Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
You know, I'm really skeptical that there are actually "different grades" of Pearl e-ink used on e-readers.
AFAICT, for 4 years no one has heard about these different grades. When Pearl came out, its 50% greater contrast was heavily advertised and featured, but no one talked about different grades of Pearl. If there really were different grades, anyone any company using a better grade of pearl would use that fact to beat their competition over the head with...and rightly so. But that never happened.
The only evidence we have for the different grades is from a second hand report we heard of from Tom's Hardware, who apparently called e-ink and learned this heretofore unknown fact. But we don't really know who they talked to, what questions they asked, or what kind of response they actually got. For all we know (and in fact, this is my assumption), they were asked how come some screens are better than others, and the response that there are different grades meant just that some are pearl and some are older vizplex. And not that there are different grades of Pearl.
And even if there were different grades of Pearl, I would be surprised if it were revealed in this way.
"Hello, E-ink, I have a question about Amazon? You know, your largest customer? How come some of their screens on the K4 look different?"
"Hello, random tech blogger. Well, we've never told anyone this yet, but there are are actually different grades of Pearl. And our largest customer - well, this is highly confidential, but they might be using Pearl B instead of Pearl A. Have a nice day!".
Anyway, for both of those reasons, I'm seriously skeptical.
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Well, for LCDs I believe there are different "grades" of screens, and it's not something that would be "announced" like it's a new product. I'd imagine that there could be variation among e-ink screens that come out of the manufacturing process and maybe they do get differentiated into grades that sell for more or less. I don't see how that's so difficult to believe. Maybe they don't get sold for more or less, but I could easily believe that there are different grades of the Pearl screen.