Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: fd3 on 26 March, 2024, 10:47:39 am
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I am after a device to use as a pdf reader (textbooks, books, comics, in that order) and as a goodnotes style machine. Ability to play videos, music, etc is totally beside the point.
Has anyone got any experience of using nxtpaper tablets or something like the boox ultra c or the bigme colour.
My current thought is that the bigme might be a year away from making an A4 colour eink and that the nxtpaper may be at a good price point until then.
I do want colour for editing/highlighting notes and the like.
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If it helps, I'm using an old Surface Pro 4 for note taking activities using one note. You have to set the pen refresh rate to high to make it totally usable. I also added a matte 'paper finish' screen protector. I already had the Surface pen as it came with the pro when I bought many many years ago.
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To what extent can I get a more eye friendly experience with a screen protector?
I was considering an xp pen magic drawing pad, about the right size and apparently has reduced ... whatever the annoying light is from looking at screens.
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I absolutely love e-ink as a screen technology and I own a number of ebook readers. Large screen is definitely more usable than small, although the higher the pixel density (pixel pitch), the easier it is to see detail in an image and the less important it is to have a physically large screen. Of course the best products will have high pixel density and a large screen.
I guess e-ink devices have a tiny market compared with backlit screens (i.e. conventional tablets) and so development is slow and prices to consumers remain high. Especially so in models with A4 screens (for which there will be even less demand as they're less portable). But if you need it for work purposes and it will aid your productivity, the cost may be justifiable and works out as a few pennies per day that you own it.
You could be perpetually waiting for the next model which may offer more functionality and/or a lower price, or of course you could just buy what you need at this stage. I think there's always a degree of obsolescence with these goods due to the fact they contain a battery pack, so you may be rebuying in a few years anyway.
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Some good points.
Really I would like the colour e ink in A4, but as it does not exist yet...
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We benefit from a decade of research and development with a monochrome ereader screen, versus just two years for colour.
I think I read somewhere that the latest monochrome e-ink screens offer more contrast, so you experience superior image quality when viewing black and white content.
ETA: this article is informative regarding the comparatively poor contrast of colour e-ink screens
https://ewritable.com/color-e-ink-kaleido-vs-monochrome-e-ink/#Resolution_and_Pixel_Density (https://ewritable.com/color-e-ink-kaleido-vs-monochrome-e-ink/#Resolution_and_Pixel_Density)
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As I am linking this to teaching and learning being able to colour code things is more important for me than picture quality.
If you have a graph, the colour of the lines is important, an hd image not so much.
The A4 is because I have poor vision and ideally would use split screen for textbooks and note.taking on same device, which would be too small for me on a 10".
Do you use eink as a reader only, or also for note taking?
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Colours are not the only way to distinguish between stuffs on a graph or chart, thobut.
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Yes, but dashed lines are very strange.
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So, I have got a boox note air 3C. I would have been torn between this and the X, except that the larger X is not currently available. (That and £300 extra).
Stuff I like; but the side by side view is very challenging on a 10" screen (pdf above notes split screen is a bit better).