Quote:
Originally Posted by el.jeffe58
Why does it make so much difference Harry. Do you have examples of your own?
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Not speaking for Harry, but this is why I'd like to see higher resolution:
1) Better support for CJK fonts. Since these characters can be much more complicated than Roman alphabet in roughly the same amount of vertical space, it helps readability to have more pixels to represent them.
I'm guessing you might see a similar benefit for scripts which have a lot of rounded, flowing characters (as opposed to the strongly upright and across nature of Latin text) but I have no experience there.
Many other Unicode symbols would also benefit from more pixels.
2) Better looking text (glyphs and letter forms). For some reason many people think it is pointless to improve past 300dpi, but experience with printing on paper shows clearly that it is not.
You can rather easily see the difference on a good printer between 600dpi and 300dpi, especially for more delicate fonts, italics, punctuation etc. If you look at the fonts that work well at 300dpi or less, you will see that often the punctuation especially is rather squared-off or blunt. Font designers also use trompe l'oeuil effects that disappear if you don't have enough resolution.
I read most on a Sony PRS-505 with 800x600 screen and the low pixel count has always disappointed me. In my early days at Mobileread it used to frustrate me that many posters claimed to not even be able to see the pixels.
Today on the 1024x768-ish screens that are common, the situation is improved but you can still see the jaggedness on curved letters and punctuation still never comes to a sharp point etc.
3) Better looking text (paragraphs). Right now the typesetting on a lot of ereaders looks primitive compared to print books. Part of the reason is the pixel grid is so large. With more pixels available it will be easier to slightly ease the positiion and spacing of words and even letters so that full justification will look better and more natural.
4) Better looking graphics. Even if we get more grey scale levels in eink, there are not enough pixels we will still see artifacts like banding and aliasing. Techniques like dithering and antialiasing also benefit from more pixels.
Take a look at some book covers or pictures that have large flat areas of almost the same colour and (especially on Kobo's in my experience) you will definitely see banding.