Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeC
I agree. The photos of the bad units don't compare to what I'm seeing.
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My unit, too, seems to be performing much better than the units pictured with uneven lighting, and degraded resolution.
I received my Paperwhite just a few hours ago, and I've spent only perhaps an hour variously loading documents and books to the device, and reading sent-to-Kindle articles while waiting for books and larger files to load.
The device is running firmware 5.2.0.
I have used the device both outside, under bright sunlight (it's a gorgeous California day), and in the office under bright fluorescent lighting. I briefly read with the device in a more dimly-lit coffee shop.
In all of these environments, the lighting has been perfectly uniform across the screen, and even in the dimly-lit coffee shop, the LED light-streams at the bottom were barely visible.
Up-date: On closer inspection, I do notice four small, rounded cones of shadow at the bottom of the screen, but, as some else previously noted, they don't reach the bottom-most line of text, and, honestly, had I not been looking for them after reading everyone's comments, I doubt that I would have noticed them.
At a light intensity setting of 22 (of 24) in sunlight, the screen background is an almost-LCD quality white; the fonts are black and, while not quite as crisp as I had hoped (and seemingly not quite as crisp as pictured in some of the online reviews, yesterday), the text is still much improved over any previous eink screen that I've used.
I can tell, already, that, as Amazon recommends, I'll be keeping the front-light on at all times: When the light is dimmed, the screen contrast plummets, and is only slightly better than that of the previous generation of Kindles. This is more than acceptable, though, given how clean, and white the background is with the light on.
Unlike the Nook Touch, I don't notice any degradation of the text quality, as the light is scaled up. Quite the reverse, actually, since the contrast improves tremendously.
On small caveat, which may become larger as time goes on, is that with the front-light on, and set, say to 22 in sunlight, the screen IS brighter than the local ambient light. This somewhat defeats the benefit of an eink screen, which reduces eye-strain when compared with an LDC screen by using only ambient light to illuminate the text. I began squinting slightly with the light at 22, because it was noticeably brighter than the objects around it. This seems to be something of a trade-off between high-contrast white background, and purely ambient light-lit text.
The touch screen is comfortably responsive, if not that much improved over the previous generation Kindle Touch. What I hugely appreciate, though, with the new capacitive screen, is that the text does not blur around the edges in warm sunlight, as it tended to with the infra-red touch scree on the Kindle Touch and Kobo Touch. The blurring of text in warm sunlight, to me, always defeated the purpose of an eink reader, which was its usefulness outside in sunlight.
I do miss a physical home button, if only to spare the small hassle of finding the menu "zone" at the top of the screen, and making two taps to return to the main menu. This is a small complaint, though.
Items are taking more time to sync to the Kindle, and it seems that only 3-6 items will sync in a given cycle; returning to the menu and tapping Sync and Check for New Items does bring down the next batch, though.
The ergonomics of the device are fantastic! I don't care for the bulk of the Nook Touch, and while the indented back is nice, I much prefer the sleeker build of the Paperwhite. This device, unlike the Nook Touch, slips right into a larger jacket pocket, and it'll fit my cargo shorts perfectly, without feeling bulgey and awkward.
PDF support isn't (as expected) as good as that of the Kobo Touch, but I'm fine using my iPad for image-heavy PDFs. Pan-and-zoom is there, though, which I don't recall being included in the Kindle Touch (but perhaps it was added in a software up-date, after I returned mine). In a pinch (no pun intended), it works fine.
All in all, I couldn't more pleased with the device, given the limitation of eink. I'm feeling really lucky to have gotten a unit without manufacturing issues, and this is definitely the best ereader I've yet used.