[Someone]

LCDs aren’t cheap as paper by a wide margin. Wallpaper is, say, $20 a square meter, and is free once glued to a wall.

Also, imagine putting high-dpi full-colour displays on all your walls and ceilings, so that one can change wallpaper at the flick of a button, or place ‘paintings’ wherever one wants.

Backlit LCDs would lead to uncomfortable living; rooms would be warm, there would barely be any shade in the room, and power costs (even if solar cells are cheap as paper) would probably be high.

e-ink wins on the power usage front, and is reflective, rather than backlit.

[sandworm101]

>> Also, imagine putting high-dpi full-colour displays on all your walls and ceilings, so that one can change wallpaper at the flick of a button, or place ‘paintings’ wherever one wants.

No. Not going to happen. The wall, the plain white-ish surface, has been a thing for thousands of years. I own a nearly infinite number of nails, glues and other fasteners to affix thing to my white walls yet change the appearance of my walls ... well basically never. It would be moderately cool to see a wall capable of HD television, but the physics of ever doing, in comparison to a dedicated device, will never be practical. There will always be a place for paint.

[RhodesianHunter]

“The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.”

I for one would love having every inch of my interior walls e-ink, changeable on a whim, and would likely pay $1 to download a new wallpaper/design on a regular basis.

[pferde]

Such products would be online-only, DRM-bound, with gaping security holes for any two-bit hacker on the other side of the planet who wants to change all your wallpapers to goatse. I'll pass.

[majewsky]

Yeah, it's a shame that we only have the Internet of Shit right now. But it's not baked in the technology. You can have secure IoT devices with custom builds, so I'm sure that there will be secure e-ink wallpapers (although maybe not on the mass market).