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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
These are informed responses, toddos, and exactly the kind I've been hoping for all along.
I, too, have noticed that greater ppi = less eye strain. But in terms of smartphones, I've only found ppi to be sufficient on the iPhone 4 and greater. My own phone is a first-gen Galaxy S and my eyes definitely become strained if I stare at its screen for too long. I also see negative scotomas afterward due to the prolonged light, which I don't with eInk.
Now that the Nexus Prime and other smartphones have higher-resolution screens, I'm looking forward to testing that reading experience over time. (Feel free to call the experience DEKNAR -- the Display Enhancement Formerly Known As Retina -- even though it only ever should have been called 640 x 960 at 326 ppi.)
As you mention, the iPad's resolution is still gimped, which is one of the many reasons I don't own a tablet currently.
But here's the question: In terms of eye strain, why does resolution matter so much on an LCD screen and so little on an eInk screen? Is it really only a matter of "perfect squares"? And what about the depth distance argument that is sometimes made against LCD screens?
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I can only speak from my own empirical evidence, but for me any LCD over ~160ppi will be comfortable for long periods of reading. Everybody's eyes are different, though, so you need to find what works for you. In my case, I was comfortable reading on my old iPhone 3GS (around 165ppi), but not my Touchpad or my wife's iPad (132ppi). My laptop is decent (15.6" 1920x1080, 141ppi) but I still wouldn't use it for long-term core reading. But it's more comfortable for browsing the web than a 1366x768 screen of the same size (100ppi).
My guess as to why eink is more comfortable at lower ppi is because the pixels don't have sharp edges like an LCD pixel, but I have no research to back that up. To my eye, the rougher pixels give eink a bit of "texture" almost like paper.
As for transmissive vs. reflective light, I call shenanigans. Look directly at a lightbulb. Now take a mirror and reflect that lightbulb right into your eyes. Both hurt the same, yeah? The light from an LCD backlight is diffused through the LCD panel. When you're looking at a white pixel, that's not the same thing as staring directly at a white LED. People get headaches from flicker, not from a light source. Back when LCDs were lit by CCFLs that ran at 60Hz, that was valid. No tablet or phone uses a CCFL backlight, and very few laptops do anymore either. Many desktop LCDs and HDTVs do, however, which is why I suspect people are extrapolating from their poor PC/TV experience and saying they would hate backlit phones or tablets for reading without actually having tried them.