Quote:
Originally Posted by johndoesecond
I own a Paperwhite 2 and noticed one curious behaviour on it.
When flipping to another page, the fonts for a very brief (very brief!) moment appear bolder and, it seems to me, more contrasted, but then they turn less contrasted.
This is particularly noticeable with smaller fonts (especially serif, especially especially when the book uses publisher-embedded serif fonts you cannot change).
My assumption is it has to do with some kind of (software) anti-aliasing or font-"enhancement" algorithm that runs at every page flip.
And it just makes me think that the technology therein might in principle allow even better contrast, but that Amazon somehow spoiled it.
Has anyone else noticed this? Did the developers here have chance to find ways to tinker with this font post-processing?
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E-ink requires going black and then back to "white" to maximally erase screen content. That is probably behind what you are seeing, irrespective of whether or not also some anti-aliasing is intended.
Are you using every page refresh (set from reading options in settings)? If not, I'd assume that is actually the partial page refresh in process, trying to make sure there is no ghosting around your text. Actually, in any case I imagine what you are seeing is related to the e-ink page refresh and the need to go black and then white to erase maximally.
On the PW1 this showed quite annoyingly when exiting a dialog such as the light adjustment and the area where the box was, was refreshed (partially always, the every page refresh didn't affect it as I recall) and the text there was bolder than rest of the text on the page until page change. It probably refreshed the text a little differently in that case and thus it remained that way.
As the page refresh is controlled in software, it may be improvable in software over time. Although of course particular e-ink screens may have some variance in how well they react to software, I have seen some e-ink screens (on same device models) that were a little more prone to ghosting, or had variances in contrast etc.
E-ink is a somewhat exotic technology, indeed. After all, it is pure magic to have a screen that can hold an image without requiring power.
