Quote:
Originally Posted by Ripplinger
I disagree, I think the front-lit ereaders are here to stay and will keep improving. If you read outdoors at all, all the fancy tablets and PDAs and phones are 100% useless in the sun...
...But that there's just no way to read from a back-lit device outdoors in bright light means that front-lit ereaders will be around for a long long time for those who like to read everywhere.
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Those are sweeping and incorrect statements and totally ignoring of the fact that technologies, including screen ones, are advancing very fast.
Despite your claim, bright sunlight readable non E Ink screens have been around for quite some while. As one example, my phone works perfectly in bright sunlight and indeed automatically adapts itself to the ambient light level from bright sunlight to pitch dark; in fact I have read books on it in bright sunlight. Admittedly it was an expensive and technologically advanced phone (not an Android phone aimed at the masses) when it was first released, but that was 3 years ago, so old.
There is also the likelihood that E Ink becomes colour capable, but the moment it does so, and should that technology be superior to alternative screen technologies at that time, they will be quickly presented as small tabs with the added functionality that those devices have over a dedicated reader and which functionality is dependant on colour (applications, images/video). It is small colour, tablets I presented as being the near future (in fact arriving now) and killing the lit greyscale E Ink market.
Of course, if colour E Ink turns out to be inferior to other screen technologies, then it will not suceed. So the future for lit devices is almost certainly in small tabs, whichever way one looks at it, old greyscale lit readers are just a short-lived passing phase; certainly my next reader will be a tab (and as I have said, I have over a decade of reading on small colour devices).
You mention colour as only being necessary if one reads magazines (in fact, as magazines are mostly pdfs and are of complex page layout they are not an easy reading experience on ANY small device). I can assure you that most who read illustrated non-fiction (whether popular or technical/scientific), and even many trade paperbacks on a colour capable device will disagree with you. There are also comics, which have a very large following. Much fiction (especially literature and children's/young person's) includes colour illustrations; in fact there are many examples of such in the Patricia Clark Library on this web site. Colour is also far superior in low light conditions than lit greyscale E Ink due to the near infinite control of the display (including use of colour: for myself, and I know for many others, a light sand or similar background tint when reading lit under low ambient light conditions makes for more pleasant reading than greyscale does).
Of course if one just reads popular skim through and throw away mass-market paperback novels then ones tastes are probably of a limited nature anyway, so greyscale E Ink is satisfactory; but such would give a more realistic reading experience if it could mimic the trashy paper that mass-market paperback is printed on
. Though it would seem to me that the likes of Mills & Boone would, for the sake of their interesting
colour covers, be better on a colour capable device.
Anyway, it seems that it is sacrilege to suggest that there are technology paths superior to lit grey scale E Ink (or even to suggest that unlit E Ink presents an equal or better reading experience), or that any reader manufacturer who doesn't go down the lit greyscale road is not doomed to oblivion, so I will leave it all at that.