[JAcheson]

I'm posting because this surprised me.

I have both the Nook Color, which has an LCD screen, and the new Nook Simple Touch Reader with an e-ink screen.

I had assumed that the e-ink screen would completely leave the Nook Color in the dust as far as readability is concerned. It turns out this is not necessarily true.

The STR's e-ink screen is indeed much much sharper than the Nook Color's screen, and its contrast between black and white is better, too. So for black and white Postscript text, there's no comparison; e-ink is much better.

However, a lot of PDFs I own are made up of scanned-in documents where each page is a bitmap image, rather than Postscript text. For these documents, the STR actually does rather poorly. It appears that it doesn't have enough shades of gray, and is attempting to dither everything. The result is that the text is broken up and fairly difficult to read on the STR.

Since I owned a Nook Color, I decided to try putting the same PDF onto that reader, just to see how it would do. To my surprise, it does very well! The Nook Color's LCD screen has plenty of shades of gray, and the text comes across as anti-aliased and quite readable.

So, if you are dealing mostly with PDFs made up of bitmaps, either from a document management system, or Google Books, or from the internet, you may want to consider the Nook Color over the Nook Simple Touch.

I have no idea if it is possible to get better results on the STR by loading a different reader app. It is possible, and now that I've rooted my STR I plan to investigate that.