Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
To my eye, the K3 already does have a white background in sunshine. It is only indoors, or in deep shade, that it appears to be a black-on-grey device.
As someone who still reads as many paper books as eBooks, I think the Kindle gets the edge on fonts, due to being able to resize, whereas paper books (except for some really old ones) get the edge for contrast ratio under normal lighting conditions.
Most paper books also get the edge for lack of glare. If improvements are technically feasible, black and white eInk has a way to go until achieving perfection.
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Right and so does pretty much any E-Ink brand screen. Even the original was quite a bit whiter under either full-spectrum indoor lighting or outdoor in the sunshine.
And then indoors under typical inside lighting the screen background will be a darker shade of grey. It seems to have to do with not only the fact that sunlight has all the colors in it, full-spectrum, but of course the intensity of the light. I read in a thread here a while back to try using full spectrum reading lights, I have both Ott Lights as well as a ton of full spectrum fluorescent bulbs and both do improve the white background in that it makes it look whiter.
My original comment wasn't that the background was not currently fine outdoors but odds are we really don't want a whiter background than the current Pearl screens should you like to read outside.
The point I was making earlier is if you have a reader with too white a background under indoor lighting then once outdoors it would be like trying to read something printed in a nice bright white paper. That white will really blast a lot of light back into your eyes. And the light from the sun is far stronger than any laptop/LCD backlight which people complain about causing eye strain. So my point was to be careful what we all ask for in the area of a white background screen because it might be defeating the one of the nice benefits of an E-Ink screen if you like to read outside or even by a window during the day.
And you make a good point about glare (or is it really reflected light) from a glossy page in a book or even matte finish reader screens. I have reference books with glassy true white pages which can be near to impossible to read under normal home or office lighting. Not sure if we'll ever get a screen that mimics the characteristics of non-glossy paper in the area of glare though matte finish screens are better than most of the glossy screens. Still even a matte screen can have that annoying glare if the light source is in just the right position.