Photo-Epaper

I put colour photos on electronic paper,
as good as possble, and good enough.

E-paper displays use no energy, except a tiny bit when changing their image.

Advantages of my system:

More accurate colours. Thus making portraits practical, with skin tones.
Less grainy. Thus making images smoother, where originals are smooth.
Sharper. The photos on epaper can look a little bit sharper than the epaper itself.
Current conversion speed: 0.8 seconds on a modern 16 core server. 15 seconds on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Video here.

You may contact me if interested in this service.
kim.oyhus@gmail.com
Kim Øyhus, M.Sc. Physics.

The display I use here is the "800 x 480 7-color ACeP Display" from
Eink.com which I bought from Waveshare.com and Pimoroni.com

Photos of photos on electronic paper

Model Iben

Artistic model Vilde wears no makeup

These photos are real, not manipulated. Lighting is from the side and the camera is against a dark background. At the left is an 18% grey reference for correct white balance and exposure.

Images were written to the e-paper at 20-25°C (68-77°F) where the e-paper seems to give best colours. Colder, and the colours become greyer. Hotter, and they just become weird. I can calibrate images to other temperatures.

A car exhibition on a sunny day.

Cat. The images tend to become a little sharper than the e-paper itself with my process.

My process was quite hard to make, involving physics and heavy math.

First, I get the original photo. It should be quite bright, without highlights, as the e-paper has low dynamic range. The e-papers white is somewhat dark, and its black is somewhat grey. The same goes for the colours, which are somewhat dull, but fine if the original photo does not use too bright colours. This is fairly new technology, and my process for putting photos on e-paper is new as of autumn 2023.

Then I translate the photo into a .BMP image to be transferred to the e-paper. The translation uses heavy math, and some physics. This .BMP image looks somewhat psychedelic. And finally a python program puts the image onto the e-paper. Best if the temperature is around 23°C (73°F) then. But it can be different after that.

And then it looks like a paper photo.

Documentation on how to use this e-paper and python programs can be found on Waveshare.com and Pimoroni.com
(Pimoroni requires "Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) Full" released 2023-05-03 )
My .BMP demo pictures for the e-paper can be found here.

The palette of the e-paper. These are the most extreme colours the e-paper can show. They are a little dull, but good enough for most colour photos in practice.

These detergents show shades of white. Some graininess can be seen close-up. The image on the e-paper is a little bit sharper than the e-paper itself.