Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
I do always read with the frontlight on, but not high up usually. Unlit eink screens just look ugly to me, or require very bright ambient light, which I hate (my eyes are sensitive to light).
Everyone's eyes are different. My eyes are so poor that I always read with my glasses on, else I'd have to put my nose against the screen. Perhaps that's the reason I'm not very fussy about slight differences in contrast. I don't see anything very sharply anyway (just like you can't see individual pixels at a certain distance).
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I do sometimes try to turn the frontlight on at night, but it never feels comfortable and as soon as I turn it off my eyes breathe a sigh of relief.
My eyesight is very good and I'm sensitive mostly to lack of sharpness in text (low PPI, for instance). My computer monitor is a 27" 4K monitor, which for me is the lowest usable PPI (somewhere around 160-170 PPI, IIRC, at a distance of 60-80 cm) - anything lower than that starts annoying me.
I don't even know whether it's the lowered contrast so much as the additional layer that disturbs me in these flush e-readers. The extra glass layer could help distribute the frontlight more evenly (just guessing here), but it does tend to degrade the sharpness of the actual e-ink layer underneath. It's like reading a physical book through a slight layer of glass - and if that glass layer has a matte finish it might be slightly distracting.
This just goes to show that everyone is different with vastly different starting points. It makes it difficult when looking up information about these readers (which aren't that popular to begin with!). Seldom do reviewers and the like state how good their eyesight is and what preferences they have for text in general. Obviously, for people with worse eyesight features might be more important: good frontlight, bigger/bolder fonts, etc.. Whereas for some of us the actual screen is key.
I wish there were more comparison reviews of these devices, showing them side to side. Especially the screens. With and without the frontlight at different levels of intensity.