[Chazzum]

My replacement black 600 also suffers some slight sun fade but to a lesser extent than the original 600. It is quite readable under direct sunlight. While not 'perfect' in the sun I feel it is well within tolerance of acceptability. It certainly would meet Sony's claim of being readable in sunshine:I could definitely use it at the beach or on a sunny deck. I suspect someone not knowledgeable of the sun fade issue might not even notice it was faded unless they compared it to pages generated under normal lightiing. Were I to push for another new unit I doubt I'd do better.

Under normal conditions, due to the text being a bit darker, the new unit's text has more 'pop' and clarity. Another plus of the new unit: it has no ghosting or afterimage. The old unit had a faint but noticeable ghost image of the previous screen. I believe this added to its overall fainter text. Perhaps the screen was not charging the ink fully? I am glad I exchanged the old black unit: the replacement's performance is markedly better.

One other thing. I've been saying my silver 600 doesn't suffer sun fade. I now see this is not totally true. In testing my new black 600 with the silver I noticed that after refreshing the black unit under normal light it had darker text than the silver sunlit generated page. The silver unit's sun fade is so slight it was still darker than normal text on my old black unit under normal light.

I feel I may have gone on a bit excessively about this but some may benefit from my observations.