Photos: Here’s A Look At That Solar-Driven Color Billboard Tech

October 16, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Here are some photos I asked for that show the public demo of that Israeli company’s very different approach to making billboards both digital and also sustainable.

KA-Dynamic Color and a NYC partner Sign Expo got the OK to show a portion of its billboard tech in a park yesterday and again today (at the corner of Barclay Street and West Broadway), timed to coincide with a pile of OOH media people being in Manhattan for yesterday’s DPAA’s annual digital out of home media summit.

The product uses a distinct type of reflective display tech (not E Ink’s) and a loose variation on the split-flap display boards you used to see at big rail stations and airports, before LED displays were really a thing. The net result is a new kind of outdoor billboard technology that is full color, digitally updated and only uses power when the visuals change. I describe it as what might happen if color e-paper and electro-mechanical technologies snuck off to a hotel room and ended up with a baby.

What’s going on here is KA using pigments on thin, flexible filters that float in silicon oil. By moving the filters, the technology can achieve endless combinations of colors. Like E Ink and similar display products, this is reflective – meaning it is not artificially illuminated by man-made lights (like LEDs), but is lit up instead by the sun. At night, as is the case with paper and vinyl billboards, the ad displays are illuminated by modest overhead lighting.

As you can see, just like LED boards on highways, they are meant to be seen from 300 feet away, not 30. A 16mm pitch LED board looks fairly awful if you are up close, but the visuals tighten right up when the same display is view from a distance. same thing with this.

Color reproduction is important, of course, but the primary selling point is the ability to put big displays up roadsides that can pretty much function without conventional energy (and the big bills for such).  They are reflective by day and when the sun is down, stored energy from solar arrays or wind turbines can drive a set of lights that illuminate the ads.