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posted by
martyb
on Thursday November 08 2018, @09:47PM
from the I-don't-see-what-you-did-there dept.
from the I-don't-see-what-you-did-there dept.
BBC:
More than 7,000 people still watch TV in black and white more than half a century after colour broadcasts began.
London has the most TV licences for black and white sets at 1,768, followed by 431 in the West Midlands and 390 in Greater Manchester.
A total of 7,161 UK households have failed to start watching in colour despite transmissions starting in 1967.
BBC2 was the first channel to regularly broadcast in colour from July that year with the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
The number of black and white licences has almost halved in the past five years and is down from 212,000 in 2000.
Aha! Those must be the last Manichaeans.
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Thousands in UK Still Watch TV in Black and White
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(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday November 08 2018, @09:52PM (23 children)
They must be watching on some seriously old hardware. Where I live TV is not even broadcast in analogue any more, so your Philips K-9 would not work anymore anyway.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @09:56PM (4 children)
We all got digital to analog converters when digital was first mandated around here.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @10:02PM
The '60s came out with something for black-and-white to color conversion around here too, but subsequently declared it illegal. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide [wikipedia.org] )
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday November 08 2018, @10:12PM (1 child)
There were free deals for digital to analog converters in the US, but I was extremely glad to ditch my old CRT TV and my LCD TV already had Digital in addition to the Analog.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday November 09 2018, @05:46PM
I had a converter box for my old TV and wish I hadn't waited for the TV to die to replace it. It pulled 240 watts, the new, much bigger TV only pulls fifteen. CRTs are expensive to watch!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday November 08 2018, @11:42PM
Exactly, I've got a digital converter box connected to a small CRT TV. It is color, but the other day I had it connected to a nice green-screen Apple IIc monochrome monitor. It works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @10:16PM (17 children)
I would love to get some high quality monochrome displays. I know extremely expensive medical equipment is available, however the consumer options are very limited. I had an Asus EEE Note with a monochrome LCD a number of years ago (sadly a trip smashed the hell out its screen, though my ribs were mostly okay) that was very enjoyable, especially compared to the e-ink screens at the time. I still purchase e-ink hardware every few years, and they are definitely better every time, but I can only imagine how nice a modern monochrome, hiDPI, transflective LCD would be today.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday November 09 2018, @12:56AM (13 children)
Check out the Kobo Aura One. I bought one and it is awesome for just reading.
Designed in conjunction with a bunch of actual users, it is basically the hackers e-book. Does one job and does it well without any crap.
Large (7.8") very hi-def e-ink screen. Reads almost any format. (except amazon's proprietary crap, but you can convert with calibre)
Huge storage (mine has hundreds of books on it and is about 5% full).
Runs for ages on a single charge. Waterproof to 2m for 60 minutes.
Very expensive for what it is, but I'm very happy with it.
I recommend paying the extra bit and getting the sleep-cover for it too.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @02:05AM (7 children)
I checked it out after reading the review/comments of the new Amazon Kindle Paperweight at Arse Technica.
Aura One does look pretty good, and I guess the price is about right, given the relatively large size. I like that it supports the formats that Amazon won't touch.
I think it could use more storage, or better yet, microSD expandable storage (I'm fine if that means it loses waterproof rating). Especially if you are loading it with a bunch of PDFs or comics. I see that Amazon is selling new base models with 8 GB, and charging exactly $30 more for a 32 GB option. A 32 GB microSD card costs you or me just $7-10 (on Amazon's very own website). Even 128 GB costs less than $30. So it should be nothing for a device manufacturer to offer 16-32 GB in the base model, since they are given volume discounts. And believe me, I can get a hold of that much ebook/PDF/comic content.
Gripping right at the heart of this article, I would also prefer color e-ink. I expected to see color e-ink escape the labs long before we reached the 10th generation of Kindles, so I've been greatly disappointed. I don't own any tablets and I use a laptop to read ebooks and have been pleased with doing that so far. Now that Samsung and others are getting ready to launch their initial versions of flexible phones that convert into tablets, I find that more interesting than e-ink technology. Especially given that you get color, video, responsive controls, etc. The loss of weeks-long battery life is unfortunate, but manageable.
Let's see e-readers turn flexible, add color, or even add high framerate video [goodereader.com] ('arry Potter!). If not, I'll look for a tablet (flexible or not, not sure yet) with AV1 hardware decoding in 2021.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday November 09 2018, @04:28AM (4 children)
I'm getting old enough that I was not reading as much, just because it was a bit of an effort to focus on the small text in most books and wearing glasses for too long gives me a headache. Bumping up the font 50% meant that other e-books required way too much page turning. The Aura One is about the size of a trade paperback.
I've gone back to reading two or three books a week on it, mostly epubs. You really should check out the screen in real life. It's about 300 dpi and is amazingly sharp.
The backlight is excellent for reading in low light. Put it on about 5% and it makes everything clear without even being obvious it is on.
Mine is 8GB. Didn't have the 32GB option in Oz. Still way more storage than I need. Epubs seem to average about a meg. It could hold 8000 of them.
The one option it doesn't have that I would have liked to see was to read in landscape.
I don't like reading PDFs because they all seem to be formatted for A4 or US Letter size and it doesn't matter how high the resolution is, I can't easily read it without a lot of scrolling. PDFs are for printing not screens anyway. Rarely read comics, and if I did it would be on the 24" colour monitor.
We have those, they are called video screens and are different to books. Also, the main application they can think of is to show you ads. Fuck em.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @05:51AM (1 child)
https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-aura-one [kobobooks.com]
If there was a 32 GB option for Kobo, I didn't see it on their website. So I brought up Amazon which is selling 8 GB and 32 GB.
The Kobo Forma [kobobooks.com] is shown with a landscape mode. I assumed they would all have this. Guess not.
If the screen is large enough, it could be sufficient for PDFs and comics. Your Kobo Aura One is 7.8", and the largest they offer is the Kobo Forma at 8.0" (not much difference there).
Using a flexible display could help with this. It doesn't even need to be fully flexible. Make it so that half the device is rigid, and half the screen can fold over. Then you could have a larger display and possibly a better aspect ratio, but make it easy to carry around.
I'm pretty sure you browse the web and maybe watch a video from time to time. Call it what it is, a tablet. E-readers are just as capable of showing you ads, as Amazon has proven. Otherwise, if ads are not baked into the system, when you use a PC, phone, tablet, or whatever, it's up to you to use software on your devices that don't show you ads.
I'd like a general purpose tablet device that can be used for everything. Clearly, e-ink has some big advantages over an LCD/OLED tablet. It's readable in sunlight, it's less straining on the eyes in a dark room, and it has better battery life. However, hypothetically, if there was an e-ink device that also displayed color, could refresh portions of the screen at up to 30 Hz (or maybe even 60 Hz) whenever needed (but still at "0 Hz" when reading a book), may or may not be flexible (choose the one you want), and didn't compromise PPI/quality due to any of these new features (basically, it doesn't look like shit, with no compromises made), then it could be considered the ultimate tablet device. Assume that the battery life would be about the same if you were only reading books in page turning mode, but would drop if you started using it for things like smooth scrolling or videos. The improved CPU/GPU performance needed should not hurt battery life since we've had devices with both high performance and low power cores for years. ARM's big.LITTLE successor DynamIQ could allow you to have a SoC with 6 high performance cores, 1 low power core, and 1 really low power core for e-reader mode.
From what I can tell, such a device (e-ink with color and/or video) is possible and there has been progress made towards it. But it is stuck in the R&D phase and may stay there for years. If they don't think they can market it, it may never leave the lab.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday November 09 2018, @07:09AM
The Forma came out after I bought the Aura. Have not really checked it out, as I am not upgrading at the moment.
The ideal device you describe does sound awesome, but I actually like the single purposedness of the Kobo. I wanted something to read books on, and that was all. I have a 17" asus laptop for big stuff, and a homebuilt desktop for really big stuff.
Have you looked at the screen that was on the original OLPC? Black/white reflective + colour emissive, both running at once. Quite innovative for its time, you'd think 10 years later they should have improved it.
In a way, I can see it being like the appeal of Apple stuff. The Kobo just works. Hopefully they'll release a software update with landscape mode, it would make PDFs and comics better, if still not great.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday November 09 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)
For $15K you can have better than 20/20 vision ($7500 per eye). The CrystaLens cures nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, and cataracts. Ask your eye doctor about them. I have one implanted in my left eye. I was very nearsighted since I was a kid, 20/200 without glasses, now that eye is 20/16. Sixty six years old and I don't even need reading glasses! I plan on having the other eye done soon.
If you can get steroid eye drops, they will give you cataracts and your insurance will pay all but $2K of it (they'll pay for standard implants that require reading glasses, the CrystaLens costs $1k per eye more). Best thousand bucks I ever spent!
Sadly, I'll have to pay the full $7500 because I'm on Medicare now, and vision isn't covered.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday November 09 2018, @10:37PM
Interesting, but I am not there yet.
With effort, I used to be able to focus closer than 2 inches in front of my eyes and read the microprint on AU currency, getting older that has moved out to about 10 inches.
With no strain I can currently focus from about 20 inches to infinity, it is just a little bit further than is comfortable reading for long periods with the font size in most books. I end up bringing the book in closer then having to exert effort to focus, or having to read under very bright lights which also bug me.
Regarding the insurance I am in AU and our system is a little bit different. Couldn't find the current cost of the lens, (in 2004 it was $920) but the procedure itself seems to be covered under our medicare system. :)
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @09:04AM (1 child)
The Dasung not e-Reader [the-ebook-reader.com] is advertising video playback and there demo seems convincing. They have launched at least two other products on indiegogo, so they have track record of shipping, and also of being extremely expensive.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @09:36AM
It's interesting, and definitely on the way to becoming useful and hitting the points I mentioned. The name is pretty clever.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/not-ereader-first-e-ink-mobile-phone-monitor#/ [indiegogo.com]
They don't mention a frame rate. It looks like 12-15 Hz. Still, you can see a clear benefit for pinch-to-zoom and PDFs.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dont-buy-e-reader-upcoming-technologies-kill-kindle/ [makeuseof.com]
^ This page mentions CLEARink. Claims 33 Hz, 4096 colors. So far, their demos don't look great:
https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2018/05/26/clearink-shows-off-disappointing-color-screens-at-display-week/ [the-ebook-reader.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @08:54AM
I have a Likebook Mars [the-ebook-reader.com] that I like well enough, as well as an Onyx Boox from a generation or two back. However I was thinking more of PC displays and how nice that would be. There are a few e-ink reader/tablets that have HDMI in and/or wifi screen mirroring, but they are painfully expensive and you still have the ghosting/lag of e-inks refresh (which is getting better every generation). Dasung seems to be the main company doing this, with some of the newer Onyx adding the feature. Again, I would love to see a modern monochrome LCD, the sharpness and clarity would be crazy given that you could have three pixels for each colored one (one each for red green blue).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @02:27PM (3 children)
Lack of SD card is a bit of a deal breaker there, my nook simple touch is getting a bit long in the tooth and my eyesight is getting a wee bit worse, I'd like a larger new home for it's 32Gig SD card, a thought though, does this beastie support OTG storage?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:44AM (2 children)
I don't think so. It is designed to be a book. No more, no less. It does a superlative job of being something to read. But that's it. No extras, no bullshit. It's a book, you read it. If it does anything extra above that, it is because it didn't interfere with it being a book. A book that you read.
To be clear here, it is designed for bibliophiles. People who like to read books. It doesn't text, tweet, email or play videos. It is a book.
(Also, contrary to my post above, apparently you can install 3rd party KOReader and read in landscape format. but it is still a book*. That you read.)
*actually many, many, books. As I said, 400 books and it's 5% full.
If I sound like a bit of a fanboy here it is because I like to support companies that actually produce a good product. As far as e-books go I consider the Kobo Aura One expensive but still so good that it is excellent value. :)
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @07:07PM (1 child)
No worries, just that I lug around several thousand datasheets and reference books on my Nook Simple Touch as well as the couple of thousand works of fiction, they all currently fill a 32GB SD card, were transferred to it a couple of years ago, and as well as being my primary 'book', it has been my portable reference library ever since.
The Nook is starting to show it's age (being fair to it, it has travelled FSM knows how many thousands of miles, been stuffed in tool bags, rucksacks, camera bags, panniers etc. and it still manages to go over three weeks between charges) alas, so are my eyes (what I could read without issue on the Nook's screen a few years ago, now causes problems even with bifocals), which is why this beastie was of interest.
Had the Kobo supported USB OTG then it would have meant that I could work around the local storage capacity limitation by keeping my current Nook library on one of my USB sticks and transfer the required files to the beastie as and when I needed them without having to resort to lugging around a laptop as well.
Which is exactly what I'm looking for, as there appears to be mutterings about a 32GB model, I'll keep a listening watch.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday November 10 2018, @10:20PM
Actually, it does have wifi and pocket integration and overdrive, I just don't use them. You could maybe look into putting all your stuff on a pocket server somewhere.
If screen real estate is important, the new Kobo Forma looks good too. The landscape screen is only slightly bigger, 8.0" vs 7.8" but it gives you much more width.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Friday November 09 2018, @02:25AM
There's one thing I sorely miss about my old Herc mono amber displays: They were easy on the eyes. Black was BLACK, bright didn't glare. Unfortunately they had about a 3 year lifespan in everyday use, so I was always scrounging for replacements.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Friday November 09 2018, @02:52AM
I still have a paper-white SVGA monitor. I stuck with monochrome VGA for a long, long time because I'm cheap that way. It's not in use these days but it's sitting in storage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @03:03PM
Check out the 'Industrial' equipment auction sites for secondhand medical displays, one of them here in Britain had a large number up for auction a month or so ago, not so much secondhand, but surplus old-new stock.