Looking at what matters: the screen technology pros and cons of the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad.

The iPad tablet computer is all the rage – it’s rocketed past the one million units sold mark and has a legion of dedicated supporters frothing at the mouth in giddy excitement. The Amazon Kindle e-reader debuted earlier, made more modest waves but a splash nonetheless, has updates and upgraded iterations cemented on a schedule and has a loyal fanbase of its own of users that, for the first time, can claim to be both technologically cool and literarily rad.

These two devices do seem different: different functions, different features, different prices and the need for differently sized pockets in which to stow them. But they also do share a common thread which will be the converging of their two roads in the future. They’re basically handheld screens and you’re expected to have your eyes glued to them, as well as a finger or two, to use them. The feature set from both will soon expand to encompass the other and then all you have left really is the different styling and the different screens.

These screens and the technology behind them, unfortunately, occupy two different areas of functionality. The Amazon Kindle, using a kind of electrophoretic technology developed by E Ink Corp. has great readability and low power consumption. The LCD screen staring at you from the iPad brings you brilliant colours and full video motion. But neither one provides what the other can, which has been one of the reasons behind the huge investment into emerging screen technologies that can, ideally, give you the full monty of features at the cost of extremely conservative battery use.

The Amazon Kindle excels in the battery life department, with its E-Ink technology rendering black, white or shades of gray extremely efficiently by way of pigment particle capsules. Each pixel on the screen is a capsule which contains two pigments – black and white. Black is usually formed by particles of carbon, white by particles of titanium dioxide. These two pigments are oppositely charged, so when you run a voltage through the capsule, you attract or repel the pigments. Manipulating the voltages correctly allows you to display mixes of both particles – black and white to give you shades of gray. Since it is simply either black, white or a mix of both being displayed on the screen at any given time, the screen relies on reflected light, meaning it’s easy to read under the sun. Once the capsules are in a certain state – say, a page from your e-book – it requires no extra power to keep them in that state. That’s the technology behind the energy efficiency.

The technology is simple and easy to produce. But it also suffers from a persistent darkness. Consider the pigment capsule – at any point, half of it contains dark particles and half of it contains bright particles – black and white. But the white never truly hides the black. It’s kind of like painting your wall black, and then painting over it in white – one coat just won’t do, but only one coat of white is all these pigment capsules can contain. That means white is never really white as the black beneath it is still partially visible. Relying on reflected light and having dark pixels means you also need light in order to read it, so you won’t be reading your e-book in the back seat of a car at night. In this way, it’s like a real book. There’s just not enough light. You can have colour on an E-Ink display, but that involves adding a red green blue filter on top which just results in more darkening. That’s why colours will always appear dull on this kind of technology, even white.

Dull, though, is not what the Apple iPad boasts in its LCD screen, a power hungry energy hog that gives you vibrant colours and full-motion video at the cost of battery life… an extreme cost. The efficiency rate of conversion of electricity to light on an LCD screen hovers somewhere between 2-3%. Abysmal. Be prepared to get used to a battery metre flashing a dangerous red while a note incessantly pops up telling you it’s going to turn off so why don’t you go climb a tree or nip off for a nap. We already know what LCD screens can do – most of us look into one every day, whether it be the monitor at work or the monitor at home or –if you’re an early adopter – the iPad you are now inseparable from.

Now, if you’re one of those people who has already queued up, paid up, and cheered up with the acquisition of your new iPad, all gleaming in aesthetic glory, you may have also realised the major downfall of the portable LCD screen: an aversion to sunlight. So the sky’s blue, you spot an empty bench and think about having a quiet lunchtime padsurf, except you can’t see the screen because it goes all wonky and dark. Even the merest reflection of sunlight is still significantly brighter than your LCD screen, and renders your iPad unreadable. You try turning the brightness up and your battery goes into cardiac arrest. Resigned, you go back to your office or home and do stuff on your Macbook.

Right now, the screen technology just doesn’t exist to combine energy efficiency, full motion and colour capability and readability during both day and night, dark and light. The tech race is already steaming ahead, with emerging technologies such as the brute force approach of 3Qi, whereby you manually switch your device between LCD and e-paper modes (similar to E-Ink) depending on whether you are in dark or light. Nature has become an inspiration for the development of a technology called Mirasol which follows the same principles as the iridescence of a butterfly wing for generating intense reflected and therefore low-power colour, but this is economically unfeasible right now. Even chameleons and cuttlefish, with their age old biological pigment switching, have been under renewed scrutiny, leading to the emergence of the still-developing electrofluidic technology which still suffers from brightness issues.

Don’t get me wrong. We are moving forward, just not as fast as the marketers would have you believe.

Words: Hugo Stanford

Tags: Amazon, Apple, iPad, Kindle, LCD
Posted in Features