Here’s A 31-inch Color E-Paper Display Running Full Motion Video

March 18, 2025 by Dave Haynes

One of the well-established and oft-stated limitations of e-paper displays is how they only really support static images and cannot do motion graphics and video that look anything like what’s possible with more conventional display tech, most notably LCDs. But here’s a trade show demo of a Shenzhen embedded computing company running smooth-looking video on a 31.2-inch E Ink-based display.

Geniatech is mostly known for embedded computing devices – like industrial and panel PCs – but the company also works with e-paper displays, and showed a prototype at the recent Embedded World trade show in Nuremberg, Germany (Geniatech has a German office). Video blogger Charbax goes to a lot of display and IoT trade shows and does videos of extended booth visits, and I stumbled on this one. It’s a bit hard for my old ears to cut through the accent of the Geniatech guy, but I believe he says video is possible through the use of a “special algorithm” and flashing the e-paper firmware (I guess) to get video running smoothly.

I have, through years of paying attention, seen some demos of video on e-paper in the past, and they looked ghastly. Recently, I posted on another run at video on E Ink that looked decent, but not really anything useful for real-world applications.

The animated movie used in the Geniatech demo is not comparable to the color support of an LCD and I am not sure it is 30 frames per second (the standard for video), but it’s not bad either.

Geniatech says on the brief video interview that commercial versions will be ready in Q2.

There are at least a dozen companies – from Samsung all the way down to specialty display shops like Agile Display Solutions and Digital View – developing e-paper displays intended for commercial applications like digital signage, and as far as I can tell, they’re all using E Ink’s technology as the display layer.

The official word on video support from E Ink is: Using the faster update modes, E Ink screens can support animation quality video rates. A number of examples are available from customers that show examples of E Ink screens showing video. However, constant updates reduce the power efficiency of our ink systems. Current production modules do not support video rate updates.

There are two hang-ups with this:

1. The price will be several multiples of what a 30-32 inch LCD would cost, whether that’s with video or just static image support;
2. The energy-saving aspects of e-paper are diminished by using video. Reflective tech like this only used power when an image changes, so for posters, that might mean once an hour or once a month. With video, images change 30 times per second.

Tech familiar to display nerds but not all that well known generally already pairs the idea of displays that reflect sunlight with well-established LCD technology. One of my stories in the Future Displays report from January is based on a visit with Taiwan’s HANNstar, which has refective LCDs that support full video and full color spectrums, but use natural or artificial light to illuminate the screen, instead of a power-hungry backlight.