Quote:
Originally Posted by screwballl
There is nothing special... they toss all these terms out there to confuse amateur techs that always think or expect higher resolution is better. When it comes to eink, there is very little difference between the resolutions when it comes to most ebooks since the font and size are always static.
|
Absolutely wrong.
A higher resolution allows the font to be displayed with less reliance on hinting or anti-aliasing - i.e. it's closer to the proper shape and clearer (less anti-aliasing means crisper characters, which is probably the source of Engadget's remark about contrast). This applies to all fonts and sizes, but is most noticeable for those who prefer that their ebooks don't look like a large-print book for the vision-impaired.
Bottom-line: until we get to displays capable of 300dpi, more resolution is very definitely a good thing. Being a 'long-time computer tech' doesn't mean you understand how typography works, sorry.
It is possible to construct fonts that are optimised for display on a particular screen - Microsoft's been doing that for ages, and the Kindle relies heavily on its use of Caecilia. But if you want fonts that are designed for elegance rather than their ability to fit into a pixel grid, or if (gasp!) you want different books to use different fonts so that the font more harmoniously expresses the content it is displaying (something that's impossible on a Kindle but trivial for ePub), then you want resolution, and lots of it.
Of course, there are some who think ugly fonts might be a
good thing. Feel free to plough through Anna Karenina in Comic Sans if you want.