Kindle 2 users complain of eye strain, mull over possible solutions

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

[Groggle Posted Apr 14th 2009 6:48AM]

Asa Kindle 2 owner: It's not a problem. I wear my glasses and the text is fine. When I take them off, the page turns into a blur and my eyes hurt. People will bitch about anything. My father in law has spoken to the poor manager at our Publix grocery store about what a serious problem it is that he cannot get cell reception inside the store... :-)

[Surrealchemist Posted Apr 14th 2009 7:27AM]

I have bad vision but I still have no problem reading it without my glasses on. It has 6 different text sizes, people are such babies.

[galfridus73 Posted Apr 14th 2009 8:08AM]

Let's see: I got my Kindle 2 a week after release. I've read three books, some issues of Analog, multiple samples of books and newspapers, all at the third largest size (so one of the sizes supposedly causing eyestrain)... and I find it completely comfortable.

What might be at issue here is what everyone else has mentioned: These folks need glasses or need to update their prescriptions.

[scobb Posted Apr 14th 2009 3:56PM]

It may actually be the opposite. If there is 'bad' font smoothing, people with mediocre vision may be used to the fuzz. People with good vision - their eyes may keep trying to focus.

Some people are sensitive to 60Hz flicker. Some are not. The ones that get bothered by it are not 'babies' - they just have a higher flicker-fusion-frequency.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 14th 2009 11:15PM]

I have both the kindle one and kindle two, and i read everything on the either the smallest or second smallest text size, I also have 20/12 vision (significantly better than 20/20) and I do not see this at all. I am straining my eyes to see how you could strain your eyes on this text... The only thing i can see at all is some parts of the text appear less bold than others but it is almost imperceptible. I mean grab an actual book the text is nowhere near as regular as the text on the kindle as it is PRINTED... This just sounds crazy to me, but as someone else said i am sure they can turn off font smoothing and it will solve this non-issue pretty quick.