Comment by abletonlive
3 days ago
Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.
3 days ago
Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.
For pure reading of text it provides minimal benefit (color highlighting and cover art, mostly) while costing contrast ratio and dollars. Especially since some devices (e.g. Kobo Libra) are now offered only with a color display, I can see why someone would call it a gimmick. I personally view the reflectivity of eink as the entire point and thus have no interest in it.
That said, of course if you want to view color content on an EPD then it is quite necessary and not a gimmick at all.
Even when your book is mostly B/W text, sometimes it may contain color content (Like illustration, or graph). This is 1 of pet peeve i have with monochrome eink.
It comes with a massive loss of contrast so it's a bit of a gimmick, yeah.
That doesn't mean it's a gimmick. Again, I implore you to actually look up what "gimmick" means. Just because there's a tradeoff doesn't mean that it's a gimmick. In fact, the very issue that you're talking about is something that is improving from Kaleido 3 to Kaleido 4. So even people that use this argument have something to take note of in this release.
When we went from black & white photography to color photography we also introduced a lot of tradeoffs. Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?
I own color eInk tablet(s) and BW readers so I'm very well aware what the usability and tradeoffs are.
Right now - on smaller devices focused on books like 6-8" Kobo/Kindle devices this is primarily a gimmick used for book covers and perhaps some text highlights at best. That's what makes it a gimmick, especially since it comes with such a massive loss of contrast that you need to drive the backlight at 90-100% during the day to get readable experience out of it.
And I'm happy that Kaleido 4 improves this (it's one of the things I'm most excited with for my 10" Boox where color screen is much more useful), but even with 50% improvement the contrast is still significantly worse than on the BW readers, making the experience of reading normal books a significant downgrade in exchange for some color front covers.
Your comparisons to TV are just inane, the tradeoffs aren't even remotely similar. Noone is clamoring for rainbow letters on their Kindle.
1 reply →
> Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?
It sucked or was massively inconvenient for the first 50+ years.
If they used the TV mainly to read black and white text they probably would have considered it a gimmick yes
Color ink remains a niche in books.
Perhaps revisiting what "gimmick" means would help you. Plenty of people use their e-ink readers to look at magazines, comics, news. Plenty of people have a highlighting system. Arguing that color is a "gimmick" is silly considering there are practical applications of color, as we can see around us in the real world. Some of you are seriously living in the weirdest of bubbles.
Biology spent a ton of time adapting and evolving for the ability to see color but sure, it's a gimmick. I guess you should consider syntax highlighting a gimmick in code editors as well? Charts/graphs in textbooks use color as a gimmick, any book that include illustrations/images in color are gimmicks
Pal, I’m not the one who used the word. I am observing that books are predominantly black ink in white paper, despite color ink being around before the printing press.