4 ms·
people underestimate how long e-ink stagnated: it seems hard to imagine an alternate timeline where e-ink had taken the place of current LED outdoor billboards
by BoorishBears 3y ago
people underestimate how long e-ink stagnated: it seems hard to imagine an alternate timeline where e-ink had taken the place of current LED outdoor billboards for example... until you realize we were decades away from LEDs being cheap and robust enough for outdoor signage when eInk was already fundamentally similar enough the tech we have now
The company that owned the e-ink patents couldn't scale properly until they were acquired around 2010: in an alternate timeline where development open enough in the early 2000s, we might have ended up with eInk display modules large enough to be assembled into incrementally larger and more profit driving devices
Even now you see that with eInk store tags for example: imagine if the profit they're driving now had arrived 20 years ago and gotten re-invested
- callalex 3y agoI remember seeing e-ink price tags at Kohls (American department store) as early as 2004-2005.
- BoorishBears 3y agoYou probably saw the LCD based price tags which have been around for ages: https://www.fixturescloseup.com/2020/10/29/kohls-sloped-digital-price-ticket/kohls-sloped-digital-price-ticket-square1/ https://www.fixturescloseup.com/2020/10/29/kohls-sloped-digi... That said e-ink price tags aren't new, them being stupidly cheap (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804488587338.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804488587338.html) and increasingly wide spread in availability is the relatively new part.
- lostlogin 3y agoThose outdoor LED billboards can burn in hell. They are distracting when driving and are awful when a pedestrian. If I knew an easy way to disable them, I’d be doing it.