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I personally love this. I have a pretty strong distaste for bright screens everywhere and rather like the look of e-ink screens. I'd love a future where we move

I personally love this. I have a pretty strong distaste for bright screens everywhere and rather like the look of e-ink screens. I'd love a future where we move away from putting up LCD panels on every surface we can advertise on.

sho_hn 2y ago
I think seeing more public spaces shift away from emissive displays and putting more emphasis on quality lighting again would definitely be interesting. What mainly limits the applications for this tech is that full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly, so it prefers static content. For public spaces this could mean a greater emphasis on graphic design quality as well, since you'd probably only want to refresh out of sight of customers, e.g. outside of business hours. The problem is that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print. Overall my gut feeling is that the economics just aren't quite there yet without some more effort put into changing the equation. For examle - I think that E-Ink should actually kind of try making the refresh experience have its own aesthetic. Right now the refresh on the Spectra panels looks like the panel is having a seizure. If they could make it look cool (e.g. doing it a fancy geometric pattern or something), it might make it OK to refresh while being seen.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print Bus advertising. According to people I worked with back in 2010 that were working on LED panels for buses[0], changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days. Which is a long time for a bus to be out of service. An e-ink panel is a great solution - lightweight, zero power use until it needs changing, and the refresh rate doesn't really matter. [0] Didn't succeed because LED panels at the time were big, low-res, bulky, and extremely power hungry.
  - michpoch 2y ago
    > changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days That sounds like wrapping a whole bus with an ad. Hardly something an LED or e-ink display could replace.
    - toast0 2y ago
      There's a mix, a quick search took me to https://londonbusadvertising.com/ https://londonbusadvertising.com/ which shows wraps, which aren't going to be replaced with a display. But also rectangle panels which could be replaced with displays. Those panels might very well be vinyl for outdoor durability, but I don't see why they'd take 3 days to swap out, unless it's a scheduling/transport issue, for example a bus operator needs to drop off day before, so the ad company doesn't have to schedule around when the drop off happens, and the bus operator picks up the bus the day after, because they don't want to schedule around when the ad company finishes; now your one hour swap is a multi-day production. A full wrap, could be a 3 day process though.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Not one, but it can be covered in screens. This has been demoed in cars for some time now.
    - zimpenfish 2y ago
      > That sounds like wrapping a whole bus with an ad. They were talking about the standard landscape side panels. Didn't make much sense to me either but that was why the bus companies were throwing money at them to get LED panels working (aside from the financial bonus of being able to book multiple ads for the same bus, obvs.) (As an example of how efficient TFL's advertising swapping was - there was a poster at Deptford Bridge DLR advertising a Gorky exhibition in 2010 that wasn't changed until late 2017/early 2018. And all that involved was opening the street-level case to put in a new poster!)
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      I'd love this to be banned. Not only is it a visual eyesore form the street, it devalues public transport's brand, and in many cases it makes it hard for people inside the vehicle to see where they are.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly Non-problem in my view. Today's 'ugliness' is tomorrow's nostalgia.
- achow 2y ago
  > ..that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently On the contrary I would imagine that 99% of information displayed in outdoors is static in nature and does not need something in the range of 24fps. After all once upon a time 100% of the world's outdoor displays were static, and things were fine. Time Square should not be a benchmark.
- Animats 2y ago
  > I think seeing more public spaces shift away from emissive displays and putting more emphasis on quality lighting again would definitely be interesting. What's the point of running the display on a battery if you need power for the "quality lighting"?
- Karliss 2y ago
  Considering that I see giant >50 inch vertical LCDs screens used as advertisement boards in bus stops and every 100m along street. Same places that previously had rolling advertisement lightboxes swapping between printed ads every couple of minutes. So i would say there are quite a few places where ads are already past the point and the cost analysis isn't E-ink vs printed poster or rollup lightbox, it's E-ink vs >50 inch LCDs. Browsed aliba and price difference between those rollup lightboxes vs similar size outdoor LCD advertisements wasn't that big ~$200-$400 for lighbox and maybe $400-1000. Wouldn't be surprised if advertisement companies can also ask more money for ads on digital screens compared to printed ones. Payoff period might be shorter than you think. But it would be nice to hear from someone in business who knows more accurate numbers. As for refresh ugliness in case of advertisements it might be considered a feature even without fancy effects -> blinking attracts attention. And once you unavoidably turn your head to take a look at what's blinking in the corner of your eye the add has already changed. As long as it isn't too frequent maybe once every 3-5 minutes it will probably be considered acceptable. The giant LCDs with annoying videos area already sufficiently big eyesore.
- Lutger 2y ago
  Movement is as much a visual pollution as light is. I find it very, very distracting. That is perhaps a cognitive defect on my part. The fact that e-ink screens will be relatively static is only a good thing in my book. Another complication might be that e-ink by itself is not visible in the dark, though it isn't a problem to add lights. However, that could again be a benefit. Personally I would love a ban on ALL advertisement in public spaces, even print. Some brave politicians have done it on a city level, and the citizens just love it. Banning moving images and lights for advertisement would be a compromise, e-ink screens could then still be allowed.
  - dspillett 2y ago
    > Movement is as much a visual pollution as light is. I find more so, especially when it happens in my peripheral vision. It can be irritating enough for me walking past overly animated displays in shops, I bet it could be dangerously distracting for some drivers (who aren't always giving as much attention to the road ahead as they should be anyway) going past street or shop window signs. > though it isn't a problem to add lights. Does backlighting eink work? I think all the hand-held displays I've experienced have been lit from the sides. That is probably practical though: the old posters-on-a-roll setups seen in highstreets were often lit that way and with modern bulbs it wouldn't consume as much power these days. > Banning moving images … e-ink screens could then still be allowed. I would be wary of that loophole. I've seen some impressive displays of quick refresh rates for e-ink, so playing distracting video content would be perfectly possible assuming those techniques scale to this size, and if advertisers can do it they will whether it is good for anyone else or not.
  - jfim 2y ago
    It's not only you. Movement in general is a preattentive feature, meaning that it gets processed subconsciously and appears to "pop out" in an image.
  - Telemakhos 2y ago
    > I find it very, very distracting. The human brain has cognitive subsystems devoted to detecting motion that seems non-random, that is, that seems to move with deliberate purpose contrary to other motions like leaves or ripples. It's important for predation on both sides—for the predator or the prey. That's also exactly why advertisers love it and will continue using it. They will buy any politicians who look likely to ban moving images or lights.
echelon 2y ago
> I personally love this. The tech is awesome, but the E-Ink company is holding it back. We would have had large and cost effective displays well over a decade ago if E-Ink (the company) didn't patent patrol the technology. It's impossible to do anything in this space without touching their patents, and so independent of their direct involvement and licensing, there's no third party innovation or competition happening. These displays have had so much promise, but they've taken decades to evolve into diverse shapes and sizes. And they still cost an arm and a leg relative to other display technologies. Other commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26173409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26173409
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  Why is this _always_ repeated? Where are these patents? Where are the examples of eInk going against their competition??? Because you have a _myriad_ eink-like technologies from many other companies, most of them literally better than eink, that were available but were abandoned after they failed in the market. One example I particularly liked is Mirasol, who was abandoned despite being owned by Qualcomm out of all companies (HIGHLY unlikely to be scared by a patent troll, considering Qualcomm could be arguably described as a patent troll themselves). It's simply ridiculous to think that eInk would torpedo their own technology out of incompetence/malice/whatever yet these ideas keep being parroted here without _any evidence whatsoever_ as if it was gospel from the gods. The real reason, of course, is that this technology is hard (plain physics), and that there's little investment because most consumers could not care less. The supposed advantages of eink are paper-thin at best (contrast sucks and keeps getting _worse_ after each generation, and that is without taking into account the color ones), customers have a hard time distinguishing it from other technologies such as reflective/memory LCDs (which practically beat them in every metric you can think of, even power usage -- except for long enough periods of idleness which are not of interest to any consumer), and at the end of the day most people will choose a backlighted LCD over all these alternatives anyway... See Garmin, which started with reflective LCD watches for outdoor usage, and the moment they experimented with a plain old fugly backlighted LCD they decided to replace most of their series, _even the ones for primarily outdoor usage_, with backlighted LCDs (e.g. Fenix 8). Customers just buy shiny flashy screens more, what can you do about that? eInk survives because they're actually one of the cheaper techs, which is the only reason talking about "billboards" is even remotely plausible, and even then they're having a hard time.
_blk 2y ago
I just have a strong distate for ads. Period. Except the funny cat ones.
guappa 2y ago
I think not having ads at all might be a better situation.
- Beijinger 2y ago
  Sao Paulo?
PaulRobinson 2y ago
Consider whether advertising at all should be everywhere, not just the brightness of it. In Brazil, one town banned all advertising hoardings (back when they were just posters), and observed multiple changes in how people felt about the space, including the fact that they were hiding entire favelas ("shantytowns"), that many locals were not really aware of.[1] It's been a while since I subscribed to Adbusters magazine[2], but I do believe in their central premise that advertising, whether it be in public spaces or online, is harmful to mental health and society, because it perpetuates an unhealthy consumerism, and it distorts truth. So, I say, don't just make advertising a bit more subdued than an LCD (but not as sustainable as recyclable paper which was fine for a long old time): let's just get rid of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters
- latexr 2y ago
  Another one. https://archive.ph/2024.07.26-042606/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-26/zurich-bern-consider-billboard-bans-after-vernier-outlaws-visual-pollution https://archive.ph/2024.07.26-042606/https://www.bloomberg.c...
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  I agree with the idea, but I guess this is just one element of life I've accepted that we've lost as a society. I just don't have the energy for every fight. I knock on doors for civil rights, I put on outdoor gear to do wildlife population counts or invasive flora removal, I don't have the energy left for another cause.
  - PaulRobinson 2y ago
    Sure, but it takes a village, and all that. If polling data shows voters resent advertising across their town, you'll find that becomes a key part of messaging and canvassing for votes, so just saying something might be enough. And we can work together: I don't have time to knock on doors for civil rights or go count lesser-spotted newts, so I'll thank you for what you're doing to make our society better, and I'll go do some lifting on this bit, 'k?
taurknaut 2y ago
I'd love a future without advertisements.

sho_hn 2y ago

I think seeing more public spaces shift away from emissive displays and putting more emphasis on quality lighting again would definitely be interesting. What mainly limits the applications for this tech is that full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly, so it prefers static content. For public spaces this could mean a greater emphasis on graphic design quality as well, since you'd probably only want to refresh out of sight of customers, e.g. outside of business hours. The problem is that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print. Overall my gut feeling is that the economics just aren't quite there yet without some more effort put into changing the equation. For examle - I think that E-Ink should actually kind of try making the refresh experience have its own aesthetic. Right now the refresh on the Spectra panels looks like the panel is having a seizure. If they could make it look cool (e.g. doing it a fancy geometric pattern or something), it might make it OK to refresh while being seen.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> information that only changes infrequently, but often enough to offset the high cost of the panels vs. just having someone put up a new print Bus advertising. According to people I worked with back in 2010 that were working on LED panels for buses[0], changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days. Which is a long time for a bus to be out of service. An e-ink panel is a great solution - lightweight, zero power use until it needs changing, and the refresh rate doesn't really matter. [0] Didn't succeed because LED panels at the time were big, low-res, bulky, and extremely power hungry.
- michpoch 2y ago
  > changing the vinyl advertising on a London bus took something like 3 days That sounds like wrapping a whole bus with an ad. Hardly something an LED or e-ink display could replace.
  - toast0 2y ago
    There's a mix, a quick search took me to https://londonbusadvertising.com/ https://londonbusadvertising.com/ which shows wraps, which aren't going to be replaced with a display. But also rectangle panels which could be replaced with displays. Those panels might very well be vinyl for outdoor durability, but I don't see why they'd take 3 days to swap out, unless it's a scheduling/transport issue, for example a bus operator needs to drop off day before, so the ad company doesn't have to schedule around when the drop off happens, and the bus operator picks up the bus the day after, because they don't want to schedule around when the ad company finishes; now your one hour swap is a multi-day production. A full wrap, could be a 3 day process though.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Not one, but it can be covered in screens. This has been demoed in cars for some time now.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > That sounds like wrapping a whole bus with an ad. They were talking about the standard landscape side panels. Didn't make much sense to me either but that was why the bus companies were throwing money at them to get LED panels working (aside from the financial bonus of being able to book multiple ads for the same bus, obvs.) (As an example of how efficient TFL's advertising swapping was - there was a poster at Deptford Bridge DLR advertising a Gorky exhibition in 2010 that wasn't changed until late 2017/early 2018. And all that involved was opening the street-level case to put in a new poster!)
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    I'd love this to be banned. Not only is it a visual eyesore form the street, it devalues public transport's brand, and in many cases it makes it hard for people inside the vehicle to see where they are.
anigbrowl 2y ago
full-color refresh is very slow and very ugly Non-problem in my view. Today's 'ugliness' is tomorrow's nostalgia.
achow 2y ago
> ..that puts it into a pretty narrow band of application of displaying information that only changes infrequently On the contrary I would imagine that 99% of information displayed in outdoors is static in nature and does not need something in the range of 24fps. After all once upon a time 100% of the world's outdoor displays were static, and things were fine. Time Square should not be a benchmark.
Animats 2y ago
> I think seeing more public spaces shift away from emissive displays and putting more emphasis on quality lighting again would definitely be interesting. What's the point of running the display on a battery if you need power for the "quality lighting"?
Karliss 2y ago
Considering that I see giant >50 inch vertical LCDs screens used as advertisement boards in bus stops and every 100m along street. Same places that previously had rolling advertisement lightboxes swapping between printed ads every couple of minutes. So i would say there are quite a few places where ads are already past the point and the cost analysis isn't E-ink vs printed poster or rollup lightbox, it's E-ink vs >50 inch LCDs. Browsed aliba and price difference between those rollup lightboxes vs similar size outdoor LCD advertisements wasn't that big ~$200-$400 for lighbox and maybe $400-1000. Wouldn't be surprised if advertisement companies can also ask more money for ads on digital screens compared to printed ones. Payoff period might be shorter than you think. But it would be nice to hear from someone in business who knows more accurate numbers. As for refresh ugliness in case of advertisements it might be considered a feature even without fancy effects -> blinking attracts attention. And once you unavoidably turn your head to take a look at what's blinking in the corner of your eye the add has already changed. As long as it isn't too frequent maybe once every 3-5 minutes it will probably be considered acceptable. The giant LCDs with annoying videos area already sufficiently big eyesore.
Lutger 2y ago
Movement is as much a visual pollution as light is. I find it very, very distracting. That is perhaps a cognitive defect on my part. The fact that e-ink screens will be relatively static is only a good thing in my book. Another complication might be that e-ink by itself is not visible in the dark, though it isn't a problem to add lights. However, that could again be a benefit. Personally I would love a ban on ALL advertisement in public spaces, even print. Some brave politicians have done it on a city level, and the citizens just love it. Banning moving images and lights for advertisement would be a compromise, e-ink screens could then still be allowed.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > Movement is as much a visual pollution as light is. I find more so, especially when it happens in my peripheral vision. It can be irritating enough for me walking past overly animated displays in shops, I bet it could be dangerously distracting for some drivers (who aren't always giving as much attention to the road ahead as they should be anyway) going past street or shop window signs. > though it isn't a problem to add lights. Does backlighting eink work? I think all the hand-held displays I've experienced have been lit from the sides. That is probably practical though: the old posters-on-a-roll setups seen in highstreets were often lit that way and with modern bulbs it wouldn't consume as much power these days. > Banning moving images … e-ink screens could then still be allowed. I would be wary of that loophole. I've seen some impressive displays of quick refresh rates for e-ink, so playing distracting video content would be perfectly possible assuming those techniques scale to this size, and if advertisers can do it they will whether it is good for anyone else or not.
- jfim 2y ago
  It's not only you. Movement in general is a preattentive feature, meaning that it gets processed subconsciously and appears to "pop out" in an image.
- Telemakhos 2y ago
  > I find it very, very distracting. The human brain has cognitive subsystems devoted to detecting motion that seems non-random, that is, that seems to move with deliberate purpose contrary to other motions like leaves or ripples. It's important for predation on both sides—for the predator or the prey. That's also exactly why advertisers love it and will continue using it. They will buy any politicians who look likely to ban moving images or lights.

echelon 2y ago

> I personally love this. The tech is awesome, but the E-Ink company is holding it back. We would have had large and cost effective displays well over a decade ago if E-Ink (the company) didn't patent patrol the technology. It's impossible to do anything in this space without touching their patents, and so independent of their direct involvement and licensing, there's no third party innovation or competition happening. These displays have had so much promise, but they've taken decades to evolve into diverse shapes and sizes. And they still cost an arm and a leg relative to other display technologies. Other commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26173409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26173409

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
Why is this _always_ repeated? Where are these patents? Where are the examples of eInk going against their competition??? Because you have a _myriad_ eink-like technologies from many other companies, most of them literally better than eink, that were available but were abandoned after they failed in the market. One example I particularly liked is Mirasol, who was abandoned despite being owned by Qualcomm out of all companies (HIGHLY unlikely to be scared by a patent troll, considering Qualcomm could be arguably described as a patent troll themselves). It's simply ridiculous to think that eInk would torpedo their own technology out of incompetence/malice/whatever yet these ideas keep being parroted here without _any evidence whatsoever_ as if it was gospel from the gods. The real reason, of course, is that this technology is hard (plain physics), and that there's little investment because most consumers could not care less. The supposed advantages of eink are paper-thin at best (contrast sucks and keeps getting _worse_ after each generation, and that is without taking into account the color ones), customers have a hard time distinguishing it from other technologies such as reflective/memory LCDs (which practically beat them in every metric you can think of, even power usage -- except for long enough periods of idleness which are not of interest to any consumer), and at the end of the day most people will choose a backlighted LCD over all these alternatives anyway... See Garmin, which started with reflective LCD watches for outdoor usage, and the moment they experimented with a plain old fugly backlighted LCD they decided to replace most of their series, _even the ones for primarily outdoor usage_, with backlighted LCDs (e.g. Fenix 8). Customers just buy shiny flashy screens more, what can you do about that? eInk survives because they're actually one of the cheaper techs, which is the only reason talking about "billboards" is even remotely plausible, and even then they're having a hard time.

_blk 2y ago

I just have a strong distate for ads. Period. Except the funny cat ones.

guappa 2y ago

I think not having ads at all might be a better situation.

Beijinger 2y ago
Sao Paulo?

PaulRobinson 2y ago

Consider whether advertising at all should be everywhere, not just the brightness of it. In Brazil, one town banned all advertising hoardings (back when they were just posters), and observed multiple changes in how people felt about the space, including the fact that they were hiding entire favelas ("shantytowns"), that many locals were not really aware of.[1] It's been a while since I subscribed to Adbusters magazine[2], but I do believe in their central premise that advertising, whether it be in public spaces or online, is harmful to mental health and society, because it perpetuates an unhealthy consumerism, and it distorts truth. So, I say, don't just make advertising a bit more subdued than an LCD (but not as sustainable as recyclable paper which was fine for a long old time): let's just get rid of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters

latexr 2y ago
Another one. https://archive.ph/2024.07.26-042606/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-26/zurich-bern-consider-billboard-bans-after-vernier-outlaws-visual-pollution https://archive.ph/2024.07.26-042606/https://www.bloomberg.c...
HelloMcFly 2y ago
I agree with the idea, but I guess this is just one element of life I've accepted that we've lost as a society. I just don't have the energy for every fight. I knock on doors for civil rights, I put on outdoor gear to do wildlife population counts or invasive flora removal, I don't have the energy left for another cause.
- PaulRobinson 2y ago
  Sure, but it takes a village, and all that. If polling data shows voters resent advertising across their town, you'll find that becomes a key part of messaging and canvassing for votes, so just saying something might be enough. And we can work together: I don't have time to knock on doors for civil rights or go count lesser-spotted newts, so I'll thank you for what you're doing to make our society better, and I'll go do some lifting on this bit, 'k?

taurknaut 2y ago

I'd love a future without advertisements.