In October 2006 Sony began shipping its ebook reader (henceforth referred to as the ‘Reader’) and I couldn’t wait to get one. For me a usable electronic book is almost a mythical entity living in a world of the future that we’ve somehow missed, along with the flying car.
Over the years I’ve used a variety of phones, PDAs, micro-laptops and one or two short-lived “electronic book” devices but none have provided a particularly satisfying ebook experience. Enter, the Reader.
The Screen
Once unwrapped and powered on you immediately see “The Screen”, the lauded E-Ink display technology making its large-scale consumer debut in the Reader.
This new display technology renders text that is crisp and flat and really beautiful. The background is slightly more dull light-gray than white, but the contrast is quite acceptable. And right away you encounter the difference between the e-ink screen and a backlit LCD. The E-ink screen, like a regular paper book, gets easier to read in brighter light. So unlike for instance, a regular backlit PDA, the Reader allows one to lounge around the patio reading, in the sun. More importantly, the display is very easy on the eyes, and I have personally experienced none of the eyestrain I had come to expect from reading text on a backlit phone or PDA display. Whatever happens to the Reader, the E-Ink display has set a new standard for portable display quality.
There is one display quirk in the form of a very noticeable flicker during page turns. It appears to invert black to white as the new page is rendered on the screen. It takes about a second for this repaint operation to complete, and the impression is of a “flicker”. Fortunately you habituate to this after about 15 minutes or so.