Day 2 DSSE – Lightning Impressions, Inc. Color E-paper And Making Smart Displays Do More

May 23, 2025 by Dave Haynes

Very busy second day at Digital Signage Summit Europe in Munich, and I got into my room at 1:42 AM. It is encouraging that I recall the time, cuz wine and weisse beer.

A lot of people at this event, with the numbers amplified by how people can fly in to the city, walk out of the airport and into the host hotel a couple of minutes away.

The micro trade show started its two-day run, and between sitting in and/or moderating education panels, I poked around and talked to several vendors.

The most interesting thing to me was a panel on e-paper that had several vendor partners from Europe who sell versions of color e-paper made by E Ink, as well as the President of E Ink’s Netherlands business unit.

E Ink said there were a number of improvements being worked out on things like the width of seams, so when modules are tiled together to make larger format posters, it looks more like one larger poster. The exec also talked about how video was being tested and one of the core types of color – Kaleido, I think – could do 30 frames and even 45 frames per second.

But one vendor, in particular, pretty much implicated that instead of trying to make color e-paper do unnecessary things, E Ink should work on making the technology more stable. I have heard lots of stories about color not really being ready for broad market deployment, and how  the underlying tech has a limited operating life. The inks, I was told, are chemicals and they can only be charged so many times for changes.

So, and this will of course get better, color e-paper is fine for applications in which the image is changed once a day, but not repeatedly. Making it do video – basically changing the image 30 times a second – would clobber the underlying tech and would not run for very long on a battery. So it would need to be plugged in, and would draw power in the same way as an LCD – except not look anywhere near as good.

The vendors on the panel were all very clear – and not just because they also sell LCDs – that e-paper is a paper replacement that could with time have a total cost of ownership that makes more sense than print posters. While printing a poster is cheap, if it has to be replaced regularly with updated information, that involves printing, transport and labor.

The color stuff, as it stands, is wildly expensive and probably has to come down by at least half to see purchases and deployments that are based on financial modeling, as in this now makes sense in terms of TCO. Right now, based on what I have been hearing, what stuff is in market is often about companies wanting to show their sustainability efforts in the context of tech people can see.

DynaScan, the big out of home display company out of Taiwan, now has a 13-inch color e-paper. While the company is known for its large format stuff, like totems, these little guys have a theoretical home in shop windows, doing things like real estate marketing.

Other stuff … and for the sake of time and serious need for coffee downstairs, I will re-post some Linkedin stuff from Thursday. It’s Friday, right?

Also, more coverage from invidis here … it should auto-translate from German.