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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?"
Use a white board and erasable marker plotter, computer controlled.
Bonus, it would put you on slashdot and earn you nerd cred. Maybe.
Plasmas can easily be replaced by LED LCD TVs that use a lot less energy.
Another vote for LED
You can get v big 60" jobs quite easily and theres no burn-in esp if theres alot of static content as you imply
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.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
I currently work in a call centre while I'm studying.
They have 4 large LCD screen in the centre of the rooms, facing outwards. These screens only show how many people are on the phones and how many customers are waiting. This display is updated every 15 seconds.
A large e-Ink display would be perfect for this. There is no colour needed and should save a fair chunk of power. That is, of course, I'm mistaken about the energy usage of e-ink displays?
Surely someone has created one if that is the case? Surely there would be a market for it now? And if you needed a bit of colour, I'm sure basic colour e-ink displays can do the job fine.
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.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
I love my e-ink reader and I love the idea of a large (color?) e-ink display, but it would require more than just the energy to update the e-ink. For example, in a darkened call center, you'd still need to shine a front light onto it which might not offer much savings over the LED back lighting of an LED LCD.
-Hovsep
A Japanese company called Soken demoed an e-ink display covering an entire wall a few years ago, but it used a different technology to the type used in the Kindle and similar devices. I have a feeling those won't scale, or someone would have demonstrated a larger display by now.
Also the OP is wrong, his company didn't buy plasma screens. Plasma suffers from burn-in and would be ruined by a static image being displayed for 15 minutes, so chances are they are LCD.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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Someone is making these. http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/06/giant-e-paper-display-spotted-ogled-at-taiwanese-book-show/ This is from three years ago, so you can bet the technology has improved.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Did you pay for that education?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
E-ink is only black white or grey.
Definitively not. Color E-ink does exist, and what's more: it exists in large sizes. This stuff was developed for digital signage projects.
Check out Magink.
Unfortunately in most real world situations it is easier to either use a billboard, or a LED screen.
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.
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.
Yes, but that's based on 5 hours a day of usage. Imagine the discrepancy when you're talking about 24 hrs/day or in high priced electricity areas. Also, and I may be wrong on this so please correct me if so, as I recall the LEDs' backlights tend to last a significantly longer time than their plasma counterparts.
Furthermore, if you ever had any scientific credentials, I'd probably be asking for them given the fact that you're comparing two different sized units as though they were completely comparable. 47"42". The only variable that should be changing is the one you're trying to test, and obviously that's not the case here.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
each pixel is a ball
Close, but not quite. Each pixel is made up of hundreds to tens of thousands of these nanoscale spheres.
It's a similar mistake that people who are only used to discrete displays (e.g. LCDs) make when first working with CRTs: a CRT phosphor triad is not a pixel; a pixel will likely cover several triads. It certainly took me a bit before this finally clicked.
It's not $8. Those numbers came from probably very conservative assumptions about how much the average TV buyer actually uses his TV, which probably isn't 24 hours/day (or even 8-16 hours, as you might expect for a TV being used as an in-office "dashboard"). I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
I just did some very rough calculations: if the TV is going to be on 2 hours/day on average, that's 730.5 hours/year. If the TV uses 100W when operating, that's about 73kWh over the whole year. If your power costs $0.20/kWh, then the TV will cost $14.61 to operate for one year.
I'd assume that these "dashboard" TVs will be operated 10-12 hours a day, which is 5-6 times those previous numbers. Plus, commercial electricity costs more than residential, IIRC (I could be wrong about that). So it's probably much closer to $100/year to run these TVs, or maybe more. Still not an astronomical amount of money, though.
What I want to know is: what kind of TVs is the submitter using anyway? He's apparently interested in an e-Ink screen that's 30 FEET diagonally.
E-ink is only black white or grey. So there is very little need for large sized versions. As most things that big you want color for.
a 30" eink display could be built though. make it from panels of smaller units like they do jumbo tron's.
You are completely incorrect. Prototype color eInk screens have been around for years, and they are now commercially available. Of course, they are not used in a Kindle or Nook, so perhaps you are not familar with them. Google "color e-ink" or just look at this ECTACO jetBook Color with color E Ink screen for an example.
The trick with color e-ink is that, just like black and white e-ink, the screen looks more like newsprint rather than a bright plasma or LCD. If a billboard or advertisement used color e-ink, it would require some kind of bright lighting to make the screen look vibrant. Once you add a bright LED lamp to illuminate your e-ink board, will it save much energy vs. an LCD tv?
perfect use for these.
With e-ink you would probably be able to read them clearly from across the terminal.
This space available.
Flipdots Are pretty close to large-scale e-ink
And once it's burned in he can turn it off and save loads of power!
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.
There may be a market for large e-ink displays (thousands? tens of thousands?), but it's a tiny fraction of the market for 50 inch LCD/Plasma screens (millions), so the economies of scale mean that it would be prohibitively expensive.
The black-and-white nature of the displays and limited refresh rate mean they aren't a drop-in replacement for every large format display, which limits their usefulness.
My favorite part of the practical applications they present is the security camera pointed at the billboard. Presumably the tech is expensive enough that someone might just scale the tower and steal it.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
If Sharp really do deliver on their promises, IGZO panels are going to dominate in the next few years. Like e-ink they don't require power for a static image and can be transparent, but unlike e-ink IGZO has fast response/refresh rates and supports high resolutions! There's a 32" 4K coming next month rumoured to be $5,500 US launch price. It's the same panels that caused Apple to release Plan B for the iPad 3.
TLDR; Check out this (cheesy) video where IGZO introduces "himself" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnUUXoFsjoY
That's one hell of a giant e-book reader.
Well, that's based on the amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area this morning.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
E-ink is only black white or gre
That's not true and hasn't been true for a number of years. You can get colour e-ink readers, just not in the US which is, as has become depressingly common for many consumer portable electronics gadgets, running several years behind Asia for newest tech.
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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. (The main advantage of E-Ink here, would be that the sun wouldn't wash it out, and perhaps you would stop seeing radios so integrated into the car. A radio should just be a radio in my opinion, although there can be value in tossing a GPS in there, if you manage to at least get a double din I suppose. In another thought, I half wish they just sold a double din radio that had a docking station for a standard low cost android tablet that size. That way you could upgrade cheaply, and when it was docked it could automatically be in car mode.
At any rate, with in dash E-Ink you could select how you wanted your dash to look with software, such as which sensors you will monitor and where the displays will be. If you combined it with a touch screen you could even do your own troubleshooting when a problem was detected, provided the software bothered to let you get to the real data. Of course a colored screen would be even better. Even one additional color would help.
I suppose the update rate for E-Ink might be a little slow for some who like to watch tach needles and miles per hour displays update quickly, although some other display tech could be used there I suppose. Then again, if peoples car dashs were configurable, someone would probably want to sell advertising on them, although I suppose laws have protected us from that, so far...
If you read my post further, I did note that even when you adjust the numbers for the amount of usage they'd get in this application, it's still not that much money. I was just pointing out that the difference is much more than $8. Of course, if you add in the fact that you'll need to toss out that plasma in 6 months because it'll have burn-in, that adds up to more money, but still not enough to buy some super-expensive product instead of using a cheap off-the-shelf product.
Still, however, this whole post does point out how large e-ink displays could be really useful for certain markets. It's not just his company with their "dashboard"; there's many other posts here pointing out similar applications, from displays outside of university classrooms showing class schedules, to airport displays showing flight statuses. Of course, the fact that e-ink requires sufficient ambient light to be easily readable may be a problem that could limit its use.
The fabrication costs for 30" are too high.
The way these things are fabricated results in a sufficien number of pixel failures in a 30" display as to make it uneconomical.
They are typically fabricated in large sheets, then the sheets are tested for dead pixels, and then the standard display sizes are cut out from between the dead pixels, and the individual units are retested. The smallest display sizes are used for things like watches and digital thermometers, etc..
The fabrication process has barely improved enough that they can (as of very recently) offer 9.74" displays in quantity sufficient to make them worth manufacturing.
Unless you can personally improve the process/methods to significantly improve yields for larger areas of the sheets, then what you are asking for will remain uneconomical, probably for several decades, as process improvements in LCD, LED, and OLED continue to outstrip E-Ink, and therefore their power consumption costs drop toward that of E-Ink. Currently, the only practical value for E-Ink is power consumption for infrequently updated displays which tend to be power sensitive only because they run off batteries.
So the short answer is you haven't personally invented the fabrication processes yet.
Airports, stations, hospitals, schools... Big market I'd say.
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At those kinds of rates solar/wind power starts to look rather enticing. There are numerous home-brew solutions that could allow you to cut that bill down significantly. Some low-cost solar panels and a battery bank that kicks on during peak usage hours for example. This doesn't make sense everywhere but at $0.40/kWh, it might be something to consider. Of course, there will be upfront costs and I'm lazy and only do math out of necessity, but I'm willing to bet that the turnaround on such a project could be at or around ten years if you choose your materials wisely and do most of the work yourself. I'm a tad off-topic here, but that just seems crazy. Also, please excuse my extensive abuse of commas.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
A large panel to replace sheet music would sell pretty well.
love is just extroverted narcissism
A bright light, or just the light that is already available in most situations?
e-ink readers do not always need an extra light, because you already have enough light from around you. Like with real paper.
Yes, I could see a market for this if prices are low enough. If prices for a large e-paper would be 100USD for 50", I would use them instead of paintings. (Not all of them) New images each day.
As I am willing to pay 100USD, I am sure there will be people to pay 1000USD and even more. Also others will have other uses for them.
As they are slow, they will not be TV replacements.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
According to this, the average person in the US watches 4 hours of TV per day.
However, that doesn't mean the average amount of time per day a TV is turned on is the same. First of all, the previous statistic averages in people who don't own TVs at all. Second, sometimes people leave the TV on when they're not watching it. Third, often the same TV gets watched by multiple people. The first two factors would tend to cause the average to increase, while the latter would tend to cause it to decrease. I haven't been able to find enough information to determine either way.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Most airports use some form of colour coding (such as green for "go to gate" and red for "final call"). I have seen station displays use flashing text to highlight platform alterations.
Here's a direct comparison for you, from my local power company (the largest hydroelectric producer in the world, HydroQuebec) all prices in CAD, and I'm ignoring the fixed costs here:
Residential rate: /kWh /kWh
Power over 50 kW (winter): $6.21 / kW
Power over 50 kW (summer): $1.26 / kW
First 30 kWh per day: 5.32
Remaining consumption: 7.51
Business rates ("low power", below 100 kW every month): /kWh /kWh
Power over 50 kW: $15.54 / kW
First 15,090 kWh: 8.73
Remaining consumption: 4.85
Business rates ("medium power", at least one month a year over 50 kW): /kWh /kWh
Power over 0 kW: $13.44 / kW
First 210,000 kWh: 4.41
Remaining consumption: 3.19
Business rates ("Large power", every month over 5 megawatts): /kWh
Power over 0 kW: $12.18 / kW
All consumption: 2.95