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Kindle 2 Users Complain of Eye Strain

by Joseph L. Flatley on April 14, 2009 at 07:11 AM


You know how it is: Amazon refreshes the Kindle, makes some upgrades, and everybody's happy. Almost. It seems that a small but vocal minority is really, really not into the way that fonts are rendered on the new device. For real. Y'see, the newest iteration of the e-reader sports font smoothing algorithms and sixteen levels of gray (as opposed to four levels on the original). For sure, these enhancements make for prettier pictures, but on the downside it causes text to blur significantly when displaying fonts in the smallest three sizes. If you're one of the disgruntled Kindle 2 owners looking for some relief for your tired eyes, there are a couple options available to you. You might want to try the Unicode Fonts Hack, which will allow you to replace the system font for something more to your liking. Or you could hop on over to Amazon's Kindle forum, where you can commiserate with your fellow angry customers (OK, not really a solution -- but possibly therapeutic). You could wait for the rumored Kindle with a larger screen to arrive (no telling when or if that's gonna happen), or even downgrade to a first gen device, as some folks already have. Or you can read a book. One thing you can't do? You can't stop progress.

[Via Wired]

Read - Amazon: Please make the text darker on Kindle 2
Read - Unicode Fonts Hack

Tags: amazon, e book, e ink, e reader, e-book, e-book reader, E-bookReader, e-ink, e-reader, EBook, EInk, EReader, kindle, kindle 2, Kindle2, Unicode Fonts Hack, UnicodeFontsHack

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