on). They bore the high price of very early adopters. And: marketing wants to have colors.

Unless there would appear a market for large B/W panels or the color version of e-Ink would enter production, chances of a large e-Ink panel are very close to zero.

Re:Use LED LCD TV instead -- not really

[Jmc23]

So a 20% smaller screen uses ~60% more energy and you say energy use is 'similar'?

Did you pay for that education?

Re:Use LED LCD TV instead -- not really

[PhotoJim]

True, but with 15-minute updates, the plasma will burn in in a few weeks to months and the LED will stay in decent shape for a few years.

Re:Black white or grey

[jouassou]

I still think there is a market for large e-ink displays.

For instance, there is a large LCD screen outside every lecture hall at my university. Each screen displays a blue-on-white list of scheduled lectures and events for that hall, which is updated every second hour or so. Replacing those screens with e-ink displays would presumably save a lot of power, without any loss of functionality.

Re:Black white or grey

[tsa]

Airports, stations, hospitals, schools... Big market I'd say.

Re:Use E-Ink in an actual dash?

[Dogtanian]

It occurs to me that one place you could possibly use E-Ink would be in an actual cars dash, well provided you could make a good way to see it at night anyway. [yadda yadda yadda]

This has nothing to do with the (first) post you were "replying" to. But I guess you realised that as a top-level post placed in its correct chronological position it would have appeared further down the page. And what *you* had to say was so much more important than everyone else that it justified cheating your way into a more prominent position near the top. Right?