Bug Or Feature? When Color E-Paper Switches Images, It Glitches Out (And I Think That’s Good)
January 10, 2025 by Dave Haynes
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.
That command of zoom in the video, though…
My two cents – for applications that are more experiential in nature, I think this is quite interesting. Creative could hypothetically be fine tuned to help manage that all of the interim steps along the way to the final image clicking into place are acceptable. And you are right – it will draw in viewers.
However, in very commercial applications where controlling how the brand shows up might really matter, I could definitely see some marketing departments losing their mind over this to the point where the tech just won’t be suitable.
I’ve been a big fan of e Ink from the beginning and I think it provides some real opportunities to deliver some very differentiated aesthetics, but I think the image switching delay really pulls it out of the consideration set for many use cases, which may or may not be a problem depending on the ambition of the manufacturers. With the R&D going into solving this problem specifically, I’d say it is very much still a problem.
Great points Jackie and I agree that brands would have to look past that. I also think color reproduction will be an issue. The new larger format Kaleido e-paper posters are great for dimension but color support is limited and the tech uses a filter to produce the colors, which makes for noticeably muted colors.That might be OK for a car dealer or law firm or local realtor, but I don’t see premium brands being very happy with that. The Spectra 6 E Ink product doesn’t have a filter, and is dramatically better with color, but costs are much higher.
Great post! Personally I find the gradual transition intriguing. Similar watching a latent image slowly and magically appear in traditional film processing. As with any art you are always working within the boundaries of technology and the innovation is combining this with other senses sound, ambient light, timing… We really need need to change the conversation from a “LCD replacement “ to a new medium and opportunity.