For pure reading of text it provides minimal benefit (color highlighting and cover art, mostly) while costing contrast ratio and dollars. Especially since some devices (e.g. Kobo Libra) are now offered only with a color display, I can see why someone would call it a gimmick. I personally view the reflectivity of eink as the entire point and thus have no interest in it.
replyThat said, of course if you want to view color content on an EPD then it is quite necessary and not a gimmick at all.
It comes with a massive loss of contrast so it's a bit of a gimmick, yeah.
replyThat doesn't mean it's a gimmick. Again, I implore you to actually look up what "gimmick" means. Just because there's a tradeoff doesn't mean that it's a gimmick. In fact, the very issue that you're talking about is something that is improving from Kaleido 3 to Kaleido 4. So even people that use this argument have something to take note of in this release.
replyWhen we went from black & white photography to color photography we also introduced a lot of tradeoffs. Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?
> Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?
replyIt sucked or was massively inconvenient for the first 50+ years.
Color ink remains a niche in books.
replyPerhaps revisiting what "gimmick" means would help you. Plenty of people use their e-ink readers to look at magazines, comics, news. Plenty of people have a highlighting system. Arguing that color is a "gimmick" is silly considering there are practical applications of color, as we can see around us in the real world. Some of you are seriously living in the weirdest of bubbles.
replyBiology spent a ton of time adapting and evolving for the ability to see color but sure, it's a gimmick. I guess you should consider syntax highlighting a gimmick in code editors as well? Charts/graphs in textbooks use color as a gimmick, any book that include illustrations/images in color are gimmicks
Pal, I’m not the one who used the word. I am observing that books are predominantly black ink in white paper, despite color ink being around before the printing press.
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