Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylver
...How does Dr. Yi's screen perform in outdoor lights? I am interested in still looking for an alternative screen technology to e-ink. The nook has the best screen contrast among all the e-ink devices that I have seen, but still, the background "paper" is not as white as I wish and the foreground font "ink" is not as black as I would like. It's a marketing hype to say e-ink screen is paper-like, to my eyes, the cheapest paperback look better than the best current generation e-ink screens. It does look Dr. Yi's LCD offers an interesting alternative, but judging from the picture on the linked site, the contrast looks very poor.
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Dr. Yi device screens do the same thing in bright sunlight that E-Ink does. They reflect the light off the back of the screen and into your eyes. That's why it's called a
reflective screen. You read a Dr. Yi device in the same lighting conditions that you read E-Ink in. Generally speaking, the more light around you, the better. Outdoors in bright sunlight is ideal.
The disadvantage of reflective LCD is the limited viewing angle. Contrast drops off when looking at it too far off-axis, but when looking straight-on, its contrast is equal to or higher than that of E-Ink...with the majority of that contrast difference being invested in the darkness of the text, IIRC. I'm not a big fan of either E-Ink or reflective LCD because both are significantly inferior to printed text (enough so that I get a headache when reading Chinese on my PRS-505), but they are roughly equal, with a couple of tradeoffs.
I'm cool with people not wanting reflective LCD devices because of their more limited battery life (though 20 hours is still twice that of the iPad, and good for more than 1000 pages of reading for most people I know--and I've never gotten close to the advertised battery life on my PRS-505), but any kind of claim that presupposes that LCD is bad for the eyes because it's LCD is simply wrong. LCD is one of the most flexible technologies available, and can be developed with backlights (emissive displays--the ones that people blame for eye strain and inability to read outdoors), ones without backlights (reflective displays--which come in many different quality ranges from those on pocket calculators to digital watches to e-paper screens like Dr. Yi and the jetBook), and hybrids of the two (transflective displays, like the mythical Pixel Qi and some PDA screens, which are not particularly high quality).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZQm9xWQJCU
I don't like that video or the presenter in it, but at least at the very end they show what a reflective LCD looks like in bright sun next to an emissive one (the iPad).
I'm not saying you should get one. I'm just saying that it's a good idea to know what the technology actually is before holding a bias against it.