[jocampo]

Originally Posted by ColdSun

Maybe if you could keep your personal preferences and opinions seperate from the facts this could happen. It seems to me that your very statements above are not only incorrect but hypocritical as well. You appear to be in every thread spouting the same thing, and NO what you say isn't proven or true - about the number of users who prefer one device or the other (and even on this site), or even your defacto declaration that LCD is harder on your eyes.

I've been a member of this site for longer than eink has been sold. We discussed PDAs, LCD devices, Minicomputers, and other devices that you could read from. It is only within the last few years that the eink crowd descended from above to tell us what we should be reading on. To the dismay of many users here, eink took off and they abandoned many devices that could have made reading in low light situations great for fans like me. Last year I predicted this would change, as did many others, as Apple entered the fray with better iPods, iPhones and finally the iPad (which only cemented an already growing market for LCD devices). So while there are many people who enjoy reading on eink, there are also many people who read on their phone, iPod, Tablet, Netbook, Media Player... You get the point. Combine those devices and the eink faction isn't any bigger.

Beyond the dead horse argument and opinions on which is better, there are solid facts people who wish to pick a device can go from:

1. Eink is clearly better for direct sunlight

2. Eink has better battery life

3. Eink is not as good in low light situations due to unevenly lit screen lighting methods (attaching lights or reading from a lamp). Some folks, like me, have partners who don't like lamps on while they are sleeping.

4. Eink is a single-purpose screen - reading.

5. LCD devices often have many other functions (music, video, web, etc).

6. Some users complain of eye strain on either eink or LCD. There are studies on both sides of the fence and the bottom line is you have to decide for yourself which suits your eyes best. There is NO conclusive proof that one or the other is better for your eyes.

7. Tablet-sized devices are more popular than ever before with every major electronics company making them from LG to Motorla. These devices using powerful mobile OS like iOS or Android have full application ecosystems that grow every day. Like the Apple mantra says, "There is an app for that." True with Android as well, and soon the very powerful WebOS from Palm/HP. We are on the verge of a virtual revolution in mobile computing.

Go over that list and decide what you want most, and what you can live with or without. If you read a lot outside in full light then eink might be your best bet (popular with students on the move). If you want a device that you can read in most lighting situations that does more than just replace a paper book, get LCD. If you want to get books and love paper books, you may not like LCD. Your best bet is to get EInk, as that will give you the experience of reading from a real paper book.

Last but not least, technology is constantly changing as do people's opinions. If you are going to join the Mobileread revolution for reading on portable devices you may want to be ready to change with things. The opinion that eink is superior is quickly becoming outdated. This year we will see new technology that will make today's eink and LCD users change their opinions all over again.

The amount of LCD devices that have been sold are not a true representation of the amount of people who use those for reading purposes only. Take the iPad, for example; that's a multipurpose device and we even have people that they never read or download Kindle or Nook for Android, so your argument has no support at all. Moreover, we have been using LCD displays for so long because still now there is nothing cheaper, easy for mass production that can be used for computer monitors or to display images or multimedia content with high refresh rate. That does not mean they are good, means there is not a good and better replacement yet.

Saying that eink is better for normal lighting conditions is not an opinion, is a scientific fact. Human eyes read and see based on the natural reflection of light, coming from the sun. Artificial lights like LCD, bulbs, etc, are just an artificial representation of what the natural light is and should be. They are better now than 50 or even 10 years before, but still are not natural. In fact, they are a lot of studies that already confirmed that LCD screens and artificial lights reduce the amount of melatonin; the result of that is insomnia or problems to fall sleep when reading from those devices instead of regular pbooks or even eink.

eink, does not emit light, is the most natural way to read. Nothing is coming from the screen so what you see and read is thanks to the natural reflection of the ambient light against the screen. A few of the benefits:

No parallax
On eink black and white particles move and reside on same layer, so when reading, everything looks and really is on the top of the screen, giving a true reading or paper feeling.

On LCD, the white color is coming from back light while black is coming from the front, the liquid crystal layer in the middle; that creates a shadow which gets worse if you read at angle, decreasing the quality of the reading experience and the legibility of the letters and whole content.

Less Glare
Self explanatory. Because eink screens are treated to be matte like a printed page, there is low or no reflection, so what you see is what you are reading, not the content plus additional light reflection, very common on all LCD screens (more or less noticeable in certain devices, depending of the overall quality of the screen)

No aperture ratio loss
The pixels on LCD screens do not have a full aperture ratio. E Ink screens have a 100% aperture ratio.

So when two black pixels are close on a eink screen, they join to create a true solid black (or white, depending) improving the image quality.

So yes, technology is changing and a lot of companies are developing new and better LCD devices (I actually work for one of them) but still they have not come yet with something that, for a pure text book, can be more pleasant for your eyes than eink.

Last but not least, it is kind of funny that companies like B&N, which started selling eink devices, were just talking amazing things about eink. Once they started to sell the Nook Color, all of the sudden LCD becomes better and ideal for everything.

The point is that eye strain is not a myth. And you cannot just deny it because you love your LCD device. And no, reading Magazines on an eink device is not nice, but reading 600 pages of a book without stopping on an eink display is way more comfortable than doing the same on an LCD screen. And that's what I keep repeating and will keep saying, until of course, something new and revolutionary takes place and change the current options that we have for ereaders or tablets.

And for the records, I do own an LCD device, a Galaxy Tab and just recently bought an iPad so I can use it for a few PDF documents I have, plus two Kindles. So my interest on one or another is the same or none.