My Kindle arrived at my house just before noon on February 1st. Were you expecting that my first post about it would occur one hour later? Or would you realize that I would be too busy reading it to write about it? Because that’s what has happened.

I’ll start with its most remarkable feature: the electronic ink display. It is a revelation. Before it arrived I didn’t know how to imagine it. I couldn’t stop thinking of a regular reflective LCD display like a typical watch or calculator. When I opened the box and turned it on, it was displaying the first page of the user manual—on what looked like a printed page. You know how in a store they might show a mockup of a device with an LCD screen, actually printing the black on gray to give you an idea of what it will look like in reality? The Kindle’s display looks like that printout.

Which is awesome, because of course a printed faux LCD display is easier on the eyes than a real LCD display. The Kindle’s page doesn’t have any angle sensitivity: from any vantage point it is crisp and clear. The words do not appear to float above the background, like they do on an LCD display. It is also higher contrast, and the background is a “pure” gray and not an LCD’s sickly green-gray color. It’s an electrophoretic display, something I have never seen before.

At a normal reading distance I cannot see any pixels or even any evidence of pixels. Of course, this is generally true of my computer monitor too. Using a magnifying glass, the pixels on my computer monitor become obvious; using the same glass on my Kindle does reveal a telltale staircase pattern on the diagonals of k’s and w’s, but only there. According to the Kindle’s Wikipedia entry, the display is a mere 800x600 pixels, but it’s hard to believe. Perhaps it’s because the pixels are not crisp squares; I’m not sure. I remember that Myst III: Exile, designed for CRT pixels, looked fantastic on a CRT, but had obvious digital artifacts on my newer LCD monitor.

Being totally reflective, high resolution, good contrast, and visible at every viewing angle, the Kindle’s display is easy on the eyes, much easier than a computer monitor. It is true that the contrast is not as good as most printed materials. It is definitely lower contrast than most books; it is closer to a slightly aged newspaper. This means that in lower light conditions it is harder to read and so I have to break out the reading light earlier in the evening.

The other feature of its electronic ink display is that once the image has been formed, it takes next to no energy to keep it there. The battery lasts for days. With the wireless powered on, it will go for two to three days (reading for a couple of hours a day); with it powered off and only using the electronic ink, it goes longer than a week. I still want to do an experiment where I leave the wireless powered off until I finally get the “LOW BATT” indicator from doing nothing except page turning. The fact that it has no backlight extends battery life too.

That’s right: the Kindle has no backlight or light of any kind. My family did not believe this when they heard it and had to prove it to themselves by turning out the lights to test it. The display does seem a bit luminous in certain lights, but this is not because it is casting any light of its own.

One odd artifact of the display shows up when I “turn” pages. There is a pause, about 0.75 seconds, while the display “flashes” as it goes to the next page. This “flash” turns the page briefly into its own negative, then blank, then the new page appears. Each transition is visible, appearing to start in the middle of the page and quickly spread outward, so that it looks more like a quick double-splash. This was very attention-getting at first, but because the pause is about the time it takes me to turn a physical page, it’s easy to ignore.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon has stated that their goal with the Kindle was to have it “disappear” the way books do. In other words, when you’re reading a book, you’re in the story, not self-consciously Reading a Paper Book. The Kindle’s display succeeds in that way for me: I’m just reading, not having to be delicate about viewing angle, distracted by pixel artifacts, or worry about bleeding the battery dry if I set it down for awhile.