Color e-paper is mainly being marketed as a sustainable and efficient replacement for paper posters, and E Ink’s newest Spectra 6 products produce visuals that are genuinely good enough to supplant print. They don’t use any energy when the static visual is loaded and displayed, but they have a bit of what looks like a medical episode when the visual is swapped.
A casual observer, seeing this multi-second change in progress, would reasonably think something is wrong. But it’s just how the tech works right now, and I think, perhaps weirdly, that it is not a bug, it’s a feature.
When it happens, people are going to look. Simple as that. Which is a good thing for whatever company or organization is using the thing for sales promotion or awareness.
Here’s a video that shows a Sharp display doing this …
AT CES, Sharp, E Ink and an Italian company, PocketBook, showed a fine art version of a Spectra 6 display that uses an E Ink display paired with Sharp’s IZGO backplane technology, LCD tech that enables faster image updates. So the glitching is quicker. Sharp first announced that IZGO-E Ink mash-up in Nov. 2023.
This is the 31.5-inch unit shown at CES this week.
