600 ppi this year or next? Good ereader speculates

[haertig]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

55", eyes about 4' from screen.

That's going to give you quite the immersive experience! Our family room shape/size/walkways does not lend itself to us getting much closer to our screen (stairs leading down to the room in the middle, low overhead ceiling in one part, high vaulted ceiling in another).

For example, a 1 pixel wide black line on a white background will be black if it is registered with a line of pixels, but it will be mid-gray and double width if its midpoint is between two lines of pixels.

That makes sense. I don't know, but imagine, that this second case would not necessarily be perceived as a wider line, depending on viewing distance. But it would be perceived as a lower contrast line. Which would be interpreted as "less sharp". So now I'll defer and state that I agree with you technically. But I'm not sure that practically there would be much, if any advantage to the higher resolution. I doubt there are many instances of single pixel width lines being displayed on an eReader, and I doubt there are many people who view from a close enough distance and on a large enough eInk screen to really notice a single pixel line. Possibly though, I'm just speculating. Many people do indeed use significantly smaller font sizes than I do.

But you have convinced me - technically, I agree with your point. You would be a good debater.

[GeoffR]

For anyone sceptical that you would be able to see differences between a 300 dpi and 600 dpi or higher screen, here is an experiment you can try using your current ereader:

Attached is a simple ePub book that has two pages. On the first page are two squares, the inner thick square is drawn in a two-pixel-wide stroke and the outer thin square drawn in a one-pixel-wide stroke. The second page has the same but with a thin inner square and thick outer square.

I can read comfortably holding my ereader at 25cm from my eye, so I tried at increasing distances of 50cm, 1m, 2m, 4m, and 8m to see if I could still see the squares and tell which was the thick one and which the thin. The light conditions were overcast near midday.

Up to and including 4m I could still easily see the squares and distinguish which one is thick and which thin. At 8m I could no longer see the thin square.

My ereader has a 212dpi pearl screen, so at 4m I calculate the squares appear the same size to my eye as they would on a 16x212 = 3392dpi screen held at 25cm, and at 8m as they would on a 32x212 = 6784dpi screen.

Edit: I should just add in conclusion: Since a one-pixel-wide line on a 1200dpi screen is the same width as a two-pixel-wide line on a 2400dpi screen, I think from what I found above that I would be able to see the difference in thickness of a one-pixel-wide line at normal reading distance as the screen density increases from 300dpi to 600dpi, 1200dpi, 2400dpi. Maybe 4800dpi.

[David Munch]

Originally Posted by sydmalicious

I don’t know if it is necessary but the commenters suggested that it is contrast that needs to improve not the resolution. A guy in the comments argued you can’t really discern the difference in resolution from 300 ppi to 600 ppi as the human eye isn’t capable of seeing those details. Perhaps, but I have the iPhone XS Max and latest iPad Pro and it seems much of those displays are noticeably crisper than my 1st gen iPad Pro and iPhone 8 Plus.

iPhone XS Max: 458 PPI
iPhone 8 Plus: 401 PPI
iPad Pro 3. generation: 264 PPI
iPad Pro 1. generation: 264 PPI

So yeah, contrast is probably preferable, if we can only get one parameter improved on eBooks.

[k1sh]

Originally Posted by maximus83

My brother-in-law is a professor of engineering and has mentioned the same issue. I'm curious what is the minimum size screen that you find necessary to read those comfortably? For me it'd be more like 12 inches, from the few that I've seen.

A letter-size paper is 13.9" diagonally. But I guess what you said (12") should be good enough. Unfortunately the largest ones at 300 DPI are 7.8". The thing is that the vast majority of consumers want something portable for reading simple text. So I think there will be a long time until what I'm looking for comes out.

[binaryhermit]

Given that the waterproofing and bluetooth isn't enough to make me get a PW4, I don't think 600ppi would do the trick either

[Philippe D.]

Originally Posted by k1sh

What I'm waiting to see is large (9" and above) e-readers with 300 DPI. I read professional PDF from scientific journals and books for my work, and most of them are in 2-columns and small font, so it would be nice to be able to have the entire page on the screen and be able to read it.

The Remarkable is about 10". Its resolution is only 225 dpi, though.

I find it quite comfortable to read my scientific PDFs, but then they tend not to be double column and not too small font; it might be different for you.

It's also able to crop margins, and will do so consistently if your PDF doesn't have different margins on left and right pages. This makes the useful display size closer to the original intended font size.

(The software on the Remarkable has lots of problems IMHO, but when reading short PDF files they are not too bad. Longer files [books] are less comfortable; when you jump to a distant page on a 700-pages long file, it takes some time to display. Still, I'm very happy with it)