Quote:
Originally Posted by Hrafn
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. |
All manufacturers of e-ink-based devices share the same problem - the technology improves very very slowly. Other than the addition of frontlight, the modern devices are very similar to the ones that were the cutting edge in 2010 (see Sony PRS-650).
Therefore every manufacturer has to add as much new technology to their new devices as he can. The main difference between them and everyone else (except maybe Kobo) that they have the resources and skills to do more with roughly the same screen tech. This is why their screens are the whitest, their backlight is the most uniform etc. If they weren't innovating in every new device, people would not have upgraded and it's already been said that the US e-ink ebook readers market has reached saturation, so encouraging customers to buy new devices is not so easy.