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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.
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.
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.
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?
Back in the eighties we had something similar to prevent CRT burn, it would display a moving or non-regular image, we called it a "screensaver". Everyone seems to have forgotten why they exist. Kids, lawn, etc.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
And once it's burned in he can turn it off and save loads of power!
Usually just setting an LCD to all-white for overnight will get rid of any persistent images. That's from what I've read online and my own personal experience.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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
Yes, I vaguely remember a time when "screensaver" wasn't an official synonym for "a zombie-making, disk encrypting, key logging trojan".
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!
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.
-- Cheers!
God it hits me in the Nerd when people open brackets and fail to close them - it even changes how I read the damn text!
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