Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason90
How's that increased 10 led uniformed lighting then? 
You would think by design an ereader is pretty basic and should be easy to assemble compared to other tech out there,yet there is always too many cases with issues of the lighting.
Would be interested to see behind the scenes how these get built and why it's so hard to lay 6-10 led's around an eink display! |
It's not hard to lay them out, but it is hard to force light from
only 6-10 LEDs to evenly light a square surface.
More ideally, you'd want a large number of lower power LEDs to avoid the shadows. The shadows are there because to get those parts of the screen lit up, you have to bend light more sharply via refraction. The physics of optics shows us that the more you want to bend the light, the more complicated the optics have to be. And to make it worse, the more likely you are to introduce optical aberrations into the layer over the e-ink that cannot be completely removed.
And here, Amazon is trying to take the light from a half-dozen LEDs, refract it down onto the e-Ink display, and then bounce it off the e-ink back out with as little distortion as possible. As someone who knows enough about optics to understand the challenges of this, I'm honestly still somewhat impressed they made it as good as it is. And all you have to do is compare the screens between the PW3 and Voyage to see how much sharper the second-generation layer is in comparison to make higher DPI screens that much nicer (something Amazon doesn't even toot their own horn about).
Optics is one of those things that never really gets any easier. We just figure out even more bizarre techniques to push the boundaries just a bit more.