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By Cheryl Lindo Jones in Picture a Day —

picture a day: may 15

Monochrome picture of a cat sitting on the floor in a sunlight/shadow pattern made by an abstract flower design of a screen door, a banana-shaped cat toy at his feet
My cat Pixel, 2025, taken with an Onyx BOOX Palma/iPhone 16 Pro Max (explanation below)

I have an Onyx BOOX Palma, a phone-sized e-ink device running Android. I loaded Open Camera onto it for when I want to try taking pictures with it. I wish that the output were the way the e-ink screen appears, like in the image above. But it's not; it's a low-quality color image that you'd expect a cheap phone to take.

I edited the actual photo from the Palma in Retrospecs to try to approximate an e-ink display, but it doesn't have such a mode. This edit looked interesting, though:

Same image of the cat as described above, but with an old computer, low-res look composed of white, gray, dark gray, light brick red, dark brick red, and black pixels making up the picture.
Retrospecs edit of the above image

I could've posted the Retrospecs edit, but I decided to take a picture of the Palma's screen with my iPhone and do a little bit of perspective and white balance editing to better represent how it looks on the Palma.

I suppose I could feed Palma pictures (and any other digital pictures I take) to my thermal printer camera, print them out, and scan those printouts to approximate the first image at the top (a future project idea).

Anyway, all this to say that I wish there were a camera app I could use on the Palma that would output the image as I see it on the Palma's e-ink screen, kinda similar to BitCam on iOS, but not quite. I'm not aware of an Android camera app that would output in monochrome 8-bit or 16-bit (?), but I should search.

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picture a day: may 14

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