Every year, the world’s tech companies descend on Las Vegas for the CES trade show. Everybody from huge companies, like Honda and Samsung, to mom-and-pop inventors, like Stu Pickles, throw their ideas at the public wall to see what sticks.
Most of it is a solution in search of a problem, or more accurately, a market. Some of it is useless, yet lovable. But it’s the rare gem that something is novel, solves a real issue, and could actually be purchased for a normal-looking home by someone who isn’t a supervillain living in an active volcano.
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One such revelation at this year’s conference: The InkPoster. It’s basically, a big, color Kindle for your wall. Not for reading, though. Its e-ink display is for displaying art that looks more like real ink on real paper and less like the overly bright, glowing LCD screens on TVs, laptops, phones, and tablets. I’ve never cared that I could carry 500 books with me on a Kindle for a plane ride. But cycling through 500 (or however many you want) photographs and paintings within a single frame hanging over my television? Yeah, I could get down with that.
no wires, no worries
The idea would fall flat on its face if you had to plug the InkPoster in during use, especially if you had several of them on your walls. Instead, it’s wireless and battery powered. The display doesn’t use any power while it’s showing your chosen picture. It only uses energy when changing the picture. If you set it to update only rarely, you could get up to a year of charge before you have to recharge its internal battery via a USB-C cable.
PocketBook, the Swiss company that designed the InkPoster, has been building devices using ePaper technology for the past 17 years, lending some credibility that its display won’t fizzle out prematurely or make every image on it appear like you were looking through the bottom of a drinking glass at a child’s drawing.
Through the iOS or Android app, you can choose from thousands of images. There are the famous, classic paintings you’ve seen in art books, contemporary art, and retro images within InkPoster’s database. You can also display your own images from your device. Mount it either way. The images will display the right side up, no matter if you mount it vertically or horizontally.
Sizing it up
There are three sizes available: 13.3″ for $599, 28.5″ for $2,399, and 31.5″ for $1,699. But all three use the same, 6″ “screen “E Ink Spectra 6″ screen for displaying the art. The rest of the real estate is white space contained within the black aluminum frame. The two smaller frame sizes use a 3:4 aspect ratio, while the 31.5″ uses a 16:9 aspect ratio. The 31.5″ has a smaller area overall, even longer one side is a few inches longer than the 28.5”, partly accounting for the latter’s greater price. The other difference is image resolution.
Resolution improves with price. The 13.3″ offers 1200 x 1600 pixels, the 31.5″ offers 2560 x 1440 pixels, and the 28.5″ offers 2160 x 3060 pixels. The 28.5″ also “combines E Ink Spectra 6 and Sharp IGZO technology, and was developed by Sharp in collaboration with E Ink,” says a PocketBook press release. “The E Ink Spectra 6 ensures vivid full-color performance, while the IGZO backplane delivers even faster image updates.” You’ll be able to purchase an InkPoster in any of the three sizes in mid-spring of this year.
