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Comment by bigfudge | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be interesting to hear from an insider (with examples/evidence etc) what the mechanism is for eink to be more expensive. I/e/ the fundamentals for why this is the case beyond economies of scale. Given this history of the patent it looks to the outsider like this probably isn't the case and short sighted rent seeking is the problem. Would love to be wrong though, so if you do have a good explanation then here would be a great place to air it. I've not seen anything elsewhere...

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I’m sure the ad-driven subsidy on TVs plays a huge part. TV prices have declined as “dumb” TVs have been phased out of the market. A more niche tool like a large e-ink display might not make as much sense from to price this way since ad systems need large networks of users to be relevant.

people underestimate how long e-ink stagnated: it seems hard to imagine an alternate timeline where e-ink had taken the place of current LED outdoor billboards for example... until you realize we were decades away from LEDs being cheap and robust enough for outdoor signage when eInk was already fundamentally similar enough the tech we have now

The company that owned the e-ink patents couldn't scale properly until they were acquired around 2010: in an alternate timeline where development open enough in the early 2000s, we might have ended up with eInk display modules large enough to be assembled into incrementally larger and more profit driving devices

Even now you see that with eInk store tags for example: imagine if the profit they're driving now had arrived 20 years ago and gotten re-invested

I remember seeing e-ink price tags at Kohls (American department store) as early as 2004-2005.

You probably saw the LCD based price tags which have been around for ages: https://www.fixturescloseup.com/2020/10/29/kohls-sloped-digi...

That said e-ink price tags aren't new, them being stupidly cheap (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804488587338.html) and increasingly wide spread in availability is the relatively new part.

Those outdoor LED billboards can burn in hell. They are distracting when driving and are awful when a pedestrian.

If I knew an easy way to disable them, I’d be doing it.

As a check against this, I looked for 42" computer monitors, which don't display ads. There are $600 4k 42" monitors in stock at CDW, for example. The same size 4k SmartTVs are about $300. So, yes... there appears to be about a 50% discount for TVs vs Computer Displays, part of which could be a subsidy, most of which I suspect is volume driving down the cost of production.

Double check the refresh rate, input latency, and color gamut for your comparisons. Computer monitor user concerns are quite different than tv screen users.

TVs also spy on you. That data offsets some of the cost. They also often have lots of other compromises, from chroma subsampling to overscanning, that make them unsuitable as computer monitors.

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