BOOX Refresh Modes Explained (and How to Set Them Per App)

Almost every complaint about an E Ink screen being "slow" or "smeary" is really a refresh mode set wrong for the task. BOOX gives you more control here than any other e-reader brand, which is a gift once you know what the controls do.

The four modes

Open the Control Center by swiping down from the top of the screen and you will find a refresh mode selector with four options. The exact names move around between firmware versions, but the ladder is always the same, from best-looking to fastest:

1. Highest quality. Full 16-level greyscale, sharpest text, least ghosting, slowest update. This is the reading mode.
2. Balanced. Slightly fewer grey levels for a quicker update. A reasonable compromise for menus and light browsing.
3. Fast. Noticeably quicker, visibly more ghosting, greys start to flatten. Good for scrolling through a web page or a long list.
4. Ultra fast. Mostly black and white with heavy ghosting, but smooth enough for video and rapid scrolling.

The rule of thumb: use the slowest mode you can tolerate for what you are doing. Reading a novel does not benefit from a fast mode, because you turn a page every couple of minutes.

Full refresh: the black flash

Separately from the mode, there is the full refresh, when the screen flashes to black and back. That is the panel resetting every capsule to clear the residue that partial updates leave behind. It is not a fault.

You control how often it happens. The default on most devices is every few page turns, and you can usually stretch that out or set it to manual. The trade-off is direct: fewer flashes means more ghosting between them. Readers who find the flash distracting set it long and trigger one by hand when the page starts looking muddy.

If ghosting is what brought you here, our article on spots and ghosting on E Ink covers how to tell normal residue from an actual panel problem.

BOOX Note Air5 C 10.3"$699.99

Per-app optimization: the feature to learn

Setting one mode for the whole device means compromising everywhere. App optimization solves that by storing display settings separately for each app.

Open the optimization panel while an app is running, from the Control Center or by long-pressing the app icon, and you can set for that app alone:

• Refresh mode, as above.
• Contrast and darkening, which thickens light text that renders too faintly on E Ink.
• Bleach, which pushes off-white backgrounds to true white. This is the setting that rescues web pages and apps designed with grey backgrounds.
• Anti-aliasing and DPI, for apps whose text renders too thin or whose interface is laid out too small.

Sensible starting points:

• Reading apps: highest quality, contrast untouched.
• Browser: fast mode, bleach on. Web pages are full of grey that turns to mud otherwise.
• Note apps: highest quality, so strokes land crisply.
• Video or anything animated: ultra fast, and accept that it will look rough. E Ink was not built for this, and no setting changes that.

Colour devices behave differently

On a colour BOOX such as the Note Air5 C or the Go 10.3 Gen II, there is a further choice between a colour mode and a black-and-white mode. Colour rendering costs refresh speed and slightly softens text, because the colour filter sits over the panel.

Many owners of colour devices read novels in the black-and-white mode and switch to colour only for comics, charts or magazines. You paid for the colour, but you do not have to use it for everything.

BOOX Go 10.3 (Gen II)$547.99

When settings are not the answer

If text still looks wrong after adjusting contrast and bleach, the app may simply be rendering badly rather than being displayed badly. Some apps use custom text rendering that ignores system settings entirely. In that case a different app for the same job is usually a faster fix than more tuning. Our guide to read-later apps on E Ink walks through what that tuning looks like in practice.

See the difference in person

Refresh modes are far easier to understand when you watch them switch. Come to our Oakville showroom and we will cycle through all four on whichever device you are curious about, so you can judge the trade-off with your own eyes rather than from a description.