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I think you're onto something, Sunspark. The Kindle problem surfaced when they went from the 4 gray levels of the Kindle 1 to the 16 levels of the Kindle 2. The Kindle guy in your link (Ted Inoue) says that the Kindle's problems are due to font-smoothing algorithms which take advantage of those extra gray levels for better text and graphics rendering. This works great on backlit devices like monitors but decreases contrast on reflective screens like e-ink.
I've got a 4-level grayscale Astak EZReader Basic. Epubs look fine on that. But on my 8-level grayscale Astak Pocket Pro, those same epubs look somewhat washed-out.
On my 8-level grayscale Sony PRS-300 (a 5-incher like the Pocket Pro), the epubs look great; noticeably darker and sharper than on the Pocket Pro. I decided to run a little test to look at the influence of the font, so on both devices I loaded up JSWolf's excellent epub production of Agatha Christie's "The Secret Adversary", v1.2, with embedded Fontin fonts, available here at MobileRead. On the Sony, the text looked very good. On the Pocket Pro, it was noticeably lighter, lower contrast, whatever you want to call it. Since both devices are 8-level grayscale, using the same font, this test implicates the font-rendering of the Astak as the cause of the difference. If that's the case, then the better solution (for Jinke) to this issue would be to improve the rendering, rather than to just make it easier for us to change fonts (though that would be nice, too).
Basically, what Jinke needs to do is to buy a Sony 300 or 505 and clean-room reverse-engineer its font-rendering engine. Or maybe just hire a disgruntled Sony software engineer.
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