Quote:
Originally Posted by rowe
I had a nxtpaper 3 TCL40 and it was very poor as an ereader (in general the device was disappointing so I returned it).
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Perhaps you had the settings wrong. I've had many mobile phones (first was one of the first analogue Nokia phones that didn't look like a brick), inc iPhone and Sony. I've found the TCL Nxtpaper 3.0 40 4G to be the best, and while not as good as eink with front light off in decent ambient light, properly adjusted it's as good as eink with front light on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rowe
They're backlit and refresh like regular phone/tablet screens - both of which cause more eyestrain than e-ink (bistable, not backlit). The epaper marketing for them is misleading.
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The eyestrain on most OLED or LED screens is nothing to do with refresh (everything not eink) vs Bistable (eink) but that most are shiny so unconsciously focusing on the reflections causes the headache. This was established with CRTs on the 1970s. Real matt screens have existed since then but are rare.
I was in a showroom of Apple products today and the screens were excessively shiny with "beautifully"
sharp reflections of the bright ceiling strip-lights. That would give you a headache. Especially bad is any reflected movement.
Interlace screens on some graphics modes on CRTs or Plasma gave excessive flicker for single pixel high detail. Such as CGA on an NTSC TV or the early 1024 x 768 interlace mode for 640 x 480 progressive CRTs.
Almost all eink screens have a micro-etched surface to make them matt. Nothing to do with being bistable or eink.
The other lesser problems are the screen too bright (some do this with eink front lights), or cheap LCDs with poor viewing angle.
The Bistable eink only has a real advantage visually over LCD/OLED with decent refresh rates and a matt surface if the front light is off in adequate ambient light.
Note TCL
default settings are poor, as are those on EVERY phone, tablet and Monitor I've used EVER!
Shiny is cheap. Matt surface keeping sharpness of display is very expensive.
If you can use a turned off display as a mirror it's garbage. If you can make out what is reflected it's poor. Nothing to do with eink/bistable vs any other display.
The other advantage of bistable eink is nothing whatsoever to do with eyestrain, but battery life because the CPU can sleep till you turn the page. This advantage is nearly gone on eink because:
1. Eink larger screens, front light, BT, WiFi, faster CPUs, audio, quick touch response. Flipping pages now uses far more power.
Vs
2. On LCD/OLED more efficient displays, better CPU power management and batteries of x4 to x20 capacity or more of eink models. Faster charging up to x20 of 20 years ago.
You can now get longer run time on some phones listening to an Audio book than on any eink model that can do audio books.
People mostly have screens set too bright. Compare with brightness of a paperback (or eink with front light off), but not laser/copier paper under the ambient light.