[rowe]

Sure, modern LCDs use diffusers. The fundamental difference is the path the light takes to reach your eye.

With a backlit LCD light travels from the source, through various layers, and is projected out of the screen towards you. Essentially looking at a complex, filtered light bulb.

With a front-lit reflective screen like e-ink the light source illuminates the surface, and what is seen is that light reflecting off it. In a normal room, seeing a mix of ambient light and the device's own light bouncing off a passive surface just like reading a book under a lamp. That's the core distinction between viewing an emissive object and a reflective one.

The location of the LEDs in an edge-lit display is to make screens thinner, but it doesn't change the final path of the light. The entire purpose of the edge-lighting system is to use a guide plate to distribute the light evenly across the back of the panel. The end result is the same as any other backlight: the whole screen becomes an emissive surface that projects light through the pixels directly at your eyes.

I agree that some people are happy with budget hardware. However, expecting a device to feel responsive across a wide range of tasks isn't a niche requirement anymore, it's a mainstream expectation. The processors on the non-Ultra Nxtpaper devices I've owned were very low-end - struggling with video playback that my other devices handled easily. And the speakers were genuinely awful. Mid-range tablets with twice the processing power are available at much less than twice the price and better all round hardware. There's popular high end tablets with more than x10 the processing power, excellent all round hardware and better screen surfaces options (but expensive).

'Thanks for the link. I see there are still the bogus claims on blue light (from phones etc being harmful, original claims flawed) and that TCL is pushing the worthless gimmicks of the color and mono epaper modes which actually degrade the performance. Silly marketing, but I suppose it might make extra sales. Everyone I've shown the modes to agrees they are a pointless gimmick and worse than the sRGB mode with adjusted brightness.'
Totally agree. TCL marketing for Nxtpaper has always been intentionally misleading, which is a shame now they've started to release some genuinely good devices.