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Originally Posted by Penny
Windows Vista had a poor launch and was an inferior product to XP in many regards. However, it paved the path that led to arguably the greatest OS of all time Windows 7. In fact, many people just skipped Vista and went directly from XP-->7.
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That's not historically true. None of it. I was involved in sales/support/installs of Windows for decades. I could write 1000s of words with references. You could switch off Vista eye candy and have it very like XP or Win7. Win7 was really SP1 of Vista. Not a new version.
Some computers advertised as Vista ready were not even good for XP and terrible for Vista. Win7 was not the best MS OS ever.
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Originally Posted by Penny
Same situation here, no one is holding a gun to your head and forcing a purchase of the current model.
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Where is the 7″ mono?
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Originally Posted by Penny
I'm also not stating that the current version of Kaleido is better at displaying BW text then Carta.
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It's not even close to Carta or Carta 1200 for sharpness, contrast and usability in ambient light.
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Originally Posted by Penny
However, the fact that everyone is acting so surprised and disgusted that the Libra2 was discontinued is mind boggling. Three obvious down sides to having both models:
1. Logistical nightmare to produce both models,
2. Squeeze gross margins(think economies of scale)
3. Creating artificial competition between their own products for the same market share.
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1) Not true.
2) Not true
3) It's not the same market. The Kaleido is only really good for comics. The mono eink is much better for novels.
What about the Clara 6″? New models in mono and colour. Some tiny companies compared to Kobo have plenty of models.
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Originally Posted by Penny
Clearly Kobo believes that the Kaleido technology is the better path into the future. As the technology continues to get better, it will outpace Carta capabilities at a wide margin.
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I doubt, unless run by accountants panicking about Amazon.
The Kaleido replaces Triton, which was basically an LCD type filter on eink. It's a compromise using printed coloured dots smaller than the pixels, so only does poor colour. It's a mono eink screen with a 2 x 2 pattern, so 300 dpi gives 150 dpi colour but only about 4000+ shades of pastel and murk because the panel has 14 greys, black and white. Because the dots only cover part of the pixel you can drive it as if it's 300 dpi, but certain dot spacings and patterns will give false colour, so there is an "anti-rainbow" setting which limits mono to 150 dpi.
The idea is about 5 years old and been in products more than 3 years. Kaleido eink can't come close to the same panel without the printed dots.
ACeP is a different technology and about x10 too slow for ereaders and eink is already x10 to x200 slower than LCD & OLED.
LCD could abandon mono (it's still a mono panel) because graphic panels with enough dots for a reader or computer always needed a backlight. They don't bother quoting a mono resolution, or providing drivers as the 3840x2160 can be on a 12″ panel that's really 3840x6480, 11,520x2160 or 7680x4320 mono pixels. QLED is actually LCD with red and green "quantum" dots and clear for blue, with a blue LED backlight. LCD has 120 to 1000 levels of "grey". Actually it's always transparent. It works by the fact the liquid is crystalline style rods that are rotated by an electric field. So if it's fed polarised light it appears to go clear (backlight) or dark.
Colour only eink would be the death of eink readers. Too small a niche.