More info on the Sony Reader PRS-505's E Ink display

Sony was surprisingly mum about what improvements were made to the on-screen performance of its new E Ink-based Reader PRS-505. So we caught up with Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink, who helped shed some light on the benefits of the 505's new display chemistry, called E Ink Vizplex:

• According to E Ink, this Vizplex chemistry is ~20% brighter than the 500. "You can see it best on the black and white menus compared to the old 500 which are twice as fast."

• Page turns are only a little faster, though; Sony said something like ~20% (but our unit seems like it might be even faster than that). Because...
  

• When out of the menus and in text-reading mode, most of the new E Ink chemistry's horsepower goes into the reduction of ghosting (a bit of a problem on the 500) and the 8 grayscale levels (doubled over the 500's 4 levels).

• Contrast is also ~20% improved. "The contrast level is better than a newspaper, on par with a book, and a bit below a magazine."