eInk vs. LCD

This was sent in by Mike Clements, and I’m not sure why it didn’t get filed under the last entry, but maybe one day I’ll figure such things out:

I agree for books like novels that consist mostly of text, eInk beats even the best LCD. Where an iPad or Android tablet shines is technical documents having large detailed diagrams, as the screen is larger, in color, and faster. These docs don’t work well on eInk readers. Even the big Kindle isn’t ideal for these docs, as it lacks color and is too slow to render complex pages.

P.S. LCD displays don’t flicker. Most refresh at 60 hertz which can cause rendering artifacts if video is being displayed at a different frame rate. But the refresh is flicker-free. That’s one thing I like about my big LCD monitor, over the old-school CRT I used to have. I would crank up the refresh rate on the CRT but it still wasn’t as nice as the steady glow of an LCD.

Gryphon’s response is:

First of all, I use an iPad for some things, so let’s get that on the record. The screens on smaller tablets are not much bigger than the one on the Kindle Touch, so I don’t think they’re much better at rendering big pages usefully. There is certainly some accuracy to the rendering speed point, though many tablets are not speed demons either. Unfortunately, the faster the device, the more battery it burns, generational leaps notwithstanding. The iPad’s screen is a bit over twice as big, which is part of what makes it too big and heavy for comfortable long use as a reader. Even so, I don’t think it’s big enough for a lot of documents, like diagrams that would be printed across pages in a paper book. This is why I like very big screens on my computers. Although some people might try to print and tape…shudder.

So, it’s certainly better to have a bigger screen for bigger pages, and in some cases it’s even necessary. Color is a separate issue and its value to technical documents is subjective enough to be better avoided here. Coincidentally, I was talking to a friend just yesterday about the future of textbooks. My comment to him was that if Amazon would put out a reader with a big enough screen at a low enough price, they ought to be able to make a dent in that long-running moneymaking scam that colleges foist on students. The large-screen kindle was a…try, not a great try…a now-dated model that was always awkward, and its screen was still not big enough for reading periodicals or textbooks IMO.

This blog is primarily concerned with reading lots of fiction, though, and as you say, there’s simply no contest between e-ink and refreshing screens for that application. Speaking of which, if perhaps “flicker” was a technical term used imprecisely, constantly-refreshed and backlit images burn a lot of battery in CPU and image display and are still harder on the eyes for reading than inert images. They kind of bring the advantages of TV-watching to reading.