Slash energy costs in your digital signage application: E Ink’s Spectra 6 display at the ipXchange office

In our first in-office product demo with an ipXchange partner, our good friend Shaun O'Brien from Ineltek Ltd burst through the door with an e-paper innovation that still has him wowed after first seeing it at Touch Taiwan in April. He was right to be amazed.?

The Spectra 6 display by E Ink Corporation , a world leader in EPDs (ElectroPhoretic Displays), pushes the boundaries of e-paper/e-ink technology to provide vivid full-colour images that rival the picture quality of LCD and OLED displays. Thanks to 6 layers of coloured e-ink – red, yellow, green, blue, black, and white – which are pulled into place by electric fields and dithered to create the full image, the Spectra 6 truly looks like a printed poster: the viewing angle is as wide as can be imagined, and the reflective behaviour of the display could not be further from a screen as there is no light source within – it looks it’s best in bright sunlight!?

What’s more, power is only required to change the display; an image on the screen will remain indefinitely when power is removed. In fact, when Eamon first saw the Spectra 6 with no cables attached, he was unsure whether it was just a poster in a frame, until he saw the image change, and that’s the idea.?

Employing the same technology that is used in many electronic shelf labels and e-readers, Shaun’s 25.3-inch Spectra 6 example provides a perfect solution for digital signage in applications that require regularly updated images, such as in retail, transport, and cinemas, to name just a few examples.?

Better yet, when compared to LCD or OLED screens used in a similar way, the Spectra 6 uses a vanishingly small amount of power, simply to change the ‘poster’ image once an hour, once a day, once a month, or however often you need to update it. Tell that to your bosses if there’s a green initiative where you work!?

Which leads us to the elephant in the room. You will notice that the full-image refresh rate of the Spectra 6 is around 12 seconds, making it unsuitable for displaying video content. That said, this is much faster than competing full-colour e-paper displays, which can take over 30 seconds to refresh the full image. We can therefore see that the Spectra 6 is not going to compete with an LCD or OLED for video advertising, but if you’re thinking about that, you may have missed the energy-saving point entirely.?

In any situation where you need to hold an image for a long time, just like a poster, E Ink’s Spectra 6 will either save you from wasting energy while burning an image into a screen until it’s unusable, or it’ll save you having to manually change posters or shelf labels printed on regular paper. While previous e-paper technologies may have looked like e-paper, we’re not sure the same can be said about this one, so learn more and apply to evaluate the technology by following the link to the board.

Keep designing!

To see Spectra 6 in action, watch the product demo here.

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