Quote:
Originally Posted by Dexmaster
Other then killing it physically it's hard to make it lose contrast or have some work-related damage. There could be some burst "capsules" on the eInk screen but they are 110% physically created.
The 1st generation eInk screens did fade after some time(2-3weeks) but only to a specific condition where their performance stabilized and after that fade, it had no more changes over time.
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Actually if you study how eink works, you will find that NOT doing the full-flash updates reduces contrast.
The first gen screens do not fade out. They are temperature sensitive and contrast depends heavily on how well the eink waveforms were tuned for different temperatures and oil viscosities.
Typical screens (especially older ones) operate NORMALLY at about 80% contrast ratio (20% of opposite colored particles NOT transported to the selected bead surface), when operated at the programmed speeds. Keeping the pixels selected (via the waveform) longer, achieves higher contrast (up to 100%) but at the expense of more ghosting (hard to shake the particles loose from the bead surface).
Even the Pearl eink screens do not operate at full contrast. When I got my first K3 (shortly before joining here), I did a little experiement where I drew images to the screen after drawing each line with MANY pure black and pure white repetitions. The contrast increase over the "normal" full-flash update was astounding. That means that we could add a "supercontrast" feature that redraws even a full-flash update page in a much higher contrast than we ever normally see.
The washed out displays are from kindles that have been sitting unused (with drained batteries) a long time, or that are colder than specified operating temperatures. Using them repeatedly shakes more particles loose so they can display in higher contrast. Perhaps my kindle video player could assist in exercising these pixels for you?
I have multiple K1, K2 and DX kindles, which all used the older eink technology, so I know from where I speak.