Thanks for the reference. I am not sure that backlights are the problem though. Just imagine shining a light behind the page of a book (although it's hardly comparable to the level of transparency of Liquid crystals). I would rather bet on the color of the light (warm vs cold). Maybe it's all in my head but when it's sleep time, I hate cold bulbs (and LCDs) while I am not bothered by warm light like a candle or a warm bulb.
Furthermore, it seems to me that with the Paper White's light guided "on the surface of the display", the light shines as much in towards your eyes as it does towards the screen...
I'm pretty confused about your comment and all the replies. Do you all not have lights? I can see my keyboard just fine without backlighting. Not wanting backlighting has nothing to do with whether I need to look at my keyboard or not. I just think it's ugly (which is just a preference, totally fine for people to like it).
AFAIK adding backlight means that the distance between the display and the pen tip needs to increase, so you end up with a small parallax effect and writing doesn't feel as natural anymore.
I don't see anything related to reflectivity vs. backlight illumination. Most of the discussion is around the wavelength of light (blue) and its effects.
Maybe this is ridiculous but I kinda like the lack of a backlight: it forces me to find nice bright places to play in, and discourages hanging out in the kind of dimly lit areas that tend to sap my energy and mood.
I've got some screwy eyes (astigmatism, nystagmus, myopia) and have definitely noticed that sometime over the last few years the lighting situation has gotten more annoying. Some things I've noticed are particularly annoying:
The screens of cellphones and certain OLED displays having visible screen refresh rates, especially if my eyes are panning across them from a distance.
Shitty LED display lighting with a visible flicker. It's especially bad on a place nearby that has window frames outlined in what are effectively Christmas lights--almost enough to give me a headache just looking at them.
Certain LEDs and phone backlights tend to leave trails in the dark (once my eyes are accustomed to it). This is probably normal, but is a little disconcerting.
Projected images can have minor chomratic aberration, which can be distracting during a presentation. If I twitch my eyes purposefully back and forth, it gets worse.
Thank you for the clarification, I wasn't able to tell from the link if it was backlit or used ambient light.
It's funny to me that they skipped over that feature, but instead talked ones that few of us here probably care about (like thickness). Just another reminder that HN is a far from average sampling of the world.
The standard thing was to turn off the fluorescent lighting back when everybody (tech support, sysops, programmers) was almost entirely looking at a screen.
I got very used to calling "lights" before turning them on or there would be moans and groans.
Your eyes are always receiving light, that's how they work. It's not at all obvious to me why an LCD backlight would be different from sunlight or an incandescent light or any other light source.
I think it's more the backlight is power hungry, not the display itself. Direct projected light into the eyes seems to have the risk of probably causing vision problems.
If the former, can you describe what about the light is off-putting?
I ask because I'm interested in the aesthetics of lighting technologies.
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