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Best E-readers features and value | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| bernardpar Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5366 days ago 4 posts - 7 votes | Message 9 of 18 22 November 2010 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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As far as reading PDFs is concerned PRS-650 is much better than Kindle 3. Native PDF
support is very good indeed + reflow works brilliantly. One cannot forget it has got only 6 inch screen but for linear reading it is not a problem. I convert some scanned PDFs with a little free application pdflrfwin, works like a charm. Event really bad scanned PDFs work very well, page turn is not affected. I would not recommend it for technical PDF though. They have simply too many charts and pictures. Edited by bernardpar on 22 November 2010 at 2:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5331 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 10 of 18 22 November 2010 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||
OK, but how does it handle when zoomed in? Can you scroll pages without zooming out? Can it display the pages continuously (like the option in Adobe), so you don't have to flip pages? Can you view them with the screen rotated 90 degrees? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5676 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 11 of 18 22 November 2010 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
I was a bit disappointed with viewing pdfs on my 650. For mostly plain text pdfs, it resizes ok and the text is a continuous flow. You can rotate 90 degrees easily. For multiple column pds, such as newspapers, I cannot navigate them successfully at all although the 650 guide describes how to do that. I think that part is cumbersome at best. For very large pdfs like the London Tube map, it was unsatisfactory. The pan and zoom were not good enough to use. So I had to make a series of separate Tube jpgs from the pdf. I find the computer application to manage the 650 to also be awkward and non-intuitive. It works but not well. The other concern I have is whether the tiny USB connector on the 650 will develop problems. It seems too delicate and you have to be very careful to push the USB plug in straight. Apart from that, I think the 650 is great. The readability of the screen is excellent. It does a great job with plain text files. And the bilingual dictionaries and the dictionary interfaces are excellent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5331 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 12 of 18 22 November 2010 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, perhaps i'll aim for a tablet computer instead then, it seems near impossible to get an e-ink reader with good pdf support. I like reading very complex and detailed pdfs, that probably won't be any fun on the 650 then.
What I'm wondering is how useful outdoor readability really is, I won't be doing much hardcore studying outside anyway. Also, thanks for the replies sorry about hijacking the thread! Edited by Gusutafu on 23 November 2010 at 9:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| flabbergasted Triglot Groupie Latvia Joined 6166 days ago 75 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Latvian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Persian | Message 13 of 18 26 November 2010 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
How about the glare and eye-strain? Does it really read like a paper book? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5245 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 14 of 18 27 November 2010 at 2:19am | IP Logged | ||
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After months of hesitation I finally bought an Amazon Kindle a few days ago. Here are my first impressions. If there is any wrong information in the following paragraphs, then this is because I may not have figured out all the bits and pieces yet.
The reason why I wanted an eBook reader was the eInk display. I read everywhere that eInk should look like printed, so I had high expectations. They were not only met but surpassed. When I unwrapped the device I saw an image on the screen and thought they had put some plastic film onto it as a protective layer, but then I couldn't remove it and realised that this already was the naked screen. The background has a slightly beige tint like old paper, which I find very pleasant. The Kindle can display only the .mobi format, plain text, and pdf. You can convert other formats by sending them as attachments to a mail address assigned to your device, but I haven't tried that yet. With all formats the result looks like the output of a laser printer. You have to actively look for an angle where you get some reflections, and even then the are very faint. I cannot test the impact of sunlight, because I live in Scotland. :-) The PDF format was developed for printing purposes, so it will always be a compromise when your screen doesn't have the format of the printed paper. The main problem with eBook readers is that the screen is just too small. The Kindle has a 6" screen, and with a good quality PDF you can just about read the text when displaying a full page at once. Most likely you have to zoom in and scroll around, which is no fun. There are 5 zoom settings: fit-to-width, 150%, 200%, 300%, and actual size. The way it works best is fit-to-width and a screen rotation of 90°. Then the buttons that usually flip the pages will first scroll down or up to the beginning or end of the page in 2 steps and then take you to the opposite end of the previous or next page. That way you don't have to scroll to left or right. I tested a rather low quality PDF from the FSI Swedish course and could read it well after setting the contrast to maximum. There are some things that annoy me. When you copy book onto the device via the usb cable you can create subfolders, but the overview on the Kindle doesn't show subfolders. Instead, it recurses through the tree and shows all files it can display in a flat list. So using subfolders is possible but useless. If you have a large number of books on the device it will be difficult to find what you're looking for, especially since the titles are displayed in the order they were accessed, not alphabetically. If there is a setting to change this sort order then I haven't found it yet. One more annoying thing is that when you don't press any button for 10min, the screen will switch to a kind of screen saver image. I don't understand the point of this. The manual says that this should save energy, but as far as I know eInk displays need energy only for changing the display, not for keeping it. And why would any of these images require less energy than the rendered text of a book? Very strange. This feature cannot be switched off, nor can you change the 10min, so this is effectively a bug. Why would anyone need more than 10min to read one page? When doing a writing exercise or having a grammar book open for reference, 10min are very short. For some reason I didn't get the WiFi connection to work. The device discovers the network, but then the password is rejected. I'm not going to switch off the encryption just for this eBook reader. No idea why this doesn't work. So I can't test the parts that require network access, like the web browser under the experimental settings. Maybe I'll try to fix that later, but actually I'm interested only in copying texts to the device by usb anyway. Network access always comes with a myriad of distractions. EDIT: Changing the encryption of my home network from WEP to WPA fixed the connectivity issue. Edited by OlafP on 28 November 2010 at 11:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Xenon Tetraglot Newbie Canada Joined 5442 days ago 14 posts - 17 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, Italian, French Studies: Russian, German | Message 15 of 18 02 December 2010 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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My money went on a Sony PRS-650 e-reader.I love the fact that can play mp3s and read
pdfs at the same time (I usually scan the accompanying textbook).I prefer the e-reader especially for the fact that a notebook is, application wise, much better than an Ipad and for reading the e-ink technology is quite powerful ( and also I am biased against everything Steve Jobs builds or recommends :)). To be totally honest I would have preferred a 7", 8" or 9" one. Asus will make me happy probably in Q1 next year :) Edited by Xenon on 02 December 2010 at 3:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5017 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 18 02 December 2010 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to the Sony site, their eReaders seem to offer more than the Kindle and the Nook (although that's from the Sony site so it's obviously biased). The multilingual dictionaries certainly make it look better from a language learning point of view, since I'd mostly plan to use it to read foreign language books. The main thing that the Kindle has that they don't is the internet connectivity, which I doubt I'd need anyway.
I'm a big fan of Sony as a company at all, but their reader, when combined with the Calibre software, seems like the best choice. I've yet to try one in the flesh though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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