Comment on E Ink goes mobile with budget eye-friendly smartphone
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I mean that’s really sick and I hope it does well because I’d love to see that tech go further. Fairly tempted as I don’t watch/play games much on my phone anyways.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
They’ve made several e-ink phones by now.
It’s just not suited for it. Even though it CAN do fairly smooth animation, it always looks like absolute ass due to the ghosting.
The tech is doing fine tho. There are two decent ways to do color now (one fast, one slow), and the picture quality is mind-boggling when you let it refresh properly. It’s absolutely fantastic for reading books, but it’s only gotten better for my favorite use-case, which is comics and manga. The ability to do color adds so much.
It’s also in use in a ton of industries. There are re-usable eink price-tags for store shelves that you can put price and product info on. While just sitting there showing info, they use no power, while still being able to be updated digitally when needed.
I also realized the live timetable at my local bus-stop is actually a giant eink panel. Which makes so much sense. Compared to a giant LCD panel it uses orders of magnitude less power, and is even more readable in daylight without any kind of backlight, and it only needs to update once a minute. It doesn’t show any info with more than 60 second precision anyway.
But eink simply cannot compete with LCD/OLED in terms of emissive color quality and refresh rate. While it straight up wins in terms of daylight readability, longevity and power efficiency. Supposedly the panels lose contrast over time, but I’ve never noticed it happening myself, even on decades old devices.
For normal use tho, eink sucks. I avoid ever using my ereader for anything except actually reading. Writing, doing any kind of browsing, (even to find something to read), is horrible. It’s like using a phone with gloves on, but all the time.
The experience is at its best when you just continue reading something you already had open, and only ever interact with the display or a button to turn the page. The moment you need to pan, zoom, select something, use and on-screen keyboard, etc. you start wishing you could use something else.
I literally use my phone to find what to read, then switch to the ereader to actually read.
calliope@retrolemmy.com 2 days ago
Do you have a preferred device? I’m really curious but it’s hard to know where to start with colored screens.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Currently on a Boox Go Color 7. My previous reader was a Likebook Mars, not color. Both are android based, meaning I can install Tachiyomi for manga. I now use syncyomi with TachiSY, allowing me to sync my Tachiyomi collection between my phone and ereader, so I can manage my library and read the occasional chapter on my phone, while syncing all that to my ereader so I never need to manually do any library management on it.
The Go 7 is just a tad to small for western comics, but its usable. It’s in the sweet spot for manga. I really like it. I technically prefer the size of the Mars, but the smaller footprint on the Go 7 has meant I’ve actually brought it with me a lot more, and the physical page buttons are simply superior.
The two ways to do color that currently exist, are Triton/Kaleido and Spectra.
Triton and the newer Kaleido, consist of a normal black and white panel overlayed by a color filter that divides it into RGB sub-pixels. For example, to do red, the bw screen goes white under the red sub-pixels, and black below the rest. This produces red, though to maintain the brightness of full white the filter isn’t very strong, so it’s a fairly pale result. The filter means it can’t go as white as a pure bw screen, but in my experience the difference is tiny. You can just barely see the difference, even side-by-side. And even tho the colors are pale, seeing book covers and comics with even a little bit of color is really nice.
The other way is having actual colored ink, or multi-color cells, and some other ways. What these all have in common is that the refresh rate is truly glacial. Like ten seconds for a single page turn slow. You’ll find these in digital picture frames and such, no ereaders have been made using these methods.
I would not consider a Kindle unless you can be sure you can jailbreak it. I had a Kobo at one point, and while I really liked it, having gotten used to Tachiyomi I could not go back to manually converting manga into .CBZ files and syncing them to my reader.
The ability to install android apps enables so many options for finding things to read, and ways to read them.
calliope@retrolemmy.com 2 days ago
Thank you very much for the information! This was really helpful.
I’ve looked at Boox devices before so it’s good to see that people are using and enjoying them.
yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Just another dropping kudos for your message, I’ve been eyeing the ink color tech for a while and I’m kinda ready to drop my jailbroken old kindle and was considering the kobo libra color…
You have given me some thinking with the boox. Kinda nice it has full android although I can read that the battery is the drawback then. Care to share your battery life with the boox? Between good battery life or full android… I might go with the battery I think. As long as I can run koreader that would be enough for my use.