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The photo looks like what I saw when my replacement K3 arrived a number of months ago. I got a replacement because the screen on my original K3, which was bought the moment they were announced, went wacky with white stripes and such. There was a clear difference between the two with the newer one being just a shade murkier, but I wasn't about to coerce Amazon to send a second replacement unit to me in Japan.
I was really hoping the K4s would have been another step up like the K3 was from the K2. But it looks like Amazon chose the tactic of pushing prices on all their units as low as possible this time around. Very understandable with the iPad dominating the high end of the tablet world, so I think it was a smart move for them in the long term. It's just that it had the side effect of leaving us e-ink users without a kick-ass jump in technology. And in some cases, a bit of a backslide.
From what I've heard, e ink displays can be of differing grades depending on how they came out of the manufacturing process, and they're priced/sold to manufacturers based on that.
If Amazon could get their hands on an about-the-same quality screen for cheaper, they'd probably focus on minimizing costs, rather than maximizing quality. In the current economy that's probably the best choice, even if it means that I don't buy any of the new models even though I had the cash pre-allocated for it months ago.
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