[stewacide]

Pretty sure you're right about the contrast only suffering when the screen is 'overbright' / contrast being the same at the same level. They should be after all considering they seem to use an identical eink panel! Unfortunately at least the upper half of the Kobo's brightness range is unuseably bright under any scenario, while it doesn't go 'dim' enough for even moderately dark settings IMO.

I suspect this was to counter the flip-side trade-off which is unevenness at low levels, which the Glo may well also suffer from if only the light would go that low.

OTOH the Kobo's far superior font/layout settings and epub support make it the clear choice IMO. My favourite fonts are all side-loaded.

edit -- Actually, poped over to the Kindle forum and it seems a lot of people are complaining about COLOURED 'blobs' on their screen. Never heard of anything like that on the Kobo forum. Sounds like there's something really off with Amazon's quality control or how they put their screens together. I strongly suspect it has to do with the capacitive layer, since it's something else between the screen and your eyes to mess up...