It's a real Android tablet with all the normal annoying aspects of Android, though TCL (who always made Alcatel phones and also now 'rent' the Nokia brand) had tried hard
It's genuinely an effort to have an LCD screen suitable for reading.
I'll do a review later*, but with most of the screen enhancing defaults turned off it's very good. In a brightly lit indoors at 25% approx brightness the screen is very like paper with Pocketbook displaying an ordinary novel.
I do find my TVs also give a better picture with all the enhancements turned off. Unlike most Android tablets there are many TV/Monitor like settings. A quick photo of part of my desk looked almost like viewing part of my desk when I set that to the background.
The 10.9″ 223 dpi (approx) NxtPaper 11 is better for mono text PDFs than the 10.3″ 227 dpi Kobo Elipsa in terms of appearance / sharpness and size. Antialiasing is far better when you have 254 shades of grey vs eink 14 greys (excluding black of text and white of background). I'll examine later to see if there is subpixel addressing and if the colour is RGB stripes or a 2 x 2 cell.
I wrote earlier:
Quote:
Eye strain issues from worst to least- Reflections. Cause eye to refocus unconsciously especially if the reflected things are moving. Severe and causes headaches. Caused by shiny screen and worse if things behind you are brightly lit.
- Glare. Make it challenging to read and can cause headaches or migrane if very bright.
- Too bright. Often people have a screen too bright indoors. Brightness & contrast settings.
- Bright light near front of screen, such as laptop on desk at south window. Pull the brinds/curtains or put desk at right angles.
- Too small print. Exhausting and reduces reading speed, may or may not cause eye-strain or headaches.
- Poor contrast (early four shade eink). Similar to too small print.
- Poor print / low resolution. Reduces reading speed
- Light too blue. Not an issue if not too bright. It may or may not disrupt sleep, the evidence is unclear. May be unpleasant but of brightness, resolution, glare, reflection are OK, it might not create eye-strain
Excessive UV light can damage the eyes, but no display has that. Don't stare at insect traps and wear sunglasses when UV index is high, especially in snow, up a mountain, at sea or on the beach.
More laptops had non-glare screens twenty years ago, but a shiny screen is much cheaper and looks better in the showroom.
Many eink use a PET (polyester/Mylar) top layer that is micro textured to reduce reflections. Phones, tablets, monitors and TVs usually have a glass top layer and that has to be expensively micro-etched (coatings are possible but no use on phones or tablets as they'll rub off). Watches and some phones have sapphire which is much more scratch resistant than glass (only diamond and a couple of other things are harder), but I doubt if sapphire is easily made non-reflective.
Reflections on shiny glass is the biggest cause of eye-strain, followed by glare.
There are subtle advantages in using only ambient light for a screen, but eink loses these if you have to use the front light, which is the same LED lighting as LCD backlights, especially needed for color eink
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[* Only arrived this morning.]