Quote:
Originally Posted by BionicGecko
I have to say I’m quite surprised at the hatred here for color eInk readers. Mobileread is the primary forum on the internet where e-reader enthusiasts get together and share their love for this technology.
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It's realism, not hate. The big advantages of eink were the resolution, sharpness, matt screen (which was always available for a cost on ANY display technology, but standard on eink to help sell it). Reading novels doesn't need loads of grey levels, even the original 4 rather than 16 would have been good enough if the contrast and brightness was as good as Pearl or Carta. Also long battery/charge run time.
So mono eink was and is ideal for novels. Colour needs far more than 16 levels. The filters needed for colour would reduce brightness to about 1/5th if any good. They deliberately made the filters poor and only partially covering the pixels to alleviate the darkness. Because eink uses front light rather than rear light, the darkness of any colour filter is doubled compared to LCD.
Also because the 300 dpi 1:1 aspect pixels is state of the art for over 10 year on eink, the colour is only 150 dpi. The claimed 300 dpi for mono is dishonest because it's a 300 dpi panel with printed coloured dots on every pixel, thus inherently the Clara Colour is worse than the Clara BW for novels. The Libra Colour is inherently poorer than the Libra or Libra 2 for novels.
Almost all use of eink is to read novels.
The Kaleido Color isn't new. It's about 4 years old, though tweaked, The best colours are pastel. Dark or desaturated pale colours are quickly indistinguishable because the mono panel has only black, white and 14 grey levels at best. CRT, QLED, OLED, Crystal LED, Plasma, LCD, DLP etc all have 64 to over 1000 levels of each pixel, typically 254 with fully on and off.
Matt surfaces have been available (no glare or shine or reflection) over 40 years. They just became hard to get due to fashion and cost saving. They are now more common again on phones, tablets, monitors and TV. Battery capacity and run time can also be good with eink like reading times now.
So the only advantage really of eink now is for mono screens to read novels and nice form factors for 6″ to 8″. Sadly the 5″ eink are gone and larger than 8″ eink are very niche for PDFs, and most ot them poorer for PDF than a tablet half the price.
If ACeP was 20x faster and 300 dpi, then there would be some point to colour eink. As it is, Kaleido 3 is a disadvantage for novels and only really viable for comic style content (which doesn't have quality colour), but the 7″ is a bit small and the 10″ models are x2 to x3 the price of a better tablet with a matt screen.
It's not hate, but realism. Look at web pages and adverts. Very many for Kaieido are misleading or downright lies.