Get the Day's Headlines on an E Ink Newspaper

If you’re a millennial or gen Z’er, there is a good chance that you’ve only ever received your news from websites, social media, YouTube videos, and maybe the radio. While you have almost certainly seen some newspapers, you might not have looked closely enough to appreciate the design that goes into newspaper layouts. The website for your local paper has a fairly typical blog-style layout, with articles headlines and snippets arranged in neat, orderly grids. But physical newspapers have far more interesting layouts and there is artistry in that. Greg Raiz wanted a way to showcase the beauty of newspapers and used this gigantic E Ink display to achieve fantastic results.

E Ink screens are usually monochrome, while also having lower resolutions and far slower response times than LCDs. But they offer two really enticing advantages over other display technologies: they have amazing contrast and they are extremely efficient. The contrast is why these are sometimes called “e-paper” displays, because they are very readable, even in direct sunlight, like printed paper. E Ink displays also only require power when they’re actually being refreshed. If the image remains static, then an E Ink display will not consume any power at all and can continue showing that image indefinitely. Those qualities made E Ink technology perfect for Raiz’s project; he just needed to find the right display. Most E Ink displays are fairly small, but he wanted something big in order to really show off newspapers.

The E Ink display that Raiz chose was a Visionect Place & Play 32”, which costs a whopping $2,576. That’s a hefty price to pay when you can buy a 32” LCD TV for a couple hundred dollars, but the results speak for themselves. The Visionect E Ink display was mounted directly onto Raiz’s wall and didn’t require any additional hardware, because it has a built-in controller with WiFi connectivity and a rechargeable battery in the case that is good for weeks between charges. The display doesn’t need any wires at all and is able to pull new content from a server over WiFi. That content can be any still image or text, but Raiz is primarily showing particularly beautiful newspaper pages. It can cycle through many newspapers and the E Ink technology makes them look like real pages mounted in a picture frame. This is a really expensive way to showcase art and isn’t a project that many of us could afford, but it is fantastic way to appreciate the beauty of traditional newspaper layouts.