Thread: iPad iPad & Comics
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Old 05-02-2010, 11:39 AM   #14
lilman
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Posts: 326
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Florida, US
Device: Kindle DX, iPad
After trying both pdf manga in Goodreader and cbz manga in ComicZeal, here are my impressions:

ComicZeal pros:
+ Much faster zooming and panning
+ When you send over similarly named manga (like School_Rumble_-_Ch.001.cbz, School_Rumble_-_Ch.002.cbz, ...) it automatically groups those manga into a collection. It named this collection "School_Rumble_-_Ch" but I was able to rename it to just "School Rumble".
+ Can lock screen rotation, which is nice for me since Canti autorotates images that need it.

ComicZeal cons:
- You can use ComicZeal sync to sync wirelessly and it is also supposed to process the manga and shrink the file size, but for me it greatly increased the file size. For example, a single chapter of manga (which I had already processed with Canti) went from .8mb to 5.6mb after Comic Zeal "shrunk" it.
- Almost no configuration options available to the user. For example, I would like to be able to dim the screen brightness within the app.

Goodreader pros:
+ Although it doesn't automatically organize manga into collections like ComicZeal does, but you can easily make your own folders.
+ Can password protect folders or individual comics (good if you have adult comics).
+ Jump to page number feature. ComicZeal just has a scrubber.
+ Can set screen brightness for night mode, and then change to that brightness at any time while reading. ComicZeal doesn't have any brightness options.
+ Much cheaper than ComicZeal ($.99 vs $7.99).

Goodreader cons:
- It has a nice wifi syncing feature where you are supposed to be able to send files through your web browser, but I have been unable to successfully connect. I'm not sure what the problem is since I could wifi sync with ComicZeal.
- No support for cbz. This isn't a big deal for me since Canti can process manga into pdfs in a matter of seconds, but this may be a deal breaker for others.

Overall I think ComicZeal provides a better comic experience and is worth the extra money.

By the way, before I edited this post I reported a problem with ComicZeal where it would stay zoomed in on pages if you had zoomed in on a previous page which was smaller, even if you later zoomed back to full screen on the smaller page. I found out that by tapping the screen once you reset the zoom level for all pages.

Last edited by lilman; 05-02-2010 at 01:48 PM.
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