Tablet or Reader ??

[Manaro]

Tablet or Reader ? which is better for eyes ? what about battery ,stay it in Ereader longer?

the first important thing for me is reading and i have heard that the Tablets are not comfortable for eyes.

whats your opinion ?

[tubemonkey]

The eyes bit in reference to an LCD tablet is a personal thing and varies from individual to individual. It bothers my eyes for prolonged reading (novels), but is fine for short attention span reading (magazine articles, web browsing).

I read my books exclusively on a Kindle Keyboard and refuse to read them on a tablet.

The advantages of an eInk ereader vs an LCD tablet are:

• smaller size -- easier to hold one handed
• much lighter weight -- 6~8oz vs 14~16oz (7") vs 21~26oz (10")
• much longer battery life: 15~30 hrs vs 7~10 hrs
• eyes bit: subjective, YMMV

And welcome to the board

[Sweetpea]

1) Battery life: e-ink based reader. Not even a fair comparison there.
2) Eyes: the discussion is still out there. Some will swear to e-ink, others to LCD and a third group to both.

The problem with backlit devices is that people often leave the backlight to 100% and use a white background with black letters. Which will cause a headache within the minute.

Advantages of e-ink (leaving out battery life): stable, no refresh. In general (especially the Pearl screens) decent to good contrast.
Disadvantage: if there's not a lot of light (you might just be able to read a normal paper book), the e-ink will be harder to read and you'll need extra light. Some people don't like the refresh flash when paging (though most won't even notice it anymore after the first time...)
In-the-middle: not really handy if you also want to use the device to do some internet stuff. It will work, mostly, but can be a pain. I leave this in the middle as you might or might not want to be able to do that. And it's only gray-scale atm (again, not interesting if you only read novels with it)

Advantages of LCD: backlit, which means you can also use it in bad light conditions. If you get a decent tablet, you'll get good to great contrast.
Disadvantage (not counting battery life): sometimes the backlight can be too much, especially if you don't turn it down the darker it get.
In-the-middle: A tablet is more a multi-purpose device. Internet, movie, social media (shudder), pictures, etc. Also, reading comic books will most often be more pleasurable, due to the colour screens.


Personally, I have both. I read on my Sony or BBMini (both e-ink) during the day, mostly in summer (not enough day in winter...) and on my Flyer at night and in winter. And during our holiday this summer (3 weeks trekking with only a car and a tent), an e-ink device with that long battery life was very handy!

[Ekaros]

Question is do you want device for reading? Or general computing like internet, youtube and email? Do you want to read magazines or pdfs on it?

Purely for reading and mainly just for fiction eReader is a good thing. If you just occasionaly want to browse net and do so on mainly text based sites you might survive with a reader which has wifi.

Tablet is a good choise if you used it for other things too like youtube, games, lot of browsing and magazines.

And yes, battery last much longer in eink devices as there is no backlight and screen is updated less often.

[pmcnz]

Hi,
I've been looking at the same question and my conclusions so far are:
I can use an 6inch E-ink reader for reading books (fiction / non-fiction with no or few pictures) but I don't want to use it for any other kind of text reading. It took a while to optimise it for reading (customised fonts, line spacing, scaling text size) due to my aged eyes not coping well with small text.

I plan to buy a larger size tablet (8" to 9") as a "text information device" for reading text from sources other than ebook files (e.g. PDF, internet blogs, internet news websites) and the key factors I am considering are PPI greater than 160, weight under 400gms and battery life greater than 6 hours. This may or may not help.
Paul