A Review of the Reterminal E1004 13.3″ Full-Color Epaper Display

I’ve had the following thing on my wall since 2020: It’s fun because it’s an epaper frame that runs on battery — so I can have it conspicuously displayed on a wall without any wires leading to it. Mysterious! Enigmatic! And it just displays the temperature and the currently playing album. It’s fine, but it’s a bit small (I gotta put on my correct glasses to see what the temperature is)… and the firmware isn’t unproblematic: Out of every twenty times it wakes up and fetches a new image, it goes to “can’t find wifi”, which is just kinda annoying. But then, last week, I read of a new generation of epaper devices with brilliant colours and neat features. Wow! Bigger! Better! Gotta have it! And yesterday it arrived. After flashing it with the ESP32 PhotoFrame firmware (from a web page! I had no idea that you could do USB flashing via web pages, but apparently there’s something called “The Web Serial API” that does that? Chrome only, of course. kids these days), and a session with Claude…