Quote:
Originally Posted by afainber
My personal opinion is that Carta screens were so slow to become widespread because they were not that much better than the Pearl HD. Of the few devices that do use Carta screen, it appears that only the Carta-based Kindle Paperwhite's screen is considered to be noticeable better than Pearl HD. The other few Carta-based devices have screen whose superiority is not noticed by everyone. Thus, my conclusion is that the Kindle's screen improvement is not necessarily because of it being a Carta but for other technological reasons.
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I would agree that Carta is an incremental improvement, rather than a revolutionary one (see for example
this chart), but would question whether the KPW2 does that much better than other manufacturers -- reviews for both the
KPW2 and
Kobo Aura H2O describe an improvement that could be summarised as 'small but noticeable'. (The review for the
Pocketbook Ultra is a lot less favorable, but that seems more a product of manufacturer errors than the underlying technology.) I would therefore expect that as long as the price differential was commensurate with the improvement (i.e.
small), that manufacturers would seek to utilise it.
If the price differential were larger, I'd have expected it to be Amazon that would be first to pass on it for their mainstream product (i.e. the KPW2), and reserve it for a premium product (i.e. the Voyage) only. Amazon tends to use their eReaders as loss-leaders on their eBook business, so I would expect them to be more cost-conscious and less interested in being on the technological cutting edge. Independent manufacturers on the other hand live and die on their eReader business, so must encourage readers to buy/upgrade-to their new model to survive, so need to differentiate their product both from their competitors and from last-year's-models.