Kindle 1 D00111

[nar001]

So, having had one of these in my possession I'm now curious, is there any tweaks or jailbreaks for these? I couldn't find anything, it seems to only be Kindle 2 and up. Thanks!

[Frogm4n]

The thing is 17 years old. It can't do a lot, and the wireless system is used is offline in most places, and likely to soon go offline in the places where it hasn't yet. You can load MOBI over USB and read those and that's about it.

[j.p.s]

It's my understanding that they have an external SD card slot, so there's that.

[nar001]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

The thing is 17 years old. It can't do a lot, and the wireless system is used is offline in most places, and likely to soon go offline in the places where it hasn't yet. You can load MOBI over USB and read those and that's about it.

Yeah I saw MOBI worked, I was just surprised every hack seemed to only target K2 and up!

And it does have a SD card slot, it's pretty neat, too bad they never did it again

[Quoth]

Because there was so little internal storage and an SD slot is about 50c.
Flash was expensive then.

Likely it's not worth replacing the battery (original release was 2007). It will soon be a museum item. It's one of only 4 Kindles that can't do the far better azw3.

No proper Greek (just enough for maths), no R to L languages, no Cyrillic. Only one each of Serif, sans and monospace. No embedded or user fonts.

Only Viziplex eink.

That mobi is a subset of HTML3, no CSS, no user fonts, no embedded fonts and was obsolete in 2005 when Amazon bought Mobipocket.

The Kindle 3 (Keyboard) is first decent Kindle as not only has it Pearl screen but later got an update to azw3/kf8 (based on HTML5 + CSS3) and then supported embedded fonts etc.

The Kindle 1, 2, DX and DXG are really poor compared to Sony of same age and the DXG only updated the screen, not RAM etc, so though it came out the same time as K3, it can't upgrade to azw3.

[nar001]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Because there was so little internal storage and an SD slot is about 50c.
Flash was expensive then.

Likely it's not worth replacing the battery (original release was 2007). It will soon be a museum item. It's one of only 4 Kindles that can't do the far better azw3.

No proper Greek (just enough for maths), no R to L languages, no Cyrillic. Only one each of Serif, sans and monospace. No embedded or user fonts.

Only Viziplex eink.

That mobi is a subset of HTML3, no CSS, no user fonts, no embedded fonts and was obsolete in 2005 when Amazon bought Mobipocket.

The Kindle 3 (Keyboard) is first decent Kindle as not only has it Pearl screen but later got an update to azw3/kf8 (based on HTML5 + CSS3) and then supported embedded fonts etc.

The Kindle 1, 2, DX and DXG are really poor compared to Sony of same age and the DXG only updated the screen, not RAM etc, so though it came out the same time as K3, it can't upgrade to azw3.

What's the difference between the Viziplex Eink and pearl ones?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by nar001

What's the difference between the Viziplex Eink and pearl ones?

Dramatic.
Original Viziplex is very very grey and only four levels, black, dark grey, mid grey and light grey.

Pearl has black, 14 grey levels and nearly white. Without touch or light pipe layer it's nearly as bright as Carta with added capacitive touch and light pipe. Pearl with touch often used IR as that needs no extra screen layers. Capacitive touch has transparent metallic layers which reduce brightness and contrast.
Carta then has higher resolution (up to 300 dpi rather than 167 dpi of 6″ pearl, but the 5″ viziplex and pearl may be 200 dpi) and brighter. The DX (Viziplex) and DXG (Pearl) are 9.7″ and only 150 dpi. Carta also has regal mode which is a faster update for only black and white, and unless there is grey scale image, there is less ghosting. Any grey scale (or colour) image or text on a page results in a slower full page update.

Then Carta 1200 might be integration of capacitive touch rather than a separate panel, which slightly improves brightness and contrast.

Carta 1300 is a further slight improvement.

Spectra is adding red or yellow balls. The earliest eink had a milky white liquid and multiple black balls per cell. The balls either stick to the front (black) or rear (white). Later eink added white balls (Pearl?) and then had much brighter white. The rear is partially mirrored, but you can make out a poor negative image.

Triton simply added R G B stripes to the mono panel like and LCD, but unlike LCD the mono pixels are still square (colour LCD uses slightly less than 1/3 width pixels), so at 167 dpi the horizontal resolution was only 55.7 dpi! Also very dark as the light is attenuated twice unlike LCD which is backlit.

Meanwhile higher resolution LCDs (mono panels) and OLED (which have phosphors and filters as they are not real LEDs) used a 2 x 2 CFA (Colour filter Array) and square pixels. So Eink Corp did a version with more space between the CFA printed dots laid out 2 x 2.
R G
G B
This is Kaleido.
That meant a 227 dpi panel was 113.5 dpi and 300 dpi gave 150 dpi and it was much brighter than Triton. Also you could "pretend" it was mono for a degraded full resolution with artefacts because part of the mono pixel is exposed. It means only pastel colours (washed out) and tertiary colours are poor, darker ones are murky and paler ones are white or grey. Also still too dark for indoor ambient light without the frontlight. Carta1300 mono panels give the "best" yet Kaleido, but still very poor and makes mono almost as poor as Viziplex.

ACeP is a totally different eink technology using Cyan, Yellow, Magenta in the cells subtractively. With none you have white. With all three layers you have black. It's slightly more than 10x as many shades as Kaleido or Triton (as they use 16 levels only givineg 4000+ shades), but still poor compared to LCD, OLED etc and though nearly a decade old, still x10 slower than regular eink (or worse), which is already about 100x slower than anything else.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Quoth

ACeP is a totally different eink technology using Cyan, Yellow, Magenta in the cells subtractively. With none you have white. With all three layers you have black. It's slightly more than 10x as many shades as Kaleido or Triton (as they use 16 levels only givineg 4000+ shades), but still poor compared to LCD, OLED etc and though nearly a decade old, still x10 slower than regular eink (or worse), which is already about 100x slower than anything else.

Minor nit is that ACeP uses 4 colours of particle (cyan, magenta, yellow and white) in each cell.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Minor nit is that ACeP uses 4 colours of particle (cyan, magenta, yellow and white) in each cell.

Theoretically the white isn't needed, as per the earliest eink. They added white balls later.

However, the point is that it's been around for years and while holds promise for brightness and more colours and resolution, they have a problem unsolved for nearly a decade of slowness.

I think ACeP is doomed. The video displays are winning in retail. I was surprised yesterday to see a very large square one that looked suspiciously like either very small true LEDs or large OLED. Very bright for OLED. Also our supermarket now has video screens to suit just above a shelf with about 4:1 or 5:1 aspect video. Two are entire shelf length. About 20cm tall.

I think the only future for eink is price labels and mono eink readers. More cheaper mono readers in 5", 9" and 12" as well as 6" to 10" are needed. Too few sizes and too expensive. I had a paper-like CRT 20 years ago. Finally tablet & phone makers are producing true zero glare/shine panels that have been possible for decades.

A no glare/zero shine paper-like CRT I had in 2004 and it wasn't new then. Scanned flim.

Raw version

Only cropped from original photo.

Mitsubishi