This is what we’ve all been wanting to know, how does E-Ink display compare to paper in the readability category, use your eyes as your own judge and you decide. Separated at birth? Perhaps.

Printed Text on Paper

E-Ink Text on Sony Reader

How E-Ink Works

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits and faults of E-Ink, but we haven’t said much about how the technology actually works. E-Ink is really a bed of thousands of tiny capsules filled with liquid, black and white charged particles. Depending on the charge applied under the capsule dictates what we see on the top. Using the left capsule in the above diagram as our example. The black particles are negatively charged and the white are positively charged, with the positive charge applied to the plate below the capsule, this force pulls the black particles to the bottom and pushes the white particles to the top, looking from above we should only see white. E-Ink is simply applying the basic rules of magnetism.

Now it’s hard to imagine how anything using capsules could look good, many would imagine the E-Ink display would look like the picture to the right, which is a low resolution E-Ink display. The more capsules, the higher the resolution, the less visible the capsules become. The capsules in the Reader are not noticable, thanks to it’s reasonably high resolution.

Conclusion

As with all new technologies comes the higher price tag for innovation. The Sony Reader is definitely a unique product that does it’s job well, but is this product worth the price tag of $350 US Dollars? The Reader is on par with paper printed books in all categories except for one, space. Space is the main advantage the Reader has over traditional paper printed books, you could carry perhaps 5-7 books in a backpack or you could carry hundreds of books in the palm of your hand. This sounds all great, but for the people thinking about purchasing the Reader, ask yourself honestly, is the price really worth the convenience the Reader provides? I personally am not an avid book reader, but I can definitely see the potential in the Reader for book lovers.

Some final notes, Sony provides an online ebook store called, Connect. The software to access the online ebook store is provided on the Sony Reader CD provided in the package. Think of the Connect store as the iTunes of ebooks.

Table of Contents:

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: InterfacePage 3: Conclusion

Filed under: Sony