Quote:
Originally Posted by jbjb
The "backlight causes eye-strain" argument is, IMHO, bogus - it's all photons hitting your retina. The issues here can be solved by an appropriate backlight brightness.
|
"Bogus" meaning "not something you experience", right?
It's possible, of course, that lowering the backlight much more may lead to less eyestrain - unfortunately for me going any lower than what I have my iPad set on (no percentage that I can see, but I'd say the slider is at around 38-40%) means that the contrast and brightness get uncomfortably dim and
that causes
my eyes even more strain.
(I should say I never read in a dark room. I always have a light - not a booklight but general room lighting on when I read.)
I'm on my second iPad and I've experimented with the levels quite a bit, not the least because I got my first iPad before my first Kindle (when I only had a Sony 505 with its, in hindsight, very dim and dull grey screen - which still gave me a much more comfortable reading experience than the shiny new iPad) and didn't want to give up easily - I
wanted to use my shiny and extremely expensive new toy for reading as well.
It was partly why I got it in the first place, when importing a Kindle was mega-expensive and quite a bit of hassle but for a while, no ePub shop would sell me anything (UK shops stopped selling internationally, others didn't sell to me yet) and Amazon books seemed to be the only option. So, yes, I tried.
And I tried again when I got the iPad 3 with its much newer, better screen. Same thing.
Eye strain is not bogus. Eye strain from reading on an backlit LCD screen doesn't happen to everyone (my mother is very happy with my old iPad for reading ebooks - she also reads for much shorter periods at a time, but she's probably just luckier than I am), but it's not bogus, not for the many people for whom it's a real concern. And just assuming that those people haven't tried the different options, haven't experimented with background and font colour and brightness ... well, some probably haven't, but I'm quite sure many have. Because a tablet
is an expensive thing and I'm sure most readers who've got one have made a good effort at trying it out.