Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
For some eInk is the only viable technology for reading. They can't read on a phone or a tablet because it hurts their eyes.
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Only if the brightness is set too high, or they have bright reflections. Nothing else.
The only people that can't read on a properly adjusted LCD held so there are no bright reflections can't read on eink either, or paper. Also people with Macular degeneration can't easily use eink, they need a high contrast 10″ or larger bright tablet and as it gets worse a bright 20″ to 60″ screen.
Some people have convinced themselves they can only read on eink, perhaps due to using too bright screens or shiny screens with bright reflections. There is no medical condition that makes eink better than a suitable LCD screen. It can be more pleasant to read on if the LCD is too shiny or too bright. Also many LCDs have poor viewing angle and the eink is more like paper on view angle and tends to have the anti-glare/anti-reflective more expensive surface treatment rare on LCD and OLED and CRT and Plasma screens (that is over 50 years old).
Also advantages of eink with the front light off (if it's bright, it's the same LED light as an LCD backlight) is the colour temperature of the white is matching the ambient light.
Phones and Tablets with bigger screens also used to have very poor battery life. They can now exceed eink when used for audiobooks and be long enough for reading. The eink cpu partially sleeps till you turn a page giving very good charge run time unless you are listening to audio, searching and page flicking continuously.
Advantages of decent mono eink (without front light) over cheap OLED/LCD - Long charge intervals (Phones can be as good or better on pure audio books)
- Superb viewing angles (OLED and LCD can be nearly as good)
- 300dpi (very crisp) as cheap LCD are less than 150dpi (decent ones can be as sharp), Old,cheap or colour eink is 150 dpi (large colour eink even less than 120 dpi)
- Colour temperature matches ambient
- No distractions on dedicated ereaders
- Better support for metadata (partially Amazon, especially Kobo) on dedicated readers
- Special anti-reflection surface finish (Nothing to do with eink and on some LCD/OLED), shiny is cheap.
Major disadvantages of eink- Frame rate about 20x slower than OLED/LCD
- Pixel change response time about 50x slower than OLED/LCD
- Not yet high enough resolution for colour (450dpi+ mono needed)
- Only black, white and about 14 grey levels vs 250 to 1000 levels, so anti-aliasing, photos and colour filter performance is poor.
- Essentially only one supplier vs many
- Very mature technology with tiny incremental improvements.
- Mechanical moving parts, but not at speed of MEMS based DLP as balls in a liquid are slow
- Animation, fast page turns and attempts at video is higher power consumption than QLED type LCD!
- AECP (CYM) is different 10x slower technology that may never suit ereaders. In contrast Quantum Dots on OLED and LCD is allowing more resolution, better colour, x6 brightness on LCD for full sunlight (or 1/6th power) and without slowing the display. At least three panel sources and already on TVs.
Yes, reading a novel is more pleasant on eink, but correctly adjusted and positioned LCD/OLED of decent quality (sufficient resolution, non-reflective screen, IPS or later for viewing angle etc) won't hurt or tire your eyes.