Comment on E Ink goes mobile with budget eye-friendly smartphone
calliope@retrolemmy.com 1 day agoIt’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.
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 1 day 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 1 day 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.
badabim@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If that’s something that matters to you, do know that Boox does not comply with the GPL licence (help.boox.com/…/4405646929812-Violation-of-GPL-GP…).
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.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
With the Likebook Mars I got used to charging it often. I was exepecting the same with the Boox, but it has suprised me in a good way.
It came configured to power off within a couple hours when unused. Which is one solution. If you only read every few days, setting it to turn off when unused does ensure it will have juice to spare the next time you pick it up, though you’ll have wait about a minute to actually be reading again…
To avoid booting it all the time, I currently have it set to power off after 2 days of inactivity. Which is essentially never, unless I take a weeklong pause in reading.
This has meant I’m plugging it in once a week or so. Still more often than the month my Kobo used to last, but not bad at all. I can still empty it in one day if spend all day reading with the frontlight on, but that’s true for any reader.
If I queue up a bunch of manga downloads, it can drain from fully charged to empty in about 2 hours.
When it does go unused, power off within two days means it only wastes about 10% of the battery sleeping before powering off entirely. (That translates to about 5% per day when sleeping, that’s with network off during sleep and all apps suspended). Meaning I’ve not had to charge it when I go to use it after a longer break.
I don’t use koreader myself, but it’s on f-droid and hence extremely easy to install on the Boox.