I'm starting to see tiny e-ink displays sticking out of shelves with prices on them. Mostly sale items..  Not a lot, but its starting. 

Kohls has been using LCD on their shelves for a while now . Ahead of the curve.

I guess large LCDs are changing things quite a bit. 

I noticed that the slots and poker machines are all basically using curved LCDs in Portrait mode, now. They're just really big Samsung CHG-90 curved gaming LCDs. 

Mon Apr 26 2021 10:51:00 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I've given the example before - until the mid 90s local grocers were
hand inking their "Weekly specials" on butcher paper. Now, they use
DTP and large format printers to print out slick, high gloss specials

That's so OLD FASHIONED.

Large format printers for in-store display copy was a thing for a very brief period of time.

Now they just put big screens up behind the counters. So there's another place where hardcopy is dead.

The *appearance* of fairness. Isn't that how Vegas always rolled?

Wed Sep 06 2023 10:45:50 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I noticed that the slots and poker machines are all basically using
curved LCDs in Portrait mode, now. They're just really big Samsung
CHG-90 curved gaming LCDs. 

I noticed that when I was in Las Vegas last year. It seems ... less "real".
Like you're not really interacting with a real slot machine, you're just "on a computer".

And yes, I know that even with the mechanical machines, the outcome of each play has been selected by a computer the moment you pull the handle, for a long time now. But at least it had the feel of a real machine.

Oh yea.  CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) brought IPP (Internet Print Protocol).  Then Apple acquired the CUPS project, it's a core component of all Apple's opurrating systems.  Combined with Generic PostScript and IPP's capability discovery, you have a small set of standards that work everywhere.

Oh, and a lot of meowdern printers still support LPD (Line Printing Daemon), so even older *nix platforms can use meowdern printers, like my SGI Indy sending print jobs to our HP LaserJet Pro MFP M277dw.

Mon Oct 16 2023 23:24:46 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

DTP uses printers.

I finally retired my venerable 25 year old HP LaserJet 5, even though it still produces good quality copy and most of the time it doesn't jam. My wife brought home a Brother HL-L2350DW that was about to become surplus, so I replaced the HP in our home office.

And it made me realize just how out-of-touch I am with technology that doesn't go into a data center.

* Driverless printing? WTF? When did THAT happen? The industry actually got together on a couple of standardized raster formats and discovery protocols and now you can print without installing drivers? All I did was tell this printer about my WiFi network and then when I brought up the "printer settings" window in Linux, it just said "oh, there's a printer here, is this the one you want?" Yes, I answered, expecting to do the dance. "Ok it's done!"
Geez.

(Windoze was a bit more fussy, but it found the printer eventually, and needed no driver either.)

* This is apparently a $150 laser printer. Somehow, through some weird miracle, we managed to get to the point where you can get an inexpensive printer that doesn't use ink (or in this case, toner) marked up to sell-a-kidney prices.
I really didn't know that this happened and I assumed they were still gouging, that you had to either spend megabucks on a printer or on consumables.


I think I'd better keep the HP in storage because this seems too ideal to be true.

The last brother i had, ( admittedly a while ago ) only worked with something like windows 7.  And that was it.  I got it second hand for almost nothing, but burnt me and tainted my opinion about brother. 

I still have a 1018.    We hardly ever print.  Just the occasional return label, or documents that have to be *physically* signed and mailed back. ( idiots this is 2023.... )

Mon Oct 16 2023 23:24:46 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

DTP uses printers.

I finally retired my venerable 25 year old HP LaserJet 5, even though it still produces good quality copy and most of the time it doesn't jam. My wife brought home a Brother HL-L2350DW that was about to become surplus, so I replaced the HP in our home office.

Did you mean: second paw

Tue Oct 17 2023 07:06:51 EDT from Nurb432

I got it second hand for almost nothing, but burnt me and tainted my opinion about brother.

Oops, my bad.

Wed Oct 18 2023 13:05:07 EDT from LadySerenaKitty

Did you mean: second paw

 

Of course.  It is a pawprint-er.

So far so good on this one.  According to its internal counter it only has 468 pages on it, which is not a lot.  It will get more than that now that it's here.  I print sheet music to take to band practice with me.  My wife and kids print all sorts of whatever.  But the "print this to keep it" days are over.

*cough* e-ink *cough*

Wed Oct 18 2023 14:07:53 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

 I print sheet music to take to band practice with me.  

The better e-ink devices lets you take notes too.  Id not go with a tablet, hard to see during a show, and poor battery.  But ink would last weeks with daily use, and its almost the same as reading a piece of paper.  And you can store more with less bulk.  Id stay away from color however, at least the last couple of generations i have are not quite 'there' yet, in my opinion.  Not tried gen 3 yet however. 

My uncle is still a professional musician, and i finally got him to change, he said he wishes he had listened to me earlier...

Wed Oct 18 2023 18:38:15 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I like to have my music on a music stand and a pencil there to scribble performance notes on it. We do a lot of last minute changes. There is a "Music Stand" app that you can run on a tablet. But I don't have a tablet and I like to scribble notes.

Might be a little costly, but you can get ink over 13" so size isn't a problem ( that is what she said? ).   And all the better ones you can use a stylus, and most apps i have seen let you annotate. Not just 'a note taking app'    They all have front lights now ( not backlight, its different tech )  so its just like having a light over your book. Some are adjustable color as well.  

If you can borrow one from someone for a evening just to prop up beside you ( even if its small, you at least get the readability angle to review ) i think you will find you like it. If you were closer id let you use my 10" that i use for 'tech manuals'.  My 8. inch is great for novels, and daily use, but just too small for manuals. End up zooming all the time and its a pain.

Yes im a huge fan of them. even if in a way it pissed me off when i first realized what they were. I was trying to make something like that in the 80s...  Sort of did and made numbers and shapes on the glass... But was just a kid with some wacky idea, so that is where it stopped: A garage project. When they first came out commercially i thought they were a marketing gimmick, much like 'e-paper' is .. re-branding of LCD tech. But no.  Ink really is not.

Many do run android under the hood, so you have that list of apps to chose from.  Avoid the proprietary OS's since you want to do more than just read books and take 'regular' notes. Those work for me and most people that just want to read, but clearly not your use-case.  The uncle, just exports his sheets from his PC to PDF for when he is on stage.  Does not need to make notes and such on them but the PDF viewer would let him..

And agreed on scanning via phone.  Sounds painful.  I got a couple of those 'wand' scanners that has a removable feeder base. Easy to scan 9" wide or smaller ( like photos ) with the feeder, but if you need something bigger, pop it off the base and run the wand across.. And does not take up hardly any space, unlike a classic flatbed. Oh, and is battery powered .. 

Thu Oct 19 2023 09:27:54 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I wouldn't want to use my phone if I had a large volume of scanning to do.
It's too cumbersome for anything other than a couple of pages now and then.
But for an occasional scan, the right app (CamScanner) in good light on a table darker than the page being scanned, produces acceptable output.

On the music side, if I did have an electronic device I'd want it to be a "real" tablet with full size pages, and the app would have to accept hand drawn annotations. E-Ink would be pointless, as I already need a light to read the pages, so a self-illuminating screen is what I would want.

One more thing about scanning with a smartphone app.

I just took a scan of my whiteboard.  The app found the edges of the board, squared it off, and reduced the color space to primary colors over a white background.

Try that with a flatbed.