4 greyscales enough?

[ProDigit]

4 greyscales, does that mean:
1- White
2- Light grey
3- Dark grey
4- Black ?

or:

1- White, 2- Light grey, 3- medium light grey, 4- Medium dark grey, 5- Dark grey, 6- Black
?

Do you think 4 grey colors are enough or should I go with a 100$ more expensive 8 grey color model?

I use pdf format books with pictures.

The more grey tints can be displayed (like e.g.:8 or 16 tints), do you find it it annoying to read old scanned books where the paper appears with smaller light grey stains?

I have some books I want to scan and bring to the device.

Thank you.

[DaleDe]

4 Gray scale devices mean 4 levels like your first case. Black - dark gray - light gray - white. The Sony 505 and 700 have 8 levels and the iRex products have 16 levels. All are Gray scale. No e-INk device currently shipping has color.

[HarryT]

In practical terms, the difference that the number of "grey scales" makes is minimal for displaying images. All the devices currently on the market have excellent "dithering" algorithms which "synthesise" extra shades of grey very effectively. Pictures on eInk devices are roughly the same quality as newspaper pictures, if you want a realistic expectation of how they'll look.

[DDHarriman]

For the question: 4 greyscales enough?
Answer: yes!

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by DDHarriman

For the question: 4 greyscales enough?
Answer: yes!

Actually I would guess it depends on how picky you are: Here are some 16 level images on the iLiad for you to study. I think they are better that 4 level.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...hlight=medical

Dale

[ProDigit]

yah,16 tint grey is a bit of a waste I think...
I'd rather pay less for 8tint.

I just want to see 4 tint first before making a decision... However I'm pretty sure with 4 greyscales you can not really make a lot of detailed photo's or the photo's need to be dirthered (same thing as with 8 grayscale).
So far the tablets with 8 greyscale photo's look pretty much like a 256color pictures on a monitor, only now without color...

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

yah,16 tint grey is a bit of a waste I think...
I'd rather pay less for 8tint.

I just want to see 4 tint first before making a decision... However I'm pretty sure with 4 greyscales you can not really make a lot of detailed photo's or the photo's need to be dirthered (same thing as with 8 grayscale).
So far the tablets with 8 greyscale photo's look pretty much like a 256color pictures on a monitor, only now without color...

Yea, I wish I had some good images to show you. Those on the iLiad were the only ones I could find. Generally these device favor text and images get second billing. However, the Sony is the only 6" reader that even goes beyond 4 level. They clearly have the latest and greatest controller. The new 700 may be even better but we haven't seen it yet.

Dale

[ProDigit]

I've seen some youtube video's of the 700, but it basically uses the same screen and amount of greytints.

I'm really not convinced the 700 is much of a step forward. The side leds make it look like a primitive PDA, and you're forced flipping pages with the touchscreen.
However I'm not fond of the buttons on a 505 neither. Clicking buttons need to be of high quality will it still function 2 years and maybe 200.000 pages down the road...

I'm only basing my presumptions on the pre-order page of Sony:
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/...52921665562069

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Those on the iLiad were the only ones I could find.

I have a few from the Kindle, see Optimizing images for use in Kindle and All on the Mac: PDFs with Formatting!. The pineapple image greyscales well (for the original in color and on the iLiad see Questions about iLiad's capabilities and whatnot). Note that your browser may not initially show these screenshots full size, click on them again to fix this.

I have found that rendering color images on the iLiad is very hit and miss - some work very well but others do not. The biggest problem, though, is that images are almost always too small for the iLiad and even for the Kindle. At least the Kindle automatically magnifies small images.

[ProDigit]

you mean it displays the images too small, or you mean that the kindle's screen is too small to display the images?

[HarryT]

He means that many MobiPocket books (the format which the Kindle uses) were originally formatted for the small screens of PDAs, and hence have very small images.

New MobiPocket books generally don't have this problem.

[ProDigit]

Oh, I also see the dirthering using 4 tint grey is quite nice.
Do you need to first convert the images to a B&W image, or does the dirthering happen on the fly (on the machine)?

[HarryT]

It will dither "on the fly", but you'll often get better results if you first convert the picture to grey-scale in an image-processing application (PaintShop Pro, PhotoShop, etc).

[gwynevans]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

However I'm not fond of the buttons on a 505 neither. Clicking buttons need to be of high quality will it still function 2 years and maybe 200.000 pages down the road...

Not sure what you're getting at here - The Sony buttons seem to be good quality & I don't recall seeing any reports of them being problematic.

[WillAdams]

Two levels of grey and black and white worked out quite nicely on my NeXT Cube....

William