Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
To be fair to the medium, shouldn't you try a few later eInk models to see how you like their screens? I'm talking about a single hour in an electronics store, not weeks of your life.
Differences in preference might have something to do with the quality of each person's vision and the level of pain they experience with eye-strain. If your sight is robust, then perhaps you don't feel the need to baby yours as do many of our nearly blind MR brethren and cistern (sorry about the pun). If I hadn't noticed a distinct difference in how my eyes felt using eInk, and if the print and images hadn't been more readable for me, then the benefits of having a backlit screen would have prevailed and I, too, would own a color tablet.
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Preference is preference, but I suspect a lot of the complaints people have w/ LCDs don't stem from the fact that they're using backlit screens, but from
how they're using them. Specifically, if people focused on the ergonomics long enough to adjust brightness, color contrast, and screen position, they might have a better experience. I suspect some people--especially ebook early adopters who put in some time w/ PDFs on CRTs--are generalizing from their experience with more-or-less fixed position monitors with brightness permanently set around 80% and black text on a surface that's 98% blaring white. Get a handheld device, crank the light down to just a notch above visible, and switch to a light-on-dark color scheme, and you have a whole different scenario.
The other issue is that people stare fixedly at their screens (handheld and monitors) all day without changing their focal distance. That issue does relate to the light drawing your attention, but you can override that instinct easily enough by taking a minute every hour to look out a window or just across the room.
This article does a pretty good overview:
How to Make Reading on Your Computer a Better Experience. I would stress the recommendation to make your monitor position easily adjustable with something like a
monitor mount arm. They're not cheap, but if you're having back problems you invest in a decent chair, right? Same thing. I would go as far as to say anyone using a LCD monitor for a significant chunk of the day should have one of these, and they're durable enough you'll probably only ever need one (or one per screen, anyway). They give you the freedom to adjust the distance and angle of your monitor as you change positions, your eyes tire, or the material you're looking at changes.
Obviously, all of this stuff is built in to a tablet, and brightness and night mode are easily accessible in most tablet ereader software.
That said, if eink works for you, by all means stick with it. If your eyes aren't getting along with your monitors, though, there may be other solutions.