Large screen, clear, simple.

[FlyHero]

My quest for a large screen replacement for a Kindle 4NT has been frustrating. What I am looking for:

-7" to 8" display preferred. Larger end of that the better.
-Very clear display (light background/dark text) when unlit
-Good font choices/adjustibility (weight and size like Kobo...not 2 or 3 choices like a Nook)
-Light must be able to turn totally off
-No difficult to source/support devices
-No asymmetric devices like Oasis and Forma
-If lit then no splotchy or uneven lights.

I use Calibre, don't care about book format as long as I can convert, do not use WiFi or stores on the device, don't sync or share. Simple is good and the display clarity/reading experience is all I really care about.

I am about to return a Kobo H202 as the display is just too dark. Nooks are too dark. Kindles I have seen are always in demo mode with light on 100% so cannot assesss but I do recall a Paperwhite 2 I tried a couple of years ago was much worse than the 4NT in clarity so I returned it. Basically I want a scaled up version of the 4NT display...anything like touch, lighting, features is a bonus.

Thanks for looking

[Sirtel]

The K4 has a Pearl screen. Those look better unlit than Carta screens on modern readers. Carta screens on my Voyage and both the Oases look pretty bad when unlit, but great with the frontlight on at low to middle levels.

In short, I doubt you'll find a modern eink screen that looks as good unlit as the old K4.

[FlyHero]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

The K4 has a Pearl screen. Those look better unlit than Carta screens on modern readers. Carta screens on my Voyage and both the Oases look pretty bad when unlit, but great with the frontlight on at low to middle levels.

In short, I doubt you'll find a modern eink screen that looks as good unlit as the old K4.

Not killing the messenger but this depresses me greatly. It is a regression to me not an improvement. I don't want to use the light, I have discomfort with a lot of LED lighting for some reason, and prefer overhead/natural light but it is uncomfortable with dark displays. Give me the K4 display in a 7.8" device and I am set. Despite the "low" PPI it's the best E-Reader experience I have ever had. Sad what I want isn't out there.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by hap124

Not killing the messenger but this depresses me greatly. It is a regression to me not an improvement. I don't want to use the light, I have discomfort with a lot of LED lighting for some reason, and prefer overhead/natural light but it is uncomfortable with dark displays. Give me the K4 display in a 7.8" device and I am set. Despite the "low" PPI it's the best E-Reader experience I have ever had. Sad what I want isn't out there.

I understand perfectly, as I used a K4 as my main reader for a couple of years. When I got my Voyage, I was disappointed at first, because its unlit screen looked much worse than the K4. But the trick with modern screens is to set the frontlight so high the screen looks lighter/whiter, but not so high it actually looks like a lit screen. When I read in the artificial light, I usually set the frontlight at level 9 and the screen looks pretty good to me, better than my old K4 looked in the same environment.

[FlyHero]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I understand perfectly, as I used a K4 as my main reader for a couple of years. When I got my Voyage, I was disappointed at first, because its unlit screen looked much worse than the K4. But the trick with modern screens is to set the frontlight so high the screen looks lighter/whiter, but not so high it actually looks like a lit screen. When I read in the artificial light, I usually set the frontlight at level 9 and the screen looks pretty good to me, better than my old K4 looked in the same environment.

Yeah I have noticed you can somewhat compensate using the light to make it "look" lighter in a given ambient light, but I don't want to have to do that and can never feel like I am in the right spot as just tilting the device a bit, or when clouds pass over or anything changes I see the glowing. I also don't do well with LED lighting for morethan a few min. I get headaches with LED devices and under LED room lighting over longer periods. I'd rather just have a beautiful light screen and not have to compensate for a worse natural clarity with frontlighting, but it's not an option it seems. Sitting by a window on a bright day the Kobo is "good enough" but seems very sensitive to variations in ambient light and is very distracting to me. Something I never even thought of with the old Kindle.

[rkomar]

The light layer, although transparent, does make the text a little less sharp. Capacitive touch layers may make the screen darker (my Inkpad has a golden-brown tinge to it). So, what you really want is a screen without a front light layer or capacitive touch layer. You can find larger devices without the front light, but I suspect that most have the touch layer on them these days. Devices that require a pen probably have the sensor underneath the display, so maybe you could focus on those. Perhaps an Onyx or Remarkable note-taking device is what you need, as long as it has software for reading epubs?