DynaScan Confirms Plans To Demo 75-Inch Color E-Paper Ad Totem At ISE

January 22, 2025 by Dave Haynes

Taiwan display manufacturer DynaScan has confirmed it is adding a large-format e-paper display to a product line-up that has been dominated by high-brightness LCD display totems for digital out of home advertising.

When I was in Taiwan in late October, and had a tour of DynaScan’s impressive headquarters and production facility, the company hinted it was intending to have a display developed in collaboration with E Ink, also for Taiwan, at ISE next week.

Now it has an ISE promo page that includes how: DynaScan is redefining digital signage with the debut of its new range of ePaper displays, including the groundbreaking 75-inch color ePaper display powered by E Ink Kaleido 3 Outdoor.

Fully integrated with DK Series kiosks, this innovative display combines exceptional energy efficiency with stunning image quality, redefining outdoor digital signage with its unique size and performance.

If you have been paying attention to e-paper tech, you may already know that the two core color products are Kaleido and Spectra, with Kaleido using a color filter while Spectra directly displays the colors and shows, as a result, much more saturated colors, as well as more of them. As with other e-paper displays, these ones  support static images, not video.

The visual performance tradeoff for using color e paper instead of high bright LCDs is energy consumption. Conventional LCDs used outdoors, in direct sunlight, need extra-bright 3,000+ nits backlighting to overcome glare, as well as sophisticated engineering to exhaust the heat that builds up from the sun and the backlighting. That requires a lot of power, whereas e-paper displays only use power in daylight when an image changes, and need a minor amount of power to illuminate the e-paper display at night.

Because of high cost – I dunno the price tag on this one, but lots and lots – this is likely much more a demon of what’s possible and coming down the road. The color performance would probably be fine for municipalities using it for maps and directories, but brands sensitive about things like color accuracy and saturation are not going to be happy with what the current generation of Kaleido can do. If the Spectra line can be used outdoors, and unit costs are not equivalent to the GDP of Belgium,  that’s when this might start to see a lot of adoption. Video support is not really an adoption barrier for sidewalk totem displays among most media companies.

Another smaller, specialized display firm from Taiwan, Agile Displays Solutions, will also have a large format E Ink-based color display at ISE. Toronto-based Praevar is also developing a color e-paper ad totem.