Sage Color ever?

[Prepper]

I have the Sage and love it. The battery is fine, I charge it about once a week (I charge my iPhone nightly on my nightstand while I sleep, so charging things is expected). I had an Aura One, and my wife claimed it. I got the Forma to replace it and had some battery issues after a while (random drains down to 0 in a day) so replaced it with the Sage -- I just like 8" screens.

My nephew got a Libra Color for Christmas and loves it, but I like the slightly bigger screen of the Sage. Do you think there will ever be a Sage Color?

[Cactus Chef]

If there's enough demand for it, maybe. I wouldn't be interested unless it's B&W mode maintained the same display density as the current Sage--sacrificing it for the benefit of color display that would only realistically be used for my book covers, would not be worth it.

Alot of the demand for 8" e-Ink readers is driven by people who want to read manga on it, anyway, which is also traditionally black-and-white. So, no benefit there.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

If there's enough demand for it, maybe. I wouldn't be interested unless it's B&W mode maintained the same display density as the current Sage--sacrificing it for the benefit of color display that would only realistically be used for my book covers, would not be worth it.

Alot of the demand for 8" e-Ink readers is driven by people who want to read manga on it, anyway, which is also traditionally black-and-white. So, no benefit there.

That would need a 600 dpi panel. Also it would be unusable with no front light. I almost never use the front light on my Sage.

If my Sage is too small I use my Nxtpaper 11 or NxtPaper 14.

I'd sooner want an 8″ 4:3 Nxtpaper than a colour eink. A 6″ 4:3 would be good too. I dislike 16:9 and 16:10 etc for reading.


One size does not fit all. Magazines often need the 3:2 14.25″ and novels work well on the 8″, but 6″ or 5″ is good for a jacket or pocket or in a bus, but only in 4:3, 5:4 or 3:2, not "widescreen" or longer.

[Quoth]

Here is second hand Oynx Boox Tab Ultra C (Color eink) in CEX, Limerick, Ireland. €500.
A 10.3″ screen, but based on a 1404×1872, so 227 PPI/DPI (same as Elipsa) in artefact ridden mono. Colour (or Artefact free mono) is 702 x 936, so 113.5 dpi
Very bright display lighting.


Note how dark and washed out it is. Oddly less matt than most of my mono eink screens. S/H on Amazon Germany €563 + shipping

If you want to avoid colour artefacts you have to use it at 113.5 dpi in mono, because the 227 dpi underneath panel has
R G
G B
matrix of translucent coloured dots that don't fill the pixels (so as to make it a bit lighter, but also makes colours look faded. Obviously a Colourised Sage would be 150 dpi and pseudo 300 dpi.

Taken earlier this week. A TCL Nxtpaper 11 (10.9″, approx 16:10 aspect, Nxtpaper 2.0) or TCL Nxtpaper 14 (14.25″, 3:2 aspect, Nxtpaper 3.0) is much cheaper and better.

Note that LCD and OLED vendors, even using subpixel addressing to sharpen the text, only ever quote the colour resolution. All LCD panels (inc QLED) are really only mono and filtered (QLED only has red and green "quantum" dots with a blue back light), reducing the resolution to give the claimed resolution.

[DNSB]

One friend of mine is currently using a 8" Gallery 3 display with a Raspberry Pi as an less than portable ereader. He picked up the display and Concerto(??) driver board from an eBay listing. The display is pretty decent but page updates while faster than some earlier versions is still a lot slower than monochrome. A project for someone who wants to spend more time twiddling with the hardware than actually reading.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

If there's enough demand for it, maybe. I wouldn't be interested unless it's B&W mode maintained the same display density as the current Sage--sacrificing it for the benefit of color display that would only realistically be used for my book covers, would not be worth it.

Alot of the demand for 8" e-Ink readers is driven by people who want to read manga on it, anyway, which is also traditionally black-and-white. So, no benefit there.

B&W display density is the same. Yes, there's some contrast loss and some people might be bothered by the color filter layer but it's just as sharp.

While a lot of manga is B&W it's really common for a half dozen or dozen or so pages in a volume to be color.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

B&W display density is the same. Yes, there's some contrast loss and some people might be bothered by the color filter layer but it's just as sharp.
.

It's not as sharp.
That's physically impossible unless the colour layer is removed, or you don't have any colour vision. That's why no LCD maker quotes the native mono resolution of the panels.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

It's not as sharp.
That's physically impossible unless the colour layer is removed, or you don't have any colour vision. That's why no LCD maker quotes the native mono resolution of the panels.

For B&W content it's just as sharp*. There's just as many B&W eInk cells. Quoting the "mono" resolution of an LCD makes no sense because you can't possibly use all the subpixels simultaneously to drive a higher res image. On Kaleido eInk you can use all the cells to do B&W text, so it's not the same. LCD manufacturers do sometimes play BS resolution games if they can, see basically every PenTile display ever.

*Yes, technically there is a small sharpness loss from the color layer, but there's also one from the touch layer, pen layer, possible glass screen layer, screen protector etc. but a 300 PPI B&W Kaleido screen does not appear half as sharp as you imply. Contrast loss is very noticeable, sharpness not so much.