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Comment by hakfoo | Hacker News Reader

The big commercial selling point of E-ink is that it should be able to survive zero power.

I assume that's why its first killer app has been pricetags. A store with 5000 items each requiring a LCD pricetag would be constantly replacing little batteries or having to reprogram units if they popped out of a plug or rail-basewd power system.

I think some of the interest from the hobbyist brows is less about that and more about other aspects of the technology-- it has a bit of a distinct look and excellent full-sun readability.

A hypothetical nonbacklit high res grayscale LCD would have some similar properties and might be more viable at small scale; I know they're making basically that in small sizes for use in resin 3D printers.

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Yes, e-ink pricetags are one niche of e-ink devices. The other niche is e-readers (which are a luxury version of installing an e-reading app on your phone). Maybe the niche of solar-powered billboards (e.g. bus-stop signs) will also take off, but that's about it.

E-ink is great, but it is niche and basically everything that you can do with an EPD, you can do with an LCD. E-ink screens are in the at best tens of millions, whereas LCDs are in the billions per quarter - there are over 6 billion smartphone owners in the world already, and LCDs are in everything from supermarket self-checkout kiosks to laptops to smart fridges, they utterly demolish E-Ink in scale.

I love e-ink screens, but there's no denying the tech's business-case is rather marginal and that won't change anytime soon.

>A store with 5000 items each requiring a LCD pricetag would be constantly replacing little batteries

Errr, not really. LCD price tags existed before e-ink (and still do) and battery life was not much worse. It's something like 1.5x-2x tops, so enough to make business sense, but not orders of magnitudes earth shattering as one might assume.

In fact, most retail shops that have anything other than paper use LCD price tags. If they are making the switch is because they expect to be frequently updating them... and then any eInk battery life advantage evaporates.

> If they are making the switch is because they expect to be frequently updating them...

Not necessarily that. They're making the switch to digital price tags because it's much quicker and easier to run promos on certain items to clear the shelves before closing time on perishable goods, but most importantly, they're making the switch because when employee have to manually change paper price tags, mistakes happen far too often, and stores end up in situations where the price on the self doesn't match the price on the cash register, angering customers who in certain jurisdictions are entitled to compensation for the store's pricing mistake.

Digital price tags ensure such mistakes are gone saving the store money over time.

Digital wrist watches can go 10+ years on a single battery, and they typically have transistors switching at 32kHz (as opposed to price tags, which could be completely static until you press a button).

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