Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
All the 5" devices use the same screen; there is only one manufacturer of it - PVI in Taiwan. ... in reality they are all the same.
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That is not true. The Hanlin (or Astak) screen is manufactured by PVI while the Sony screen is manufactured by LGPhillips; and having owned both, I can attest the Sony does offer significantly better screen contrast (the background whiter and the font color darker) under exact same lighting conditions.
Back to the original post: darker case does give very marginal and most probably purely illusionary "better" reading experience, but it also distract some people while reading. Many people suggested choosing certain case color or playing font settings to "improve" screen contrast, having tried myself, I can honestly say, the improvement (if any) is very very marginal and illusionary. The fact is: 1. the current generation e-ink technology as demonstrated in mainstream ereaders available on market is not matured enough and the so-called "paper-like" screen contrast is more of a marketing effort than truth (you've heard newspaper has 4 to 1 contrast ratio while most ereaders today claim to have at least 6 to 1 contrast ratio - some sellers deceivingly confuse consumers between contrast ratio and gray scale levels); 2. different readers/manufactures do have slightly different screen contrast implementation for basically the same e-ink technology, I compared in different stores and with different products side by side, my impression is Nook has the best contrast, closely followed by Sony PRS 300 (not the touch versions), and my Astak reader (aka Hanlin) has the worst.
To summarize, you need to pick the color your really like for your case, not some perceived or most probably illusionary improvement on contrast. And Sony 300 is a good one if you - like me - care more about the screen contrast than things like folder structure file system, external SD card, mp3 playback, text-to-speech, flexible font settings, replacement battery, or etc (don't take me wrong, I'd love to have these additional features, especially replaceable battery, but just don't want to sacrifice the screen contrast for these). I have quite some novels in PDF format embedded in Chinese fonts, each one has about 4mb in size, and carrying 100 or so such novels at anytime should be sufficient for me so I don't immediately have a need for SD card. My Astak/Hanlin has about 7 or 8 areas that I liked better than my Sony, but fails on only one area - the screen contrast, and if it can be quantified in some way, it is only about 10% worse than Sony in the area of contrast, seemingly very subtle at the beginning, but if you read more than several hours, that 10% subtle difference eventually augments by itself to the point I cannot bear with that I finally gave my Hanlin to a friend and kept my Sony.