Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
So you agree that the screen position is not the only reason for screen differences, and often not even the main reason. There are others - glass vs plastic, lighting, probably other factors most of us may not even be aware of. It's not merely flush vs recessed.
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No, I do not agree. I no longer have my Oasis, but at the time I had both the Oasis and H2O, I never felt that that the Oasis had a better display. If anything I thought the H2O had a very slightly better display in it's natural state, i.e, with the lighting off. E-ink displays are always evaluated qualitatively with the internal lighting off. The Oasis has a better lighting system by miles, but that is a separate issue to the e-ink display.
All other things being the same, the recessed screen will always be superior because there are fewer layers on top of it to degrade the quality. You can put plastic or glass or micro etched glass on top of it, but it'll always degrade it to some extent, even if only minutely. How can a layer added on top of the bare e-ink display improve it? It cannot. One can argue that the degradation is too minute to care about -and that is a vey reasonable stance to hold- but it is wrong to say that there is no degradation possible at all.
Even the highest grade of glass on top will bend light. And if the glass layer on top is not laminated onto the e-ink display below, then this gets worse, because of the air gap. (This is why Apple has laminated displays on it's higher end iPad models, while the older and cheaper ones have the air gap). Someone correct me if I am wrong, but the Oasis has the air gap too. The glass layer on top is not laminated onto the e-ink display.
Even within the category of recessed screens, the older ones that were touch based and used IR were superior to the later ones that are capacitive touch based, because the capacitive layer is laid over the bare e-ink screen on the later models. Extra layers always degrade quality. It's just physics. My old Aura H2O is IR based and the display is whiter and the text darker than both the Oasis and Libra H2O. It only loses out because of it's lower ppi and older white lighting.