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740 Posts
Haha. A collective *sigh* at the light discussion from both team 'lighting is perfect" to team "lighting is flawed"
An engineering friend who works with LEDs explained the lighting best to me. "If you put an LED light facing down on one side of a piece of paper, by the time you get to the other side of the paper, the lighting power won't be exactly the same." (try it with a booklight on a book). Add enclosure, add a touch layer, add external lighting effects and you have quite an engineering challenge. The goal for frontlighting is to bridge that gap so our eyes don't see it. For an overwhelming many, the Kindles succeed in this. Amazon has been working tirelessly (in a great way) and pride themselves on every year getting the light better and better and more even. They are not using magic lights, however. They are using 10 finely tuned LED lights made in China. There is a huge difficulty in measuring a broad spectrum of light, which is not always known to the user. LEDs have the distinct advantage, fortunately, of a narrow, known wavelength spectrum which makes it more even than traditional lighting. The decision to move from four LED lights at the bottom of their reader to 10 on the side of the Oasis is surely not simply a design decision. It makes absolute sense because the lights now have much less ground to cover from one side to the other and the results show. The Oasis is the best implementation of LED front lit lighting yet in my opinion. If you look at the complaints from those about the Voyage, all of the complaints are that the lighting is different at the very top which is not coincidentally the furthest point from the four LED lights of the e-reader.
Ann is absolutely correct that there has to be defective units and units of varying degrees of LED tuning (I even got some). At the same time, there are people whose eyes seem to be sensitive to the way LED lights emit across a 6" screen. I think everyone here would agree that if they look hard enough (or not at all), you can see where the lights are on the Oasis. You can call it 'Scalloping' (whoever invented this, bravo) but you can also think of it simply as where the LED lights are emitting their light and how some people's eyes spot the shadows from said LEDs.
I bought and replaced 8 paperwhites and my eyes saw varying degrees of shadows on all of them (2 I would say were defective). I agree, i thought it was atrocious too. With the Voyage, I bought and returned 2 with the same 1/4 top issue my eyes caught, the 3rd ended up having the faintest lighting difference for me so I kept it. Every iteration, the lighting gets better. It's never perfect. With the Oasis, the Scalloping was very strong when I first turned it on but after a day or two of use, i just stopped seeing it or trying to find it. That doesn't mean it's not there, it just doesn't bother me. If I read with the Oasis with my right hand, i don't see any shadows and very few lighting problems. But when I use my left hand, i can see the left half of the screen as a different shade than the right. My first impression was negative with the lighting but now not so much.
Out of all of our senses, we trust our eyes as "truth". Betsy makes a great point that it's all in the eye of the beholder. The more happy people the better but for those that aren't, there's always the next generation. And I hear you, it sucks when you see light problems. After three generations of me not being able to use Amazon readers in the dark, I'm back on board. This Oasis, despite it not being perfect to me, is as close as i've experienced yet and i'm very pleased.
If you're paying 300+ dollars to read on a premier e-reader, I don't blame anyone who's not very happy with their screens to voice their complaints.
An engineering friend who works with LEDs explained the lighting best to me. "If you put an LED light facing down on one side of a piece of paper, by the time you get to the other side of the paper, the lighting power won't be exactly the same." (try it with a booklight on a book). Add enclosure, add a touch layer, add external lighting effects and you have quite an engineering challenge. The goal for frontlighting is to bridge that gap so our eyes don't see it. For an overwhelming many, the Kindles succeed in this. Amazon has been working tirelessly (in a great way) and pride themselves on every year getting the light better and better and more even. They are not using magic lights, however. They are using 10 finely tuned LED lights made in China. There is a huge difficulty in measuring a broad spectrum of light, which is not always known to the user. LEDs have the distinct advantage, fortunately, of a narrow, known wavelength spectrum which makes it more even than traditional lighting. The decision to move from four LED lights at the bottom of their reader to 10 on the side of the Oasis is surely not simply a design decision. It makes absolute sense because the lights now have much less ground to cover from one side to the other and the results show. The Oasis is the best implementation of LED front lit lighting yet in my opinion. If you look at the complaints from those about the Voyage, all of the complaints are that the lighting is different at the very top which is not coincidentally the furthest point from the four LED lights of the e-reader.
Ann is absolutely correct that there has to be defective units and units of varying degrees of LED tuning (I even got some). At the same time, there are people whose eyes seem to be sensitive to the way LED lights emit across a 6" screen. I think everyone here would agree that if they look hard enough (or not at all), you can see where the lights are on the Oasis. You can call it 'Scalloping' (whoever invented this, bravo) but you can also think of it simply as where the LED lights are emitting their light and how some people's eyes spot the shadows from said LEDs.
I bought and replaced 8 paperwhites and my eyes saw varying degrees of shadows on all of them (2 I would say were defective). I agree, i thought it was atrocious too. With the Voyage, I bought and returned 2 with the same 1/4 top issue my eyes caught, the 3rd ended up having the faintest lighting difference for me so I kept it. Every iteration, the lighting gets better. It's never perfect. With the Oasis, the Scalloping was very strong when I first turned it on but after a day or two of use, i just stopped seeing it or trying to find it. That doesn't mean it's not there, it just doesn't bother me. If I read with the Oasis with my right hand, i don't see any shadows and very few lighting problems. But when I use my left hand, i can see the left half of the screen as a different shade than the right. My first impression was negative with the lighting but now not so much.
Out of all of our senses, we trust our eyes as "truth". Betsy makes a great point that it's all in the eye of the beholder. The more happy people the better but for those that aren't, there's always the next generation. And I hear you, it sucks when you see light problems. After three generations of me not being able to use Amazon readers in the dark, I'm back on board. This Oasis, despite it not being perfect to me, is as close as i've experienced yet and i'm very pleased.
If you're paying 300+ dollars to read on a premier e-reader, I don't blame anyone who's not very happy with their screens to voice their complaints.
