The DaVinci Electric Guitar Is a Chameleon That Can Change Colors

I am decidedly old-school when it comes to guitars: vacuum-tube amps, alnico pickups, and traditional bodies made of alder, swamp ash, or mahogany. None of the technology in my setup at home, from guitar to amp to pedals, would confound a guitar technician from the 1970s or look out of place on the album of a classic rock band.
Cream Guitars’ DaVinci is one of the very few modern guitars that make me do a double-take. I’ve spent 22 years drooling over guitars, mostly electrics, and have never before seen a guitar that can change its color and pattern with the push of a button.
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The Davinci Electric Is an E Ink Guitar
Expecting a gimmick, I scanned the specs sheet for aspects that might interfere with a guitar’s primary purpose—to sound good—but found nothing that suggests its visual trickery would make it all show, no go. It’s a real electric guitar, all right.
Cream Guitars goes to great lengths to point out that there is no AI and no screen on the DaVinci. Its color-changing abilities come from E Ink embedded throughout the guitar’s body. E Ink, as you see in Amazon Kindles, is actual ink that responds to electronic stimulation. I put together a whole explainer on what it actually is.
You connect your phone to the DaVinci via Bluetooth and adjust the color and pattern through an app. I’ve noticed that, of all the sample photographs of color schemes shown on DaVinci’s product page, there are only variations on a mostly solid color and a diamond-checkerboard pattern.
It doesn’t appear, at least from these early photographs, that there are other patterns available, although you can change the colors of the pattern.
There doesn’t appear to be a pick guard to protect the paint from wild swipes of the guitarist’s pick, as has been common on most electric guitars since their beginning. There’s an illusion of one, but judging from how it changes colors in photographs of some of Da Vinci’s various color schemes, it seems to be a cosmetic effect in the E Ink.
Cream says the first batch consists of 100 DaVincis. Shipping of those initial pre-orders doesn’t happen until July 2026, so if you want one now, you have to put 50 percent of the $2,500 price down now, with the remainder charged next July.
Who knows how long the introductory $2,500 price will remain? Cream puts the retail price at $3,500. There are several unknowns left up in the air. After this first batch of 100, when will the next batch come out? Will there be another batch to go on pre-order before the launch date in July 2026, or are these 100 all we get until then?
All we know is that, as of publication, 85 units remain from the original batch of 100.