Portable Player Reviews

Amazon Kindle Fire

We live in a specs-based world, and looking at the numbers the Fire barely seems a contender: its 7-inch 1,024×600 IPS LED-lit LCD screen is 16x9.333, or slightly taller than 16x9. It's not particularly light for its size, either. Turns out, that doesn't matter at all. For all the details on the Fire, check out my recent full review.

Test Bench

The Fire's 7-inch diagonal screen has a 1,024x600 resolution. The LCD is an IPS (In-Plane switching) design similar to many LG and Panasonic LCD flat panels. This provides excellent off-axis viewing, so those in the seat next to you on the plane can enjoy your episode of Bachelor Pad. Overall uniformity was quite good, with just a few faint light leaks at the bottom, presumably close to the LEDs.

With the backlight set to max, the Fire outputs 114 foot-lamberts with a full white image, and 0.104 with a full black image. With the backlight set to minimum, these numbers were 9.755 and 0.009 respectively. This is an average contrast ratio of 1090:1, the highest contrast ratio of the tablets in test and better than some LCD TV's I've measured.

Color temperature averaged 6720 kelvin, very slightly cool from the D6500 TV standard. Brighter images were cooler than warmer images, though it was fairly consistent bright to dark (average deviation of 92). Dark images were slightly too green to generate a color temperature.

The Fire is 0.45 inches thick and weighs 0.91 lbs.