Comment by ludvigcosma
1 month ago
I've had an x3 with crosspoint for a couple of months. Overall I love the device, it's making it easy to pull up the phone and read a couple of pages instead of doom scrolling. But a huge drawback is that it's unusable in direct sunlight since the screen fades away. Here is how it looks: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1q5fhwf/dire...
I contacted support and they answered
"We would like to clarify that on e ink displays, text may appear lighter under very strong direct sunlight. Once the screen refreshes or you return to normal lighting conditions and turn a few pages, the text will fully recover. This behavior is related to the low power design of the display and does not cause any damage to the screen."
Apparently the cable to the screen is to blame and the workaround is a piece of tape to block UV light reaching that component: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1qlyq3s/this...
Personally, I've found that just moving the screen out of the sun (for example by turning it upside-down, or holding my hand in front of it) when refreshing a page is enough to prevent it.
Crosspoint has a software fix for this in settings. It’s not 100% but it does work. It’s called the Sunlight Fading Fix under Display settings. https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/blob/...
Oof... I just ordered the x3 and plan to add CrossPoint on it. If hesitating to cancel my ordered as it didn't ship yet. I have plenty of other e-ink screens and it has never happened. I specifically enjoy e-ink in directly sunlight or at least outdoors ... so I'm not sure if that's still a good usecase for me anymore.
Thanks for for sharing.