E-ink and other displays
Dec. 29th, 2020 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSince the new toy I've been reading books on is my first physical Kindle and my first e-ink device of any sort, much of my review was about the experience of using one in general--and this is a line that's been around for 13 years.
It seems, from studying the history, that these Kindle displays haven't changed quite as much as other types of displays have over the past decade-plus. For the past six years or so, the high-end ones have been at 300 ppi, equivalent to what you'd gotten out of a low-end laser printer or inkjet since the 1990s or so. (Earlier Kindles were at 167 or 212 ppi.) That used to be a spectacularly high resolution for a display, though modest for printing on paper. But that was about the same time frame in which Apple started putting "Retina Displays" on everything, and resolutions of things like phone screens have just kept climbing from there*, so it's not gigantic now. But it's good enough for pleasant reading.
Contrast is a more interesting thing: it depends entirely on the room lighting, in the opposite way from what you may be accustomed to. Because e-ink displays are reflective, if you read one of these e-ink Kindles in direct sunlight or some other kind of bright reading light, the contrast is truly stunning compared to what you're used to getting from a display. It does feel more like reading printed material than reading a display.
But if you're relying on the Kindle's internal light in a dark room, it's just OK, because, lit up, the black level isn't as black as a modern LCD or especially an OLED screen. These days it's popular for every kind of display to offer a "dark mode" in which text rendering flips to light on dark, so you can pretend you're a hacker from 1979, and the Kindle Oasis is no exception--but its dark mode doesn't look that great, because the high black level becomes hard to ignore, particularly since you have to jack up the screen brightness to make dark mode really readable. Dark mode is definitely not what reflective e-ink displays were made for. It's better to keep it in light mode and use the brightness and warmth adjustments to keep from frying your eyeballs.
I suspect that, as other kinds of displays get better and people expect more from tablet-like devices, the days of e-ink technology may be numbered aside from really niche applications. (Amazon's own Fire tablets, which can more things since they're really just general-purpose Android tablets, already compete with Kindles.) But it's still a reasonable thing to use for a dedicated book reader.
*(A thing that annoys me in this vein is that, for complicated historical reasons, the font size used in Mac OS's UI dialogs is tied to the screen resolution, so I can't even use my very nicest work monitor at its native resolution without making the menus hard for my old eyes to read--I have to throttle it back in software! Though the resulting display is still so high-res that I can't see the pixels, in a world where all fonts have been scalable for more than a decade, this shouldn't be necessary. Display resolutions have gotten kind of silly, though--many high-end phones offer the option to throttle the screen resolution back from what the hardware can do just for performance and power conservation. And you probably won't even notice! Human eyes can only do so much.)
Contrast is a more interesting thing: it depends entirely on the room lighting, in the opposite way from what you may be accustomed to. Because e-ink displays are reflective, if you read one of these e-ink Kindles in direct sunlight or some other kind of bright reading light, the contrast is truly stunning compared to what you're used to getting from a display. It does feel more like reading printed material than reading a display.
But if you're relying on the Kindle's internal light in a dark room, it's just OK, because, lit up, the black level isn't as black as a modern LCD or especially an OLED screen. These days it's popular for every kind of display to offer a "dark mode" in which text rendering flips to light on dark, so you can pretend you're a hacker from 1979, and the Kindle Oasis is no exception--but its dark mode doesn't look that great, because the high black level becomes hard to ignore, particularly since you have to jack up the screen brightness to make dark mode really readable. Dark mode is definitely not what reflective e-ink displays were made for. It's better to keep it in light mode and use the brightness and warmth adjustments to keep from frying your eyeballs.
I suspect that, as other kinds of displays get better and people expect more from tablet-like devices, the days of e-ink technology may be numbered aside from really niche applications. (Amazon's own Fire tablets, which can more things since they're really just general-purpose Android tablets, already compete with Kindles.) But it's still a reasonable thing to use for a dedicated book reader.
*(A thing that annoys me in this vein is that, for complicated historical reasons, the font size used in Mac OS's UI dialogs is tied to the screen resolution, so I can't even use my very nicest work monitor at its native resolution without making the menus hard for my old eyes to read--I have to throttle it back in software! Though the resulting display is still so high-res that I can't see the pixels, in a world where all fonts have been scalable for more than a decade, this shouldn't be necessary. Display resolutions have gotten kind of silly, though--many high-end phones offer the option to throttle the screen resolution back from what the hardware can do just for performance and power conservation. And you probably won't even notice! Human eyes can only do so much.)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-31 11:57 pm (UTC)(edit: these are not actually the first; there have been various approaches to color electronic paper for a decade now, and products have shipped with them, which haven't been that successful. It does seem to be the biggest crop of them yet, and the tech is a bit more mature. Amazon hasn't yet put it in a Kindle, instead opting probably wisely to go with the conventional Fire tablets as their color offerings, and they're the colossus dominating this market.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlnzrxaZViU