Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
Contrast: I have only rarely seen any paper book that comes anywhere near the crappiness of e-ink contrast, and I certainly wouldn't buy any of them. I always have my 505 with me when I go to bookstores, and I'm always happy to show people side-by-sides to discourage them from buying an ebook reader.
Resolution: I can easily read complex Chinese books with proper light Ming typefaces even on the cheapest paper. They are at best annoying and ugly, at worst practically unreadable on e-ink, and the only way around it is to use unpleasantly beefed-up bolded fonts. This is more a function of contrast and anti-aliasing though than pure resolution, though resolution dictates the need for anti-aliasing.
Refresh rate: It doesn't take a second to flip a page on a physical book unless you have some kind of physical disability, and it takes far far less time if you are flipping quickly.
When current gen e-ink is phased out by something a little less rubbish, I'll probably be all for it. The current stuff is to me little better than a cheap calculator LCD.
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Odd - when I look at an eBook reader like the PRS-505 or the PRS-300 in any light which isn't too dim to read by, the contrast is pretty good. I guess maybe it's the fact that I'm trying to read in a semi-well-lit area which makes all the difference. Plus, I've seen quite a few crappy books out there... some of which were on very, very cheap tissue-paper like material, whose contrast ratios are pretty bad. Worse still when the ink fades, which I've found has happened on some of the cheaper books with badly-done print runs.
As for the Chinese texts, those are more the fault of the font than the display, at least with embedded fonts. May I point to Japanese manga on eBook readers, as an example of how that sort of text looks on an eInk screen? Yes, they're not 1900x1200 yet, but neither are they as screwed up as you're suggesting, unless your typesetter (or whoever put together those books for you in whatever format you were using) was completely incompetent... and the argument ahi was bringing in was that typesetting was inherently superior on a paper book.
It doesn't take a second to flip a page... most of the time. It's harder when you're having problems 'gripping' the page through gloves, but it's about the same rate as an eInk reader since the act of page-flipping doesn't mean the next page is 'instantly visible', or at least not flat or otherwise in an easily viewable angle. Usually it's half a second unless you're speed-reading, in which case you're not spending a lot of time worrying about the 'resolution or contrast ratio' of what you're looking at, since you're too busy taking in the images and translating the content mentally in whatever your brain's using for a buffer.
I will grant current eInk looks like a calculator LCD, but I've found the resolution to be better than early LCD screens, or even some of the later-gen PDA LCD's, when I compare them side-by-side. The 320x480 screens definitely suffer compared to these, due to the lower PPI ratios on the latter, so comparing them with 'cheap calculator LCD's is something only a complete idiot would do... especially since anyone with half a brain would've returned the PRS-505 if they disliked it so, or sold it to someone else so they weren't stuck with something they so thoroughly hated.