San Francisco

This is a mirror selfie from an intimidatingly large bathroom at San Francisco International Airport. It’s almost midnight and I’m half asleep waiting for my flight to Manila, where I’ll be visiting Chia.

In the coming month I’ll be traveling around the globe for a mix of work and leisure, and I’ve decided to bring eink.cam as my primary camera. Lots of questions on my mind – What does the world look like through a dithered 7-color display? Will the 30-second period it takes for the photo to show up on the eInk screen change the way I choose my subjects and frame my shots? Will I feel like less of a tourist when I can’t just mindlessly snap hundreds of pics at once?

The flight was delayed so I spent some time watching the plane prep. Flying Food Group is a really good name.

The number one question I get about the camera is whether I can take the photos out of it – if I can send them to my phone, or upload them somewhere to the cloud. Sometimes I like to say the point of eink.cam is that you shouldn’t be able to get the images as files. Just like with a polaroid, the eInk screen is what makes the picture. So if you want to show it to someone that’s not physically next to you, you’d have to take a picture of the screen itself.

For the first year of eink.cam development, that’s the only way I shared the images – I would take photos of my hand holding the camera. Or I would lay the screen down on a flatbed scanner and scan the image to capture all the little particles and imperfections from the ink.

Before they’re dithered on the display, the eink.cam photos are just regular jpegs. So for the sake of sharing them online more easily, I ended up writing a sort of “emulator,” which reproduces the color palette of the screen and the dithering. These faux-eInk images don’t look as nice on my phone as they do on the eInk display, but they have their own charm.