Can airport X-ray machines harm your Kindle? Some e-ink Kindle owners have discovered their e-readers stopped working after passing them through airport security X-ray machines. The culprit is thought to be not the radiation from the X-rays themselves, but the static electricity that can build up from the circulating rubber conveyor belt and could be strong enough to disrupt the e-ink capsules in the reader’s screen.
Spokesmen for Amazon, which is replacing the damaged Kindles, insist that X-raying your Kindle is perfectly safe. “Many Kindle users travel by air, and their Kindles are screened by airport security every day without issue.” And they’re probably right, or else we’d be seeing an uproar tantamount to Apple’s “antennagate”.
Still, I suspect more than a few Kindle owners are going to hesitate next time they have to surrender their e-readers to an airport scanner.
Of even more concern would be loss of digital information in devices such as USB drives, laptops, digital cameras, CF and SD cards and the like. Fortunately I am not aware of any such outrage. There are always those who will suffer a problem and seek redress from other alleged sources. Since most eReaders are carry-on devices and thousands are scanned daily, I would suggest the complaint is bogus.
So you think that a static discharge could hit a Kindle inside its case, inside a bag, while sitting in a plastic bin? How exactly would that work?
Also, why are you singling out just the Kindle and not other gadgets? Assuming this actually happens, all electronics are vulnerable.
Nate, the issue is probably when some security drone insists they take the thing out of its case and lay it right in the olatic bin. Because it’s a “computer”.