The Kobo Aura HD marks the company’s second iteration of a front-lit display on your traditional e-reader. No other company in the world has produced a second generation e-ink device that will allow you to read in the dark, and many people have questions on how it stacks up against the competition. Today, we compare the Kobo Aura HD against the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, Kobo Glo, Kobo Arc, and the Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD.
These Nighttime Reading tests are very short videos and are conducted in our studio with all of the lights turned off. We show you how the front-lit displays compare against each other. Most of the tests take place on the main home menu and then within an ebook. Also, you can get a very good sense of how the screen technologies really function in real world conditions. Our last test compares the Aura HD against the Kobo Arc, an Android tablet. Many people often ask us the prime differences between a front-lit display and a back-lit one, so here we go into detail with the pros and cons of each.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.