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.
Best Answer
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.