[News] Crunchyroll to Launch New Manga App Later This Year
[News] Crunchyroll to Launch New Manga App Later This Year
App to offer manga in English in U.S., Canada, with plans to roll out in other languages
From the article:
Crunchyroll announced during Sony's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) press conference on Monday that it will launch a new manga app named Crunchyroll Manga later this year as a premium add-on to its subscription service. The app will launch first in English in the United States and Canada, but other language options and web browser integration are planned.
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Content aside, what’s the best e-reader for manga? It’d be nice to have color, but that’d honestly be secondary to having a larger screen you wouldn’t have to zoom in to panels on.
I can't recommend colour e-ink. I tried it with already the expectation that it won't be great, but still got disappointed. I went back to my black and white e-reader. The colours are bad and it makes the actual b/w e-ink look worse:
- the colours have half the amount of pixels as the e-ink, making things look very jagged.
- colours have a very limited range (causing a lot banding like it's very compressed among other things)
- if there's a colour that takes up the majority of the screen (sky BGs for example), the rest of the image also gets slightly tinted that way.
- the colour layer (which is a tft lcd layer) on top of the b/w e-ink darkens the b/w. Meaning that unlike b/w e-ink, you always need the backlight, even in the bright sun. Even with the backlight on I found it always looking a bit dim.
- the pixels of the colour layer makes the b/w e-ink look pixelated, even if the colours are off. I could always see the tft layer, even when not in use.
- the screen looks nothing like paper anymore, even in just b/w
By getting colour e-ink just for the occassional colour page in LNs or manga, you'd be sacrificing all the black and white pages, while not getting a good colour page anyway. They all use the same screens too, so checking out multiple brands doesn't matter.
As for recommendations, I use a b/w Boox e-reader (the Leaf, the 7" screen is almost perfectly sized for manga). It's with Android, so I can use Mihon as well as Bookwalker, Kobo and Kindle (I strip the DRM from my e-books bought with the latter 2 stores though, so I can put it on my Komga server, so I haven't used their apps). Really convenient.
I use a boox ultra tab c a like a lot with 2 big caveats:
Color e ink is something you should probably see in person first, buy from a place with a good return policy. I like it and think it’s worth the $100 but it’s nowhere near oled or lcd. Color palette is limited, nowhere near as vibrant, etc. it’s like comparing newsprint to oled
Newer tech in the color e ink space is severely lacking so the kaleido3 panels in the tab c are basically what you can get. Gallery 3 is a thing but it’s not really ideal for reading and the only option is the remarkable, which can’t run any of the tachiyomi forks. There are some potential non e ink technologies but they’re all concepts at this point. E ink patents finally expire in 2026 and then we will hopefully finally see some competition in this space with the monopoly starting to die
Boox hardware support is fucking garbage. If you ever break it repairs are extremely expensive, take a very long time, and may not be done very well. I broke the screen on mine, which was my fault, and it was $350 plus shipping to fix. Took 8 weeks because they didn’t have parts in stock. Then they shipped me back a reader with a bunch of dead and stuck pixels, wifi that doesn’t work as well, and a fingerprint reader that doesn’t work at all. The dead and stuck pixels I’m sol because they don’t count unless they’re in a square in the center third of the screen (so the other 2/3rds can have up to 10 dead/stuck pixels and large clusters of 2-4 stuck pixels count as 1). They would fix the fingerprint reader but I’d have to pay again to ship it back and wait several more weeks (and who knows what they’d break this time)
So if you get one maybe get one of those warranties where they just send you a check minus a deductible or something
Thank you for the info. I might be able to live with the colors not being perfect. I just like the fact that some manga and light novels have an occasional full color page though most is in black and white.
Bummed to hear about the hardware support because the Boox products look really good.
I personally like the color. I had an old e reader before this one that was much smaller and I was using a friends b/w kaleido3 for a bit but decided to try the color. I read tons of manga and it’s nice to have color pages have some color to them, the occasional time I’ll read a webtoon, etc
An important thing I forgot to mention though is that the color has drawbacks though. The way kaleido3 color panels work is basically that they’re the black and white kaleido3 panels with a color filter over them. This filter means that you lose some contrast, brightness, and the screen isn’t as “white”.
The last point actually works for me as it looks closer to paper stock. The first two points are a bit of an annoyance potentially. I didn’t really care because my old reader was from like 2010 and this was still a tremendous upgrade. But when I put it side by side with my friends b/w and the same content I could definitely see the difference. It’s not huge but it’s noticeable. If you read stuff with really complex shading the contrast might be more bothersome.
The brightness is basically he can read his with the front light off in more situations and I need mine on more regularly because the screen appears too dark, which is kind of a bummer bc imo e ink looks it’s absolute best without a front light. But this depends on where you read. If you read outside in sunlight you’ll never need the front light, if you read in bed you’ll need it 100% of the time with both.
And one really nice thing is that their software support is actually really good. They have feedback built into the OS and it’s actually useful, basically a ticketing system and they actually respond to it. I’ve actually had suggestions get added to OS updates via this route. Although they’ve added ai bot responses to this lately and getting an actual persons response takes longer. that’s a bummer but ultimately they do still respond and are helpful on that front
E ink patents finally expire in 2026 and then we will hopefully finally see some competition in this space
I had no idea! That's excellent news!
I use a Boox Page 7" ereader. All the big manga apps, including Shonen Jump and Manga Plus, work on it. None of them support the page-turn buttons except Mihon though. The Shonen Jump app is an especially bad experience because you need to swipe to turn pages; at least with Manga Plus tapping the edge of the screen works. Speaking of the screen, 7" is plenty big for reading in your native language, but I occasionally have to zoom in to make out certain kanji when reading in Japanese. It doesn't sound like a big upgrade in size over phone screens but since it's actually the right aspect ratio it's a huge difference.
As for color, I suspect that color e-ink screens aren't gonna be a great time. You're giving up effective resolution in exchange for it, and I think I'd prefer sharper black and white performance instead.
I’ll check it out. Thanks!