BOOX Max3 is one of the mightest digital tablets in BOOX lineup. It is the world’s 1st eReader that employs Android 9.0 OS, a powerful Octa-core processor, and many other advanced features. As for the characteristics of E Ink display, it’s eye-friendly, glare-free, power-saving, but at the same time, the display refresh rate is much lower than LCD display. That’s quite a problem to run some apps with considerable colorful content and animation on it. Does this change on BOOX Max3?
As we know, BOOX Max3 has four refresh modes used in different circumstances, which allow you to have a more seamless experience. Normal mode is the default mode for reading text. Speed mode provides a little bit more ghosting but a higher refresh rate. It’s great to view news or magazines with text wrapped around images. A2 mode which seriously degrades image quality but it’s smooth to view on browsers even you need to drag it up and down. X mode is quite a new thing, it was designed for watching videos. With these modes, let’s have a close look at how the performance is to play games on Max3.
In the first place, we went to the Google Play store, randomly downloaded a free chess app. Opened it and call out optimization settings by the NaviBall. Before that, the app was automatically optimized by the system when first opened. Now we just need to manually adjust some of the settings. There’s a default setting called “Whiten Background”. It’s used to whiten up dark backgrounds. Obviously, in this case, this setting was not necessary since this app seemed not that bad on the E Ink display. Sometimes it performed worse with this setting activated. So people should try to test it during the optimization for every newly installed app.
We selected the normal mode and started a new game. As seen that every chess could be viewed clearly on the display, the chess shape, the white and black color, and the chessboard. Actually it performed much better than what we expected. The display looked more like a printed chess manual than a game interface. That feeling was fantastic especially after three and four games finished, we did not get eyestrain, blurry vision, dry eyes like when you stared at an LCD screen for such a long time.
With two sides to everything, the E Ink display also has some drawbacks. As the test results, since this game does not require too many animations, the normal mode had the best performance, while the other three modes caused a different degree of ghosting. However, the normal mode wouldn’t always be the winner. Which mode to choose depends on the refresh rate required.
Here are some tips to solve the ghosting issue.
(1) In the optimization setting, there’s a full refresh option. Setting it to a small value helps to get a higher refresh rate. Recommend to set it to refresh per 5 or 10 operations. By the way, phones and tablets refresh themselves at a rate of 60–120 per second, which is really bad for your eyes.
(2) Set the full refresh option to the NaviBall, then manually click “full refresh” when the ghosting begins to annoy you.
On the whole, it’s possible to use Max3 to play games, to some extent. It’s amazing to play games on E Ink display if they are compatible with E Ink display. To choose an appropriate refresh mode for apps is important. Generally speaking, eReaders are used as a productivity tool for study or work, but BOOX Max3’s abilities make it more like a tablet. If one day the E Ink technology break through the limits of refresh rate, you would play games on E Ink tablets, wouldn’t you?
Sample device:
