Quote:
Originally Posted by scrapking
Do we know that they're exactly the same, or based on the same principle? I have a sneaking suspicion that, in an attempt to make it come out looking whiter, that Amazon modified it in a way that (when it goes wrong) creates the colour blotching that people refer to.
|
The light guide and display itself are the same tech in both. The Kindle uses a capacitive layer between the light guide and eInk display. I'm not sure if the Kobo uses a capacitive layer as well, or is still IR-based (it looks capacitive from review shots). Either way, to make the front-light work well, you need to bond the guide to the display. A capacitive layer means you need two layers of bonding. IR means you only need one.
It's not as if the light guide is terribly complicated piece of tech. It's not really a new idea (look at the light wedge for the 505 for example). The difference is more getting at newer materials made in a way to get more uniform lighting as a sheet. I suspect some of these materials include the newer plastics that are making more flexible fiber optic cables available over the last few years.
The blotching is unlikely to be caused by the light guide itself unless there is terrible control over the purity of the material in the light guide. That's not exactly a common situation these days to have purity so low as to be visibly uneven. However, incomplete or uneven bonding will produce distortions of the light passing through it between the guide and the display.
As far as I can tell, the "whiteness" and light uniformity of both models is roughly similar. And the Kobo is not immune to blotching, just a smaller percentage are seeing it (if you can even determine a percentage based on forums):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=193587
There's other factors that can contribute to the differences, but in general, there's a lot of ways you can have two groups telling Foxconn to assemble the same thing, and get different results.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scrapking
Really? Crazy. They used to release multiple models in the past, didn't they? I recall looking at several models at a time, each time I evaluated Sony e-readers in the past. Interesting.
|
It makes sense if you want to focus a bit and push price/features. Sony isn't really doing a great job with that though. Over the last few years they've seemingly been throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it does, some of it doesn't.