There are numerous companies big and smallish showing color e-paper displays at ISE this week – everything from previously seen variations of E Ink’s Spectra 6 to DOOH street furniture-sized 75-inchers that use E Ink’s Kaleido 3, which has quite limited color support and a filter that doesn’t allow anywhere near the saturation of Spectra 6.

I mention this because Taiwan’s Dynascan, a major player in high bright outdoor ad displays, has an interesting set-up at its stand that has three street furniture ad totems side by side. Same enclosures and dimensions.

One with high bright LCD.

One with direct view LED.

One with Kaleido 3 e-paper.

So you could see what they look like in what amounts to a product shootout, by one company.

If I was smarter, I would have grabbed a shot of all three in one frame. But I wanted to get each on its own, from head-on. Fortunately, Dynascan had someone with a real camera (or a working brain) to shoot that wide shot (see top photo).

High-bright looks far superior. LED looks much better than what my camera did. The banding or whatever you call that in the photo is not evident in real life, but DV LED does not look as good as LCD. The e-paper is OKish – not something image-sensitive brands would OK, but workable for things like directories. Color is the issue, and price. It would cost a freaking fortune.

E-paper will get better. E Ink’s CTO said this week big advances were coming for Q4 2025. And he also expects prices will come down with time to 1.5X-2X of LCD. Given power savings and upfront infrastructure costs, and thinking lifetime TCO, that would be workable.

So I’d say color e-paper is something to watch, but we’re still in future tech mode for projects that are more than proofs of concept or based heavily on demonstrating sustainability.