I'm a news junkie, and the power and allure of a newspaper's front page have always fascinated me. When I stumbled upon an article written by a Google engineer who had built an e ink device with the front page of his favorite daily newspaper prominently displayed on his wall, I was a bit jealous. So, I worked with a e-ink company called Visionect in Slovenia to build a version that comes shipped ready to put on your wall. The screen isn't cheap ($2500) because it's a huge 32" e-ink display. The beautiful glass screen is connected to wifi and we made it easy to choose your favorite newspaper frontpages to put on display. It's a bit like an ever changing artwork.
It does look cool, but I think the last thing I want on my wall is yet more 'news'.
I was about to say something similar about the price; for that money I can just stick the newspaper itself up on the wall.
OTOH if the display is already 2300EUR, I can't see how the OP can possibly make any money on this, especially with free global shipping, returns, etc, etc.
> OTOH if the display is already 2300EUR, I can't see how the OP can possibly make any money on this, especially with free global shipping, returns, etc, etc.
I don't think they are making money out of this. The display is 2300€ without VAT and the OP is selling them with 2783€ with 21% VAT, so it's exactly the same price.
You may be missing the purpose of this item. The price is high, but it is really not for a picture of the paper. It is for the 'look','old feel, while still clearly being very modern'. In other words, it is trying to be closer to art; so its about being cool in an understated way with unnecessarily expensive things.
Also the fact that it can be anything that fits the aesthetics. I have been drawn to this E-ink concept for many year and other than waiting for a drop in price, I would love it to be available in color and use it to dynamically change between vintage movie poster, hell maybe even pull the one for the movie that I'm watching in my media server.
Other commenter [1] mentioned that there's a subscription required. I found no pricing link, but saw a subscription on the parent page [2] listed at 60 per year. So if we're talking 10 years, then it's closer to 3000.
Depends on the person but it doesn't seem completely impossible - ignoring inflation, $250/yr for <5mins a day (part of an existing delivery route, so no worrying about the commute time except from front door to wall hanging location - realistically could be 2 mins rather than 5 but say 5 to be conservative) is ~30hrs for 365 days, so ~$8/hr.
If they can manage it in 3min rather than 5, it's up to $13.70/hr.
Where I am (UK) I think most newspaper delivery people are aged 13-18, and while there's far less of them about than when I was a kid, I wouldn't be surprised if >50% would be willing to do it to earn an extra $4.80/week.
Of course, you also need to trust the person to come into your house every day, either giving them a key or being available to let them in each time; and while I skipped over inflation it's likely that $250 in ten years has devalued a lot - but maybe you could get a yea for just $150-200/yr at the start to have room for annual increases...
So I don't think your curt dismissal adds much to the conversation.
And that's feasibility thinking about US/UK people, as konart points out in their comment there are countries where $250/yr stretches much further than in wealthy, high-CoL countries.
You have conveniently left out the cost differential for the printed edition, and you are conveniently pricing the trust/risk/hassle that comes with it at 0. And even in this case I doubt the USD 5 pw is the market price, you are basically assuming there is a kid, who values extra pocket money.
The assumption about a kid for pocket money is relevant because a) lots of people doing the job of delivery papers are kids already and b) even if they're not, they're some doing the same job for minimum or less than minimum wage so presumably have similar desire or need for earning money for simple work.
And as mentioned, the person who suggested it being possible was talking about using an existing physical subscription not paying for that within the $2.5k
When I was 13 I delivered newspapers, two of the people with subscriptions on my route, both >70 (not sure exact age), one asked me to take their bins out to the street once a week, the other wanted company and hoped I'd come in for a drink every time. They both offered to pay, my mum wouldn't let me accept money from them but I was still happy to go inside both of their houses each week to be friendly. I'm pretty sure I'd have said yes to hanging the front page every day for whatever was worth $5 of 2023 money back then a week extra!
Sure, most people wouldn't want that, and most people wouldn't want to spend $2500 getting a newspaper they'd already paying for to be hung on the wall. But that's not the same as "no you couldn't [do that at all]".
Yes, it's absurd. But for most people paying this amount of money to get a single page of a newspaper on their wall for however long the screen and cloud service work is also absurd. Despite looking extremely cool, it's a pretty small group of people this is targeting.
Then let them have their fun? I’m not sure what the issue is here. Just seems like folks working on their tight 5 and announcing to everyone how shrewd they are for declaring how dumb they think this product is. Feels like I’m back on reddit already lol
The person you're replying to was just making a sensible observation that was relative to the conversation - I don't see any problem with what they said, nor relevance to Reddit's typical comments.
You on the other hand haven't added to the discussion but instead broke one of HN's guidelines:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Maybe worth checking the whole page out, then you can help keep HN comments as high quality as possible to avoid other people feeling the need to compare to Reddit! <3
We all make childish or otherwise foolish comments sometime (most of us probably quite often - I definitely do), worth trying not to as often as possible but no big deal slipping up :)
Also, in my country minimal salary this year is 180$/month. So I can realistically find a person to change newspapers full time every workday for a year, for those money. I rather think there will be a a queue of candidates for this, as compared to loading cargo or or giving out flyers on the street for the same sum. :)
I think you've overlooked the realistic useful lifetime of the product, and how long the novelty factor would last -- if you price it according to that duration I think that you'd find the hourly rate to be far higher.
Heh I just had a bored few minutes outside with a cigarette, but I didn't find writing that comment interesting enough to want to turn it into a new career :)
I think you're massively underestimating a) the amount of poverty even in the US (or whatever country you're thinking of) yet alone in places where the mean salary is only a couple of hundred bucks, and b) the limited options for making more money for the type of person who does paper rounds (often but not always <18yo, but always in a situation where they need/want the work of delivering newspapers for a low hourly rate and for likely less than a few hours a day).
My 13 y/o son delivers newspapers, he earns £24 per week for 6 mornings. He delivers around 16 newspapers a day. (£24/16)/6 days = £0.25 per paper.
365 days per year at £0.25 per day is £91.25 per year.
The most popular printed newspaper is the Daily Mail, I have no idea what the wholesale cost is, but the retail price is £30.33 per month So, worst case is £363.96 per year - but my expectation is that it is half that.
$2500 USD is currently £1946.66
£91.25 + £363.96 = £455.21
So, you totally can get the paper delivered by a 13 year old boy for ~4.25 years, by which time he'll retire off to college. However, if my premise is that wholesale cost of the paper is half what I thought it is, then 10 years sounds about right.
EDIT: I checked with him, and if you live close enough he'd be willing to come in and stick it on your wall every day, as long as he can get home in time for school.
I live in India. My newspaper costs ₹230 a month. That's ₹2,760 a year and ₹27,600 for a decade (not factoring inflation). At today's conversion rates, that's $333.58 for entire decade.
If I pay the remaining amount of $2166.42 to the delivery person over 10 years, that's about ₹1493 per month, which is over 6 times the cost of newspaper subscription. For that amount, yeah, they'll be happy to hang the paper on a wall.
I've just done that in reply to your previous comment, but will add here: they said "pay the person who delivers my daily newspaper", so it's $2500 on top of an existing delivery, not $2500 including paying for a new subscription & deliveries.
$250 is a tad lower than the median monthly salary in India. I bet you can find hundreds of millions of people willing to earn a cool $0.7 a day doing something as easy as this. That’s a meal or two for a poor person.
With millions of people living in conditions where even safe drinkable water is not something you are guaranteed to get - 250$/year equivalent seems wild.
Hi! This looks like a useful product at a good price point. Are you based in Germany? How come you only ship to Australia, Canada, China, India, UK and USA?
Also, you should look through your privacy policy. Its straight up copy/pasted from Shopifys template now with all the "ADD CASES THAT APPLY FOR YOUR STORE", "REMOVE THIS TEXT IF THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO YOUR STORE" text remaining. And apparently you sell your customers information to display targeted ads?
Thanks for the answers! I hope that you will be able to sell in the EU. CE is good consumer protection but it is unfortunate that it creates such a hurdle for small companies to sell their products.
Please let us know if/when you can sell it locally. I'm very interested in getting one for my kitchen wall.
Can you disable the online integration features? Ie no google login, just be dumb and display what i tell it?
Second question, any thoughts on if this could run off of battery? Eink tends to be so low power, i'd love this type of product with a wallhang and periodic charge. Thoughts?
Batteries drive up the cost for certification and shipping. I think a battery works better together with a bigger, more expensive display, where these costs are less of a concern and which you cannot place on a stand.
(Even though you can definitely hang my display up on the wall and if you don’t have a socket nearby, you can plug it into a battery pack)
Sorry if that’s a lot of text but I think about this stuff every day :D
> You still need to in to the companion app because the device needs the online backend for computing the render.
Right, but that could be fully in my network if i understand correctly.
> But on iOS you can log in with apple. And there is no need to pair with google calendar if you use the image url feature:
This works, but i'd really like a way to do this without any cloud-y features. As dumb as possible. Especially for low cost devices like this where i'm paranoid of it being "cheap because they sell my data" sort of thing.
> (Even though you can definitely hang my display up on the wall and if you don’t have a socket nearby, you can plug it into a battery pack)
This is exactly what i was hoping for! I don't mind buying the battery pack separately. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't hard wired to a wall plug, etc.
In the future if you could try to allocate space or hooks or anything to support this use case that would be amazing. Ie some little hooks on the back where a user could ziptie a battery back to it would be great!
I think i'm going to give one of these a try. If it works well for my headless use case i'd probably love a handful of these things, they're very close to what i've wanted for years. A lot of little low power displays around the house that work like picture frames. A hybrid to "modern life" and "old life" if you will. I love Eink
Thank you for your comment, it made me notice that I sold out. I just added some more inventory, but it may take a little bit longer to ship than usual, because I still need to assemble those units...
Hmmmm, trying to see your point of view, what I would do differently....
If one is going to use plywood for the frame, maybe a nice "multi-ply" plywood (Europly, Apple Ply, etc.). The Japanese kids make speakers from plywood and love to show off the "plys" because they use the good multi-ply stuff.
Frame could be cut with more CNC precision? (Looking at the inner cut in particular).
Maybe the stand should be cut from extruded aluminum of some interesting cross section rather than the Scrabble-tile-holder-like block of wood.
Given those changes I would raise the price as well to $199 and think nothing of that.
(Also, would like to dial down the refreshes — or at the very least, not refresh if the pixels are unchanged. Unless somehow they are able to do invisible refreshes on the e-ink display — 'cause e-ink refreshes sure can be distracting and ugly.)
The cable looks cheap indeed, although otherwise you have the trouble of keeping it charged. But other wise "cheap"/simple look imo is a selling point.
But it's not going to look as nice as a 32" e-ink display on the wall.
Is there a yellow backlight, or a blueish backlight?
Is there a low-cost way to make a solar roof that varies in solar reflectivity? FWIU e-ink only requires voltage to cause the e-ink particles to flip over? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink
> Why do larger e-ink screens cost more to produce?
Last I knew the bulk of cost for e-ink displays was just due to the patent holders decision to charge a lot, which is disappointing, but can't go on that much longer...
This is a myth that people keep repeating. E-ink prices have very little to do with patents.
E-ink displays are more expensive because they are utterly niche compared to LCD screens (there are over 6 billion smartphone users in the world right now, and plenty of people own a smartphone, laptop, desktop, TV, tablet, smartwatch, then use a computer at work, interact with a self-checkout kiosk at the supermarket, etc).
There are basically two common use-cases for e-ink right now: e-readers (and nowadays 'e-notes', which have stylus input), and smart-pricetags in supermarkets. Neither of these require large e-ink screens, so there's no existing production line to feed these 32" monitors off. The 32" screens are created by hand-fusing 4 16" screens together, IIRC. This isn't automated because there's not enough demand to automate it.
The reason there's no demand for e-ink screens is that the technology just isn't very useful - I love e-ink, but it's not particularly flexible and can't be used in general-purpose devices that need to display video. It has its niches, but they're niche.
It's lower battery usage is due to low refresh rate, which is inherently incompatible with displaying video -if an e-reader refreshes once per minute and an LCD screen would have to refresh 60 times a second, then the LCD needs to refresh 3600x more often which means e-ink saves power even if the e-ink screen takes 10x or 100x the power per refresh. But if the e-ink screen plays video at 60FPS, then by definition it's refreshing 60 times a second and thus will use 10x or 100x the power of the equivalent LCD screen playing the same video.
If we want prices to drop substantially, we need more use-cases for e-ink. There's hope here, as the recent fast-ACEP tech (the Gallery 3) is color-tech that doesn't sacrifice half of your contrast and resolution (like Color Filter Arrays do), but is fast enough for an interactive device and is almost as fast to refresh as a monochrome screen (previous ACEP screens took min 7 seconds to refresh the screen, the new tech is amazing). With some refinement, it might be enough to bring e-notes somewhat into the mainstream.
So, all that said: e-ink screens that are 6" or less aren't really any more expensive than an LCD. It's only when you get outside of normal e-reader sizes that the price goes up like crazy.
...not to mention, e-ink isn't the only "e-paper" company - ReInkstone are making their DES screens, which dodge at least some of the patents on microencapsulated electrophoretic displays as their cofferdam tech doesn't use microcapsules at all and instead integrate the seals into the display.
Volume, Demand, IP, power utilization per real second
FWIU non-e-eink flexible display tech has advanced considerably.
Maybe there still is a market for huge broadsheet e-ink newspaper devices? How many flexible broadsheets of display would approximate the ux of a real newspaper?
The e-ink newspaper project comes up from time to time and I keep waiting for the prices to come down to Earth.
Guess I'm still going to have to wait, ha ha.
I did play around with an affordable (smaller) display and liked the result though (but since it was small I did not ry to emulate a newspaper but rather a vintage Mac).
yeah the displays are where the cost is, here, and until the company that makes these giant panels starts pricing them sanely, there won't be any products built with it which are priced sanely.
It's kind of sad that the newspaper format--which gradually developed over many many years due to how a human interfaces with the medium--is now so... quaint?... that it has entered the realm of "art."
All that inverse-pyramid, "Five Ws and an H," Journalism 101 stuff developed in part because of how newspapers were designed, typeset and printed. Now it's kind of like a Thomas Kincaid print?
That's pricey. Perhaps using a normal 4k monitor is a better option? It could even display video. You could couple it with a motion sensor to turn it off and save power when noone is around.
There are cheaper e-ink displays by Waveshare.
e.g. the WaveShare 13.3inch e-Paper e-Ink Display HAT For Raspberry Pi for 500€.
You can build a box to house the display and the Raspberry Pi for under 100€…
Add some scripts to download and display the news PDF and you can enjoy it for 1/4 of the price…
Is that really worth it, though? The 13 inch screen from this company is 899€ and already comes in a proper enclosure, and is wireless which seems important for this product. If your goal is to quickly manufacture reliable devices, partnering with someone that already sells a proper device seems totally worth the extra cost.
Not to mention that OP wants a big poster-size screen, so your suggestion comes a few inches short.
It is absolutely worth it! The Visionect display require a subscription to run properly: https://www.visionect.com/software/ .
60 Euro / year to run a display that I paid almost 1k for is not for private use.
I guess that's why the price for the 32 inch display is so high, the subscription is priced in.
I am simply not interested in that sort of limitation on a display device, regardless of the available work arounds. Just sell me an eink monitor and be done with it. This is digital sign technology as can be seen at https://www.visionect.com/products/, and has very little place in the home. It is a waste of resources in that location.
I don't think you can buy a large eink screen as a consumer anywhere because of the shenanigans of the company that owns the eink technology. I forgot the exact details, but it was discussed here several times in the past.
Could you give a few more details on this? While the 32'' screen is a bit too expensive for me, I would probably find interesting usecases for he 16'' version if there weren't the subscription requirement. I don't mind writing my own CMS as long as that's possible.
What are the requirements to make a system work with these? Do you at the end stream bitmaps to the device? Something else? Is there a documented interface?
