A major electronic ink company says its found a way to produce life-like color displays. The catch is that for now at least it’s more suited to signs than e-readers.

The news comes from E Ink, the company that first commercialized electronic ink and created the screens for several early e-reader models including some Kindles.

The company already produces color displays using a technology it calls Triton, though this is restricted to 4,096 colors. The new technology, Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP) has 32,000 colors. According to the company that enhanced spectrum is enough to make signs look just like a printed color page.

The old system worked in a similar way to television screens with separate pixels used for red, green and blue that are each either lit or unlit; other colors are simply an illusion created by a combination of colored pixels being close to one another. The new system lets each pixel act as multiple possible colors because each pixel houses multiple pigments.

ACeP has several limitations that stops it being useful for electronic reading devices however. It takes around two seconds to refresh, long enough to be irritating when turning a virtual page. It’s also restricted to 150 pixels per inch, half that of many electronic reader displays.

Instead the technology will initially be used for signs and other displays which need a realistic image with minimal energy consumption.