Paperwhite Second Gen: First Impressions

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by 7hir7een

My KPW1 is JBPatched, so yeah, I was able to reduce the margins on that device. Didn't want to unpatch it for pictures . What you see on the KPW2 is the lowest margins you can set on the device by default, unfortunately.

ETA: The 32 is the chapter heading, part of the book.

Okay, thanks. That explains it.

Now I'm just wondering how you can read with such a busy skin on the front of the thing

[Darkuul]

Originally Posted by Outrager

I only have the new 2013 Paperwhite, but here it is on lowest brightness on top of a white piece of paper to compare. It isn't white, but only a tiny bit greyer than the paper.

Excellent idea, comparing it to actual paper! Could I bother you with additional images of that setup, but at different brighness settings, say middle and full, I'm interested to see if the light itself makes the screen look whiter and more like the page at some point. Mayble you could find the sweetspot at which it looks almost the same as the paper (at your particular ambience light levels, I know it will vary)

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by sparklemotion

Overall I am extremely pleased. It's everything the PW1 should have been.

Nice to hear. Then now return the one from Amazon (or put it into the Best Buy box and return it to them ) and use the durned thing instead of looking for problems

Originally Posted by Darkuul

Excellent idea, comparing it to actual paper! Could I bother you with additional images of that setup, but at different brighness settings, say middle and full, I'm interested to see if the light itself makes the screen look whiter and more like the page at some point. Mayble you could find the sweetspot at which it looks almost the same as the paper (at your particular ambience light levels, I know it will vary)

I did exactly this with the KPW1 last year. For me, the setting is 12, to compare against a bright white page without making the scrreen look like it's lighted. It'll be different for the KPW2 of course, and it'll also differ depending on the ambient light.

This was the closest I could get (KPW1)

[Outrager]

Originally Posted by Darkuul

Excellent idea, comparing it to actual paper! Could I bother you with additional images of that setup, but at different brighness settings, say middle and full, I'm interested to see if the light itself makes the screen look whiter and more like the page at some point. Mayble you could find the sweetspot at which it looks almost the same as the paper (at your particular ambience light levels, I know it will vary)

I'm running out of sunlight, but I'll try to get some more up.

[coolbreeze]

I almost feel guilty for getting $95 on my blotchy PW1 trade-in. Almost.

My v.2 will be here Friday! Can't wait.

[negris123]

I just wanted to post a picture that shows the difference in the light between PW2 (left) and PW1 (right) at max brightness. To me, this alone was worth upgrading. The tint on the PW2 is yellowish, so I think that's why the light looks more even now and the patches of light along the bottom are not noticeable. I think they are still there, just camouflaged by the yellow light. I didn't realize how bluish the PW1 was until I had both side by side. I was happy with the PW1, but the improvement of the light on the PW2 really impressed me. I am so happy!!

I don't know if anyone else has mentioned it already, but the light on the PW2 is actually DIMMER than the PW1 at their lowest setting. However, the PW2 is brighter than the PW1 at their max setting. I know some people were concerned that since the PW2 is brighter, it would be too bright at its lowest setting, but I guess Amazon thought of that.

[sparklemotion]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

and use the durned thing instead of looking for problems

I shall do exactly that.

[Darkuul]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Nice to hear. Then now return the one from Amazon (or put it into the Best Buy box and return it to them ) and use the durned thing instead of looking for problems



I did exactly this with the KPW1 last year. For me, the setting is 12, to compare against a bright white page without making the scrreen look like it's lighted. It'll be different for the KPW2 of course, and it'll also differ depending on the ambient light.

This was the closest I could get (KPW1)

That's precisely what I was thinking. Thanks a lot, I definitely see the possibility of supplenting ambient in a subtle way and make it even more readable than print. Awesome feedback, and excellent book choice

Originally Posted by Outrager

I'm running out of sunlight, but I'll try to get some more up.

Woot! Thanks a lot!

[NiLuJe]

@Barty: The keyword here being "k3". A whole 'nother beast than the K5 .

Although it did suffer from the exact same kind of issues, the impact, as you said, was limited to disrupting the UI at worse. (And the workaround was already the same: use a vanilla freetype build).

Hence my numerous warnings on both the K2/3/4 & K5 fonts hack docs. The issue is exacerbated with the K5 (and particularly the PW, since we can't kubrick it) because of the inability to recover from the 'Your Kindle Needs Repair' (YKNR) screen with a vanilla/nearly-vanilla device without resorting to opening it up, unlike the previous models, where the recovery was more easily accessible and/or a hard factory reset was a possibility.

[Outrager]

Originally Posted by Darkuul

Excellent idea, comparing it to actual paper! Could I bother you with additional images of that setup, but at different brighness settings, say middle and full, I'm interested to see if the light itself makes the screen look whiter and more like the page at some point. Mayble you could find the sweetspot at which it looks almost the same as the paper (at your particular ambience light levels, I know it will vary)

The first set is with the exposure locked for the set so the paper should be the same in all of them.

The second set is with auto exposure so the paper gets darker as I increase the brightness.

I hope these help.

I'm not sure if it's my camera or my monitor, but in person the light is whiter than in the pictures.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@Barty: The keyword here being "k3". A whole 'nother beast than the K5 .

Although it did suffer from the exact same kind of issues, the impact, as you said, was limited to disrupting the UI at worse. (And the workaround was already the same: use a vanilla freetype build).

It makes one wonder why Amazon did/does not use a Vanilla Freetype build, and include 12 or even more fonts per default. Tweaking them to look good on the KPW is not very difficult.

[anywho]

Originally Posted by booklover6

I took some pictures, but can't really tell anything from them. I can say the text on the PW2 is darker, the screen is lighter, and the USE_ALT_FONTS trick does NOT WORK!!!

Yeah! I just noticed. I'm so sad about this! argh :/

[NiLuJe]

@Katsunami: Because they use a number of hard-coded stuff to tweak (at the very least) Caecilia's rendering. The most obvious one being Caecilia Condensed.

Try rendering the Caecilia Condensed font files with vanilla Freetype: it's not really condensed at all .

That doesn't really answer why they do it this way, but it at least somewhat explains the situation .


At least we got a pretty good full serif font in the form of Palatino with the PW... And Caecilia itself is also a pretty damn good slab serif. I'm mostly happy with the fonts available, with the glaring exception of Helvetica, which I simply can't stand (so I was pretty glad with the switch to Futura in most of the UI on the PW).
What I dearly miss is decent control over the margins, line-spacing, font sizes, and hyphenation, possibly contrast & hinting tweaks as a bonus.
Being able to tweak the renderer and/or font files to be able to control those felt a bit overkill .

(Wouldn't have stopped me though, my desktop ft+fc setup is pretty particular, and it's a topic I feel strongly about ).

[Darkuul]

Originally Posted by Outrager

The first set is with the exposure locked for the set so the paper should be the same in all of them.

The second set is with auto exposure so the paper gets darker as I increase the brightness.

I hope these help.

I'm not sure if it's my camera or my monitor, but in person the light is whiter than in the pictures.

Those are perfect! To be honest I doubt there will be any issue with the whiteness, from what I've seen, the device does an outstanding job at delivering a very paperlike experience. I'm really happy that I decided on this model to be my first e-ink reader. Thanks for all the trouble, and enjoy your PW2!

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by xendula

I just got mine. I'll post more impressions and pictures later, but for now:


The screen:

• I unfortunately have a few tiny pinholes on the screen where the light shines through - waiting to see if they bother me when reading, but I find this very disappointing.
  

I think you can tell by the tone of this entry that I am not as over the top happy as I thought I would be... That's because of the pinholes

Oh no! You would think they would have fix this issue. Mine are so tiny on my PW1 unless I go looking for them I can't see them.

A good way to check for pin holes is to try different fonts on the page. They often hide behind the text till you hit to certain pages.

So far with the initial reports I am thinking of holding off for awhile to maybe the third or forth batch. I did that last time and got a really good one.