From Karel (iRex Community Manager) here (http://forum.irexnet.com/viewtopic.php?t=2857): The speed of a page refresh depends on a number of factors, to name a few: the type of content, the processor, the speed of data transfer, the limitations of the electronic ink, etc...

To give you an idea: in general with the iLiad it takes about 500 ms to transfer the image data or a regular page to the display and another 800 ms to refresh the screen. With the iRex 1000 we managed to reduce the transfer speed to 50 ms for an even larger display. The refresh rate of electronic ink is still 800 ms (based on Vizplex material).

So in theory the refresh rate improved from approx 1300 ms with the iRex iLiad to 850 ms with the iRex 1000.

These are not exact figures, but should give a good indication of the actual performance improvement. I have updated the E-book Reader Matrix (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix) with these values. All the other refresh rates in the wiki seem to be about 0.9s, and this is consistent with what EInk said a year ago (NEW VIZPLEX IMAGING FILM IS BRIGHTER AND FASTER (http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr100.html)) if their controllers don't add much overhead: Typical Switch Speed Previous Generation Imaging Film 1200 ms
Typical Switch Speed Vizplex Imaging Film 740 ms

Does it pre-render next page correctly into some type of fast access memory as it should to optimize the time required to go to the next page?

Improved from 1300 ms to 850 ms? About 35% improvement. Looking at the figure will make me think it's quite an improvement. But I still wonder if users will notice a 450ms faster improvement when they are using DR1000.