3 ms·

The whole purpose of E-Ink is to use "passive" displays which are more comfortable to the eye. Adding a backlight would remove that.

schwartzworld 5y ago
Most e ink doesn't use a true backlight, but an array of lights along the inside of the bezel that light up the screen reflectively. It's still very good for battery life. Both the kindle Paperwhite and the onyx tablets have this feature. Onyx even let's you tune the warmth of the light.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  The Kindle Oasis also does this
fsloth 5y ago
IMO lighting on an E-Ink display does not increase the strain any more than illuminating a paper with reading lamp does.
0-_-0 5y ago
You can turn off the backlight
furgooswft13 5y ago
I have an Onyx Boox Max Lumi [1], there are 2 reasons why the "backlight" is very useful. First off it's not really a backlight like you see in most LCD displays, it's a front-light, or edge-light that projects directly on to and is reflected by the e-ink display (the transparent top layer of the display acts as a wave guide for the edge lighting, and it's really quite an impressive engineering feat that they got it to apply so evenly on a 13.3" display area). Obviously this will be useful when ambient lighting is too dim to even read paper, but the fact is current e-ink technology is just not as reflective, or high contrast as regular printed text on copy paper. The front-light illumination at low to mid levels (at least on the Onyx series) goes a long way towards making the screen background look almost as white as real paper. Granted if you are outside in the sun you will not notice the frontlight even at max brightness. But in dim indoor lighting, it's the difference between looking at greenish-grey kinda washed out image, and something that might fool a casual passer by into thinking it really is paper & ink. 1: https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi

schwartzworld 5y ago

Most e ink doesn't use a true backlight, but an array of lights along the inside of the bezel that light up the screen reflectively. It's still very good for battery life. Both the kindle Paperwhite and the onyx tablets have this feature. Onyx even let's you tune the warmth of the light.

emodendroket 5y ago
The Kindle Oasis also does this

fsloth 5y ago

IMO lighting on an E-Ink display does not increase the strain any more than illuminating a paper with reading lamp does.

0-_-0 5y ago

You can turn off the backlight

furgooswft13 5y ago

I have an Onyx Boox Max Lumi [1], there are 2 reasons why the "backlight" is very useful. First off it's not really a backlight like you see in most LCD displays, it's a front-light, or edge-light that projects directly on to and is reflected by the e-ink display (the transparent top layer of the display acts as a wave guide for the edge lighting, and it's really quite an impressive engineering feat that they got it to apply so evenly on a 13.3" display area). Obviously this will be useful when ambient lighting is too dim to even read paper, but the fact is current e-ink technology is just not as reflective, or high contrast as regular printed text on copy paper. The front-light illumination at low to mid levels (at least on the Onyx series) goes a long way towards making the screen background look almost as white as real paper. Granted if you are outside in the sun you will not notice the frontlight even at max brightness. But in dim indoor lighting, it's the difference between looking at greenish-grey kinda washed out image, and something that might fool a casual passer by into thinking it really is paper & ink. 1: https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi