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Originally Posted by LDBoblo
Except the Sony isn't purported to be a communications device. Reading inevitably means things beyond just unadorned text (unadorned is taken to extremes in ebook readers as well). People who are simply novel readers who care not one bit about color, quality, or speed shouldn't be so offended when more demanding folks start putting down those devices.
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If you want adornments, then I think zelda's "Three Men in a Boat" or pdurrant's "Desbarollda, The Waltzing Mouse" show the large extent of what can be done using current ereader technology. But the fact is that I can open any of my large collection of paper books at a random page and there's a 99% chance that all I'll see will be monochrome text.
There's a market for colour in books, but it's limited. Low-resolution colour is used in some technical works and is important in children's books, but that's it.
High-resolution colour for images would be nice, but we're not going to get that on an ereader any time soon, all the coming colour displays will be limited to the same sub-newsprint resolutions used on the web.
There are many ways in which I'd like to see ereader displays improve, but colour isn't one of them because it's simply irrelevant to reading text.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
Well yes and no; a high-contrast LCD with a given method of font-smoothing (to compensate for the low resolution) will display finer text than will a lower-contrast screen. This is painfully obvious with traditional Chinese, but I see it with some of my favorite western typefaces as well.
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Sub-pixel rendering techniques such as ClearType work best on specifically-designed fonts in order to avoid the colour-fringing problems that can be seen at small point sizes. When using fonts that aren't tuned and hinted for ClearType an increased contrast can sometimes make things worse. Increasing the overall contrast helps only up to a point, as the real problem is the limited resolution that all displays suffer.