Although electronic readers can do one thing which is reading, they do it amazingly well. It makes eBooks so easy and fatiguing to the eyes. Screens like Kindle look exactly like paper and viewing angles are exactly like a paper even in direct sunlight all that with a long battery life up to weeks.
- How Can These Screens Work?
- What Makes Them Much Better For Reading?
- How Doesn’t It Harm The Eyes?
- We’ll Answer All Of That In This Article.
Let’s Firstly Know What E-Ink Is.
It’s a method of projecting on screens using only white and black without any need for any light emitted from the screen itself. Words appear on the screen as if it were on a page from a conventional book. Not using blue light emitted form the screen makes it very easy on the eye.
The idea of the screen is circular white and black particles rotating based on an electric charge.
Firstly originated in 1970 but E-Ink was developed in 1997. The idea behind it was to create a low power paper by Xerox PARC and further research on the hands of Joseph Jacobson.
The first device using E-Ink was Librie from Sony. It was available in Japan first the first time in 2004 but it wasn’t a wide spread due to its high cost and protected PDF (DRM) Digital Rights Management.
The real launch for E-Ink was in 2007 with Kindle from Amazon.
- A 800 x 600 pixel screen
- 4 levels of grey screen
- 250 mb of storage but it was enough to carry a digital library with you wherever you go.
E-Paper and E-Ink
We have to know the difference between both of them so that they don’t mix.
E – Paper is a technology simulating paper depending on external light instead of emitted from the screen thus reducing eye fatigue.
The Pebble Smartwatch is the best example for E-Paper. It uses a low power liquid crystal with a reflective layer making it look like paper.
What About Reading In The Dark?
E-Ink can’t be read in the dark because it relies on external light so you’ll need some sort of a lamp to be able to use it.
