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Why Don’t We Have Giant Color E-Ink Screens?

Have you noticed that big LED TV’s are cheaper than last year? That’s because prices have dropped an average of 16% PER YEAR since 2000. Screens in all sizes are ubiquitous now and they get better, clearer and CHEAPER every year. So what’s up with E-ink screens you see in your kindle? Where are all the color E-ink screens? Why is it trapped in time like the TI-83? Which, by the way, is the same price as a 32” smart tv.

How Color E-Ink Works

E-ink, or e-paper, is the reflective display technology that you see in kindles or price tag displays in retail stores. Unlike LCD screens, it has no back light and causes less strain on your eyes.

The display is made of a film sandwiching millions of tiny capsules containing negatively charged black pigment and positively charged white pigment. Electric fields are applied to electrodes on each capsule to either bring the black or the white pigment to the top of the film, and all the capsules combine to form images.

Color E-ink adds a three-color filtering layer on top of the black and white film to let through different levels of red green or blue.

Applications in Real Estate

One of my top proptech wish list items, if you can even call it proptech, is a large format, color E-ink screen. Not like an iPad Pro big. I’m talking like 6 feet big. You could hang it up to display all sorts of stuff- from famous artwork to huge pictures of your own face.

E-ink looks a lot more like printed paper than an LED screen ever could. And it uses almost no power in comparison to a TV. People just don’t use TV’s as huge static art displays.

The advantage of E-ink over a static piece of art is that you could rotate through all the major works of your favorite artist. Or maybe scenery of a country you wish you could travel to, or personal family photos.

The Business Model

An entire business model could be built around this. People could subscribe to certain artists’ or photographers’ work to display it in their homes. Or if people stay at a hotel with one of these, they can log into their personal account and feel a little more at home by seeing their preferred art and photos.

One application of E-Ink that’s sort of onto this is E-Ink Prism, which is a film that can be applied to architectural products so you can program patterns and colors on design elements in a room.

So why don’t we see giant color e-ink screens and wall accents everywhere? Because they’re insanely expensive. While a 32” smart TV costs about 130 bucks, a 32” color e-ink display is north of $3000. You could buy 23 TI-83’s and tile them on your wall at that price.

E-Ink’s Patent Moat

E-ink is expensive because only one company makes the displays- Eink corporation. The technology was developed in MIT’s Media Lab in 1997 by a couple undergrads and a professor. A few hundred million dollars of R&D and 1300 patents later, they have a monopoly on commercial applications for it. Since the demand isn’t at the scale of TV’s and phones, we’re stuck with high pricing without much new R&D spend.  And that’s why a real estate developer is blogging about what they’re not making.

I’m looking forward to whenever the patent moat expires, because I think it could unleash a wave of innovation. Given enough production scale and further R&D, refresh rates and image quality could improve while prices could finally come down.

Large format Color E-ink is part of a customizable real estate experience that people can bring with them wherever they travel. And I think it’s part of what homes could be like in 100 years.