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Comment by Waterfall | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the hacking community of the Amazon Kindle. The firmware developers said they could have blocked it out harder but didn't because they didn't want to cripple the device for hackers. Apparently the Kindles run awesome windows manager.

I used to be into eink displays but the contrast ratio is too low and it looks too blurry for me so I went back to screens. Eye strain was the first reason they said eink was good for eye strain. Turns out it's the DPI or PPI, so essentially an iPad with retina is less eye strain. I use AMOLED to read since I read that the wavelengths of blue light also are bad.

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It's not DPI or PPI for me, the lack of a backlight and the finish on eInk seems to be the thing.

I'm not saying it's that way for everyone, but if I'm going to be reading for a while then my kindle paperwhite is much better for my eyes than any backlit screen I've used.

That's what the research says. It is not an opinion of mine. Eye strain may also be defined differently. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/eyestrain/sym... I have had success with OLED screens with black backgrounds and red font

The page you linked doesn't mention PPI or DPI at all. From what I can see from a quick search, viewing low-res images strains the eyes but I'm not sure how that relates to pure text.

It also specifically mentions glare and reflection being part of the problem, something eInk displays are better at than normal displays IMHO, because they don't project light at your eyes.

Do you have any links to "the science" here? Because a quick search seems to pull up a few things supporting less eyestrain from eInk than other screens, regardless of resolution. For example - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24386252/

Low res rendered on a low DPI/PPI screen causes your eyes to strain. I will link you later.

Please do!

I hope that whatever you link to takes into account different screen technologies too - I can understand that it makes a difference on back-lit LCD monitors, but I'm going to take more convincing that the same necessarily applies to eInk tablets, as that would contradict personal experience as well as other material I've seen.

Contrast varies a lot between devices. I haven't received my ReMarkable yet but it is a custom panel, supposedly better contrast than the average screen, and being fully matte probably helps.

The contrast is a problem of eink screens. There is not much besides grayscale. That is why even if it's 1080 it looks like crap compared to an LCD at 720.

> Eye strain was the first reason they said eink was good for eye strain

This is tautological. Do you mean 'front lighting'?

Sorry it was late I'll check better next time

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