jkOnTheRun guy gives up on the Kindle: Not enough screen contrast for him
E Ink screens are better than when Sony announced its first Reader for the U.S. market, but they could still stand improvement, lots of it. That’s why James Kindle of the jkOnTheRun blog has given up on his Kindle. In his words:
“Trying to use it for so long has led me to realize that the places in my house where I normally read e-books are just too darkly lit. The relatively low contrast ratio of the E Ink technology combined with the lack of a backlight means you need to be in a well-lit area to read e-books on the Kindle or other E Ink devices. The few places where I sit comfortably to read are not well-lit areas and the Kindle just doesn’t work for that reason alone. I have tried so hard to make it work but I don’t want to change my reading routine just so I can use the Kindle so I have given up. I know that the E Ink technology is cool but the contrast ratio of the Kindle is far worse than a real paper book for example. The page is not white enough and the ink is not dark enough to make it work for me given the lighting I have to work with.
“I can read regular books fine in this lighting but the Kindle makes me constantly strain to do the same and I just don’t want to continue trying. A backlit solution like the HTC Advantage has both the ability to read e-books in poor (or absent) lighting and also a very high contrast ratio with the page being totally white and the ink very black. So I have shelved the Kindle for now until some advancement in the future makes it more practical for me.’
Related: Cybook tip: The Embolden feature—letting you bold even DMRed e-books for MUCH better reading with E Ink, an earlier TeleBlog item. Will the new firmware update for the Sony PRS-505 have the equivalent of embolden to help deal with contrast issues?
(Big thanks to Mike Cane.)
January 21st, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Amen, I am so in agreement with this.
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Er, how about installing a lamp or something in your reading area? If your lighting is so bad you can’t read a Kindle there, its probably not doing your eyes any great favor to read paper books there either. You can get a nice little halogen floor or desk lamp for pretty cheap at your local hardware store, Target, etc.
I understand not wanting to make changes, but you must not be that afraid of change if you got a Kindle in the first place. So why not bust out and get some better lighting in your reading space!
That being said, if your use case is that you don’t read in daylight (outside, in a train, office, your house during daytime, etc.) and only read in darkness or very poor lighting, a backlit LCD may be a better fit.
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:35 am
Hi, EE. That’s a good assessment of the situation. I myself have considered a stronger light. Still, that cancels out the energy-saving advantages of E Ink. Stick around. Thanks for your thoughts. - David
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 am
Sure, you would be using more power, and E Ink is ‘low power’. But the low power aspect, at least in devices this size, is more about saving battery power to allow longer times between recharges, being able to design smaller batteries, use solar or human power for recharging, etc., than about cutting carbon emissions.
The amount of energy used by a backlit LCD over an E Ink screen is substantial when you are talking about battery life of a sub 1000mAh battery or the output of a small solar panel, but utterly trivial when thinking about energy use on a global scale. A quick calculation of this, assuming a backlit LCD uses about 3W more average power than a similar E Ink screen, indicates that the power saved by the E Ink screen over an hour of reading is equivalent to that used by driving an average car about 5 meters. So even if you read 3 hours a night every day of the year, the amount of energy you would have saved with E Ink is about like driving your car 3 miles less for the whole year…
Anyway, my point is just that the power savings for E Ink are very real and matter a lot in some ways; but global environmental impact is probably not one of them. Also true is that burning a halogen bulb for a few hours a night is going to use a lot more power than the backlit LCD, but its also not at all significant in terms of global impact.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Turns out that’s something of a myth. The British Medical Journal did a study in December: turkey doesn’t make you sleepy, no need to drink 8 glasses of water a day (you already get most of the liquid you need by eating food), and reading in dim light doesn’t damage your eyes.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Hey Bill, that was an interesting article! Thanks for the link.