Pimoroni's Inky Impression Is a 5.7" Seven-Color E Ink Display for the Raspberry Pi and Compatibles

A big jump from the company's earlier three-color displays, the Inky Impression is great for art — though comes with a slow refresh time.

Gareth Halfacree
3 years agoDisplays

Pimoroni has launched a new display add-on for the Raspberry Pi and compatible single-board computers, and this one comes with a twist: It's a 5.7" E Ink screen offering seven colors in total — a major step up from the usual tri-color ePaper panels.

"Inky Impression is a big, beautiful, 5.7in, 600 x 448 pixel 7-color electronic paper display for Raspberry Pi," the company explains. "The low power consumption e-paper display is crisp and readable in bright sunlight and the image will persist when unpowered. In a first for the Inky series, we've also added four tactile buttons on the back, so you can control what's on the screen without the need for extra hardware."

"But the best bit is that this time you get seven whole colors to play with, which means this Inky is very suitable for displaying graphics, drawings or art — we've found pixel art, panels from comics and retro video game art look particularly good."

Building on the company's earlier Inky wHAT and Inky pHAT three-color display add-ons, the Inky Impression has enough colors for a convincing display of artwork — if not quite photo-realistic. Based on an E Ink Gallery Palette 4000 panel, the display offers black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, and orange — though color fidelity is muted when refreshed at low temperatures, the company warns.

Another caveat is the display's refresh time. While E Ink and other electrophoretic display panels have never been particularly snappy, the Inky Impression needs to cycle through each color as it updates — meaning that it takes a full 15 seconds to perform a refresh, making it best suited to display projects which update intermittently.

The Inky Impression is now available on the Pimoroni store for £66 (around $73). A Python library is provided for text and image display.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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