600 ppi this year or next? Good ereader speculates

[sydmalicious]

Will We See 500 or 600 PPI e-Paper Displays in 2019 or 2020?

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.

What do you think?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Barbara1955]

My My My Does Any one need something they just read on that high? Not me!

I Do wish Tablet would be that High. I Know that Amazon Fire Phones are Over 300 PPi I Loved reading on mine. But the Tablets .... Nope & I Hate reading on them.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by Barbara1955

My My My Does Any one need something they just read on that high? Not me!

I Do wish Tablet would be that High. I Know that Amazon Fire Phones are Over 300 PPi I Loved reading on mine. But the Tablets .... Nope & I Hate reading on them.

the discontinued Fire HDX tablets are over 300 dpi. i guess they were not popular enough or the profit margins were lower - so discontinued, but you can still get used ones. The HDX 8.9 is much better than the current HD10 tablet, IMHO. It is well worth sacrificing an inch of screen for the improved display and better sound

or you can get a good quality android tablet with 300+ DPI if you carefully study specs before buying. e.g. My 10 inch Yoga 3 plus has a great display

I am pretty sure that science backs up your comments, the human eye cannot distinguish 600 from 300. around 300 is where it becomes impossible to see individual pixels.

similar nonsense gets hyped for screen refresh - gamers buy displays and graphics systems they can refresh at over 100 fps but the eye maxes about at around 60 fps. There a season why movies are still made at 24fps. that;s all you need to convince eye & brain that the big screen picture is " moving"

then there is the ultimate hype of 24 bit hifi music encoding. yet another case of "the marketing may entice but your ears cannot tell the difference". actual A/B blind tests confirm that most people cannot even tell mp3 from CD!

Originally Posted by sydmalicious

Will We See 500 or 600 PPI e-Paper Displays in 2019 or 2020?

What do you think?

What do I think? I think, "why?" For e-ink, what's the point? My H2O2 is 265 ppi, and side by side with my 300ppi Clara, I couldn't really tell the difference. For reading text, ~300 seems absolutely fine. For full colour displays like tablets and phones, higher res makes sense, but not for e-readers, imo.

[mbovenka]

Agreed, 300 dpi is Good Enough (it's as good as the first laser printers were). I'd like E-Ink to focus on improving contrast now.

[rvcjew]

I would argue yeah, I have glaucoma and am very near sighted so not greatest sample size but I can see the pixels of the HD Carta screens and it's why I did not go for the 10 inch readers as the 300 ppi on the t80d and the T80S I can already see them. My phones also have way more pixels and still I can see them sometimes but it's much harder ( v20 1440 x 2560 pixels, 16:9 ratio (~513 ppi density), (note 9 1440 x 2960 pixels, 18.5:9 ratio (~516 ppi density). The bigger the device the ppi it really should strive for. My X1C5 has a 1440p screen at 209 ppi and it's also very seeable if you run it at 1080p for instance. So for most it might not matter much but for a device in bed you might have closer to your face I prefer the higher ppi.
Malcolm

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Barbara1955

My My My Does Any one need something they just read on that high? Not me!

Nope.
Not for ebooks.
Color displays can take advantage of that but not grayscale. It's overkill.
(Yes, the eink film can easily do it but the substrate to address that pixel count would drive up the price for no perceptible benefit.)

Plus... consider the source.

[Barty]

What we need is better contrast. Contrast on eink Carta is a comically low 15:1, and it's probably worse than that once you add touch and light layers on top. (Contrast of good ink on non glossy paper is about 200:1) But I guess it's easier (albeit not cheap) to throw on more DPI.

[GeoffR]

I am a human and I can easily see the quality difference between 600dpi and 1200dpi with laser printed text, so the idea that the human eye cannot tell the difference is simply nonsense.

(Edit: That's not to say it is a particularly important difference, there are other things that are much more important for reading than high dpi, such as using a well-designed font, good typesetting, fine-tuning layout to suit personal preferences, etc. )

[barryem]

I have a Paperwhite with 212ppi and one with 300ppi and I can't see the difference. I do have 20/20 vision with glasses on.

The other side of that is the several comments that say we're just reading on it so it doesn't matter and I think that's backwards. High resolution is more important for text than for images. Although I think we have it high as we need right now.

If the next generation of ereaders are 600ppi that won't keep me from getting one but it'll probably reduce battery life and I hope it doesn't happen.

Barry

[ilovejedd]

Curious though wouldn't higher pixel density help with contrast?

Comparing side by side, text on the PW2 looks more washed out and fuzzy compared to the PW3. Same goes for line art and small text when reading manga. To me, the difference is noticeable during normal (manga) reading, too. I'd often need to zoom in on text on the PW2 to make it legible. Never had to do that for the PW3.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by sydmalicious

Will We See 500 or 600 PPI e-Paper Displays in 2019 or 2020?

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.

What do you think?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Image quality is the result of a combination of factors, only one of them is pixel density.

All generations of the iPad Pros have exactly the same DPI (264). The 12.9” models all have the same pixel resolution (2732x2048). The smaller iPad Pros have had progressively larger screens (9.7>10.5>11) and thus progressively larger pixel resolutions. If the newer ones are crisper, it is not because of having higher pixel density; probably it is color gamut has improved or something like that.

In the case of iPhone 8 Plus vs iPhone XS Max, the pixel density has gone modestly up (from 401 to 458) but the main difference is that the former is LCD+IPS whereas the latter is OLED. OLED gives 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio (because it has ‘true black’ pixels) whereas LCD is ‘only’ 1300:1 (black pixels still emit light). Both phones are calibrated to the same maximum brightness (625 cd/m2).

I read with black theme so OLED difference is pretty noticeable, and at least theoretically photos and video will look a little better (though that matters less to me).

Slap a 300 DPI OLED screen on my Kindle and I will be happy!

Seriously, 600 dpi eInk does not interest me at all.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Barty

What we need is better contrast. Contrast on eink Carta is a comically low 15:1, and it's probably worse than that once you add touch and light layers on top. (Contrast of good ink on non glossy paper is about 200:1) But I guess it's easier (albeit not cheap) to throw on more DPI.

The latest/greatest inks on high gloss paper with all the brighteners it can hold can hit 200:1. Some manufacturers claim up to 275:1 but those claims don't seem realizable in the real world even using 4 black inks.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Slap a 300 DPI OLED screen on my Kindle and I will be happy!

Seriously, 600 dpi eInk does not interest me at all.

Hmmm... I suspect you would not be happy for that long. OLED does use quite a bit more power than eInk.

OTOH, you used resolution properly. So many times, people seem to confuse DPI/PPI and resolution.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Curious though wouldn't higher pixel density help with contrast?

Comparing side by side, text on the PW2 looks more washed out and fuzzy compared to the PW3. Same goes for line art and small text when reading manga. To me, the difference is noticeable during normal (manga) reading, too. I'd often need to zoom in on text on the PW2 to make it legible. Never had to do that for the PW3.

Higher dpi doesn't affect contrast in itself, but then fuzzyness is not a lack of contrast but rather a lack of sharpness.

On greyscale or colour screens, software anti-aliasing is often used to increase smoothness at the expense of sharpness. A 600 dpi screen could achieve the same smoothness as a 300dpi screen without as much anti-aliasing, and so text could be sharper (less fuzzy) at the same smoothness setting.

Personally, as with high dpi, I don't think a high contrast ratio is anywhere near as important for reading as a well-designed font and the ability to fine-tune the font weight and sharpness settings.

(Edit: Also, fonts often use hinting at small sizes, which sacrifices the fine shape of glyphs to allow a simpler pixel representation. Higher dpi screens can reduce the need for hinting and so fonts can appear sharper at small sizes without sacrificing shape.)