[dylan-m]

> Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.

Someone definitely flunked the messaging on this one, and I find it very disappointing :( The key advantage to an e-ink style of display is less eye strain, because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second. (And battery life, of course; you can put your book down and forget about it until later). And that this limits the device is fine: a lot of people do a lot of reading! People like reading! Alas, as more and more people grow up reading all sorts of things on LCDs, so the inconvenience and the discomfort is just a normal part of reading for them, that becomes a much harder sell.

[nybble41]

> because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second

LCDs update 60 times per second (or more… 120 Hz displays are becoming more common) but they don't flicker the way CRTs used to, so there's no reason to think this would contribute to eye strain. Brightness could be an issue but you can just lower the brightness of the screen to match the surroundings.

As I see it the advantages of e-ink displays lie mainly in their visibility in direct sunlight and minimal idle power consumption.

[stormbrew]

This isn't entirely true. It's not the same intensity of flicker, but LCDs do have a small amount of flicker at about half their refresh rate to flip voltage and reduce the chance of burn-in. Also, the backlight itself may flicker depending on what kind of light source is used (especially if it's not an LED backlight, but cheap LED lights do flicker -- see christmas lights -- so it's possible some cheaper LED panels might have this effect too?).

[murderfs]

Cheap LED christmas lights flicker because they don't have a bridge rectifier, so half of the input waveform is zero, at 60Hz. You're not going to see that kind of flicker in anything that requires real DC power (PWM frequencies for brightness control are generally way higher than 60Hz).

Some displays do this as a feature though (known as backlight strobing, motion blur reduction, etc.): LCDs take time to transition, so if you keep the backlight on at all times, you'll potentially see blurring from persistence of vision while the display is mid-transition. Instead, you can turn the backlight off until the screen has transitioned and then turn it back on so that you never show a partially transitioned image.

[maratc]

You don’t have to convince me (I bought the first commercially available reader, Sony PRS-500, for $350 the day it went on sale, and several others since), but for great many people their laptop does the job just fine, while many others enjoy the dead tree variety.