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The Idea

When I heard about Mirasol and Electrowetting the first time, I considered this techniques to be useful for building a wall-hung touch screen where you can show notes, calendarings, drawings and so forth.

The advantage would be that you can leave this notes visible, but without wattage or display lightening (like on LCD).

Such a display has to satisfy the following requirements:

  • not shining
  • small wattage
  • one big screen or multiple small screens combinable to a big screen
  • color picture, if possible
  • overall less than - let's say - approximately 600 $
  • the ability the show pictures rendered by a computer

My Problem

I even after intensive searching I wasn't able to find a screen suitable for such a use-case or - more precisely - I wasn't able to find a display with a acceptable resolution at all for retail selling. It seems like there aren't any new e-paper products coming onto the market at all (expect for cheap and small grayscale e-readers).

I also thought about demounting displays from Mirasol readers, but all these readers are currently out of sale, very expensive compared to their screen size and I don't really have the know-how to assemble a display wall from small E-Ink displays.

My Questions

  • Does anybody know where to get such E-Ink displays?
  • Any ideas how to build such display walls yourself?

Thanks for your help - if anything's unclear, please leave a comment.

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1 Answer 1

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I think a lot of people would love such a thing if it existed. Unfortunately it doesn't. It also appears that Qualcomm have stopped making Mirasol.

E-ink has a strange history as a product; it appears that the public much prefer active displays, despite what they tell market research people. They're also difficult and expensive to manufacture (this appears to have been what doomed Mirasol) without having a niche that's distinct enough from LCD or OLED to be worth investing in.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for your answer, even if don't like its content. - Any idea - do you know about any competing technologies or products which would be suitable for my use-case after a little bit of assembling? \$\endgroup\$
    – fdj815
    May 21, 2013 at 12:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ E-ink offer large signs: eink.com/large_area_signage.html which are monochrome and probably not cheap. Big screens are generally not cheap - if this tech existed, it would be used in cinemas. Currently the easiest way to get a wall-sized colour image is with a projector; you can get small cheap ones but they're not really intended to run 24/7. \$\endgroup\$
    – pjc50
    May 21, 2013 at 12:29
  • \$\begingroup\$ I've seen that one too, but it seems to me like they don't do retail selling. But I'll try to make contact with the salesman in spite of that. \$\endgroup\$
    – fdj815
    May 21, 2013 at 13:10
  • \$\begingroup\$ The bigger, the better - but a e-paper with just a normal 24" screen size would also do it. It should become something like a digital clipboard, you know what I mean. \$\endgroup\$
    – fdj815
    May 21, 2013 at 13:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ And I didn't hear about Samsung's or rather Amazon's Electrowetting technology for a while too ... \$\endgroup\$
    – fdj815
    May 21, 2013 at 13:15

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