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Originally Posted by afainber
You are right in that I don't have exact numbers to back my opinion. However, feel free to scrape all the images online of a Kindle/Kobo and their competitors and read all the reviews. The first generation of Kindle Paperwhite was criticized a lot for its blotchy frontlight. When the next Paperwhite came out (and then the Voyage) - this part of the criticism near disappeared. Now read the reviews of the newest Onyx, Boyue and Tolinos: "blotchy", "non-uniform frontlight", "the contrast is not good" (I personally had two T68 devices. One has a great backlight. The other... not so great. Both have about the same contrast as my old Sony PRS-650, maybe even slightly less. Even the 2nd generation Kindle Paperwhite has better contrast).
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A few points:
- The Tolino Shine, Onyx T68 and Boyues have the same generation of display as the 1st Gen PW (i.e. E-Ink Pearl). It is therefore unsurprising that they compare poorly with Carta-based Kindles.
- The reviews I've seen of the T68 (e.g. here and here) make no complaint about the screen.
- It is rather difficult to find English-language reviews of foreign-market-only models (e.g. Tolino Shine, i63ML), so claims about them really need to be backed up with the actual reviews they came from.
- Even (recent model) Kindles have quality issues, e.g. this review of the Voyage:
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The only disappointing thing about the Kindle Voyage for me is the frontlight. When paying a premium amount for an ereader you expect it to be perfect. And unfortunately the frontlight isn't perfect. In fact it's not even as uniform as the frontlight on my Kindle Paperwhite 2. The Voyage has sort of an orange gradient at the top of the screen. Ninety percent of the time it's virtually undetectable, especially when using auto brightness and on lower brightness settings, so it's really not as big of an issue as it would seem.
But there are times when it is distracting and takes away from the reading experience. The gradient is more apparent with the brightness turned up high, and when reading at night in a dark room. It's especially noticeable when using landscape mode to read because each line goes from light to dark.
Frontlights vary a lot from one device to the next, however, so it's always hard to know what you're going to get. The Kindle Voyage has been getting complaints about the uneven lighting and different-colored hues from reviews on Amazon as well, so it's not an isolated issue. The variance it subtle enough that most people don't even notice it unless it is pointed out to them, so for most it's not a problem at all. But if you're super picky about screens and notice details like that it might bother you enough to return it.
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But at the end of the day, I'm probably never going to use a Kindle (unless and until somebody works out how to completely replace its OS with an open version of Android), so am largely indifferent to comparisons to it. As long as my next eReader is a noticeable all-around improvement on my current i62HD, I will be happy.