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Old 04-02-2013, 06:44 AM   #3
meeera
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Posts: 5,828
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Libra 2, iPadMini4, iPad4, MBP; support other Kobo/Kindles
Hi,

Your main choices as far as lighting are

(a) e-ink with no inbuilt lighting: eg Kobo Touch, non-Paperwhite Kindles, Sony PRS-T1 or T2, etc;

(b) e-ink with front-lighting. There is a bank of LEDs at the top of the screen (the glowing Nook) or the bottom of the screen (Kobo Glo, Kindle Paperwhite, etc), with a very thin invisible grating layer on the screen that distributes the lighting. A lot of people find this variety of lighting very easy on the eyes, and I can vouch for the fact that the frontlight on my Glo improves readability and contrast even when there is ambient light. These devices are typically light, fairly inexpensive (with a very slight premium over unlit e-ink readers), and have similar battery lives to their non-lit counterparts.

(c) a backlit tablet, eg iPad, Kindle Fire, Kobo Arc, the various Android devices, etc - there are many many of these. Some find the lighting to be "harsher" on the eyes than the frontlit e-ink devices, but on the other hand it can be a more even light than some less well-made frontlit devices, and there is typically a "night mode" available to reverse (light text on a black background) if you're into that sort of thing. The downsides are a pretty hefty list: extended use (2 hours +) of tablets before bed can inhibit sleep; they are expensive; they are heavy; their battery life is very, very inferior to the e-ink devices, including the frontlit ones. On the gripping hand, tablets are a better choice for reading PDFs and for running various non-reading apps (email, web, video whatever).
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