Quote:
Originally Posted by MariusMasalar
Radius, you've made me curious about the Kobo type thing: is it that you find Kobo text rendering ugly as well?
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Yes. I no longer own a Kobo, but from what I remember, I had a few issues with it:
1) Control over whether pixels on the screen are full black/white didn't seem as good. If you look closely at the screen (especially visible on long black lines) you can see that the edges are noisier and not as crisp as on the competition. This makes everything look a little fuzzy to me.
2) Glyphs aren't as pleasing. Even with the stock, included, fonts the letters weren't drawn as attractively. This is puzzling since as far as I can tell, Kobo, Amazon and Sony all use the popular Freetype library for font rendering.
So for example, if you look at some letters like 'o' the inside looks a bit squared off in some fonts when compared back to back with another reader or my Mac etc.
This is easiest to see with embedded fonts (and the Kindle falls down a little here too). This can manifest in some letters having a greater visual weight than they should. For example, I remember one book where all the letter 'y' on the page popped out at you because they were drawn slightly heavier than other letters.
Or it could take the form of some letters missing the more delicate lines, so that the loop in a 'p' or 'd' might not close fully.
The Sony PRS-T3 blows away the Kindle PW2 and Kobo Aura in this regard and even that doesn't hold a candle to a retina iPad.
3) The user-adjustibility is an awesome feature, but when you try to reduce the font weight, it looks to me like the text actually gets greyer and less black to some extent -- not just thinner. The reason this is relevant to me is because I thought the default weight was too thick.
You probably won't find many people on Mobileread agreeing with me on this last point. My impression is that a majority prefer dark, solid, blocky, heavy fonts at large size for reading. I remember many people loving Amazon's use of Caecilia when Kindles were new on the scene. And BookCreator(?) for creating Sony LRF books back in the day defaulted paragraph text to bold! (that's probably also why many people don't see any advantage to increased pixel density)
4) I'm hazy on this and can't test it, but I don't remember ever seeing ligatures on the Kobo (and come to think of it, I'm not even sure about kerning). I also didn't see the option to turn on hyphenation, so with full justification I often got rivers. Not to mention Kobo seemed to me to have aggressive widow and orphan control, which combined with the already large-ish bottom margin meant that sometimes the page looked strangely truncated.
Anyways, all that to say that purely as a manner of converting abstract binary symbols into physical letter forms for me to read enjoyably, the Kobo isn't my first choice. It does a bunch of other stuff perfectly well though.