[FoRK] Media Roundup

[Ken Meltsner]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:01 PM, Stephen D. Williams <sdw at lig.net> wrote:
...
>  Now, if there was something like the Amazon Kindle (free EVDO et al)
>  that supported at least 8x10x150bpi (preferrably 8.5x11x150bpi), PDF
>  support, direct or indirect voice / speech recognition dictation,
>  bluetooth keyboard with freemind and syncable wiki support with full
>  enough document editing, Matlab/Scilab, and regular expression search,
>  I'd be happy.  My minimum bar is display of a PDF scan of an 8.5x11 text
>  book with multi-column small text, diagrams, and formulas.  The device
>  can be smaller, but the resolution has to be there, or at least half
>  that in landscape mode.  That works out to 1275x825 or 1275x1650, or,
>  assuming reasonable white space, 1280x900 or 1280x1600.  Should have
>  2-4x that for proper anti-aliasing, but it would be livable.

Latest e-ink reader that's been announced (not shipping yet) is
1200x825 at roughly the same resolution as the current
Kindle/eReader/NAEB/Cybook products:


http://www.netronixinc.com/product_e-book.htm

EB-300 doesn't have EVDO, but it's the display that's the big
constraint and if Netronix can get them, so could Amazon.

The underlying display should support 3-bit gray (8 shades) instead of
the current 2-bit "standard", so that will help with anti-aliasing:

http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html

A long time ago, a friend from the MIT Media Lab (who should know such
things) showed me that increased pixel "depth" was at least as
effective as increased resolution when anti-aliasing, but I'm not sure
whether this is actually true or applies here.

Ken Meltsner