Although mostly relegated to e-readers, e-notes, and price tags at your local grocery store, there are some other novel users for E Ink displays. Want to display art on your walls without committing to just a single artist? That’s how Project E Ink is using the display technology, but instead of putting renaissance masterpieces on a wall, it turns front page news into artwork.
If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it was inspired by Max Braun, a Google engineer who, back in 2019, turned a 31.2-inch E Ink panel and some wirelessly connected electronics into a piece of wall art that would display the front page of the New York Times newspaper every morning. Alexander Klöpping, a University of Amsterdam student, liked the idea so much that he created his own enormous E Ink newspaper display, made possible by the fact that many newspapers, including the New York Times, share their front pages as PDF files every morning.
Project E Ink from Project E Ink on Vimeo.
Klöpping shared the blueprints and details of his own build online. Despite open-sourcing the device, though, he soon had an inbox full of emails from people wanting displays of their own but who lacked the technical expertise needed to get the hardware up and running by themselves. That led to the birth of Project E Ink, a company that’s now officially selling the hardware as a finished, ready to mount, screen that puts newspaper front pages on display.
Like most art worth appreciating, Project E Ink’s display doesn’t come cheap. You can buy one with either a black or light gray frame for €2,300, which is over US $2,500 after currency conversion. That’s a hefty investment for a piece of art that will never appreciate in value, or end up giving you a surprise windfall on Antiques Roadshow.
Maybe reselling is a better way to describe what Project E Ink is doing, because its newspaper display is essentially a Visionect Place & Play 32″ E Ink device that already has a rechargeable battery, wirelessly connectivity, and even a VESA mount on the back allowing it to be attached to a standard TV or monitor mount.
Project E Ink adds a “personal online portal” allowing users to choose exactly what newspapers they want the E Ink screen to display, and how often it should be refreshed—but once a day is all that’s really needed, which should keep its battery running for weeks on just a single charge. You can’t flip to other pages of the newspaper being displayed as the publications available because papers only share the front page publicly for free, so Project E Ink encourages users to actually subscribe to their favorite newspaper to ensure the journalism work that goes into creating each front page is properly supported.