Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
As I said, I own the other three devices you're talking about. You've been saying the 350 is darker than the others and attributing this to the amount of text, but I've compared the Kindle 3 and the 350 and I must say -- I disagree.
It might be a difference in settings, as my colleague said above, in which case, to be fair, all brightness and contrast settings should be normalized before the comparison.
The one review I've read that seemed to substantiate your claim was an early one that included this picture:
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That picture really doesn't support my claim of screen brightness but rather the issue with text formatting when using the medium font. As for screen comparisons, the settings should be adjust so each display provides it's best display of text and contrast. Sadly there's no standard test established for this like there is for HDTVs. That way you could calibrate the displays as close as possible to a reference and then compare each one on a level playing field.
If you look at a page that has a lot of densely populated text on it then it will appear darker. When you use a smaller font you amplify that effect since there's less "white space" visible to actually see. If you up the font size, you have less text and more space between text and closed characters (like "e", "a", "d", "o", etc.) on the page/screen. This makes the page appear brighter when in fact it is not, there's just less darker items on the page. In bright settings this isn't an issue but when indoors you'll hit a threshold sooner where it's hard to read using the smaller font but isn't with a medium fonts. But as mentioned above, using the medium font has formatting issues and is too large of a increment in size.
I mentioned that the pixel density might be adding to that cause as well. Makes sense when you consider that there are little balls inside the display and that there are smaller balls in the more dense screen (5" display has the same resolution as the 6"). And that one side is white and the other black, how those smaller balls reflect light could give a darker appearance under lower light conditions (less ball surface to reflect light). But this is just theory based on what seems logical.