Quote:
Originally Posted by seajewel
A couple people in a different thread are reporting that they see "less contrast" .. blacks are not as black and whites are not as white as before.
I would also really like to hear about any noticeable effects on battery life.
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During the last 4 days I've been traveling to and from a conference and had
lots of time to read using the new firmware and epub books from Feedbooks.
Funny, but all weekend I kept thinking, "The display looks like it has
more contrast!" Not a reasonable observation, but for some reason it does seem easier to read. Hmmmm . . . better font rendition? Is the "paper base" whiter with epub than with a PDF?
2.) I felt there was a definite
increase in battery life. Before the firmware upgrade, I typically used Custom PDFs from Feedbooks. A long weekend of heavy reading would drain the battery at least half way, sometimes more. The only thing I read this weekend was epub books and after four days of heavy reading the battery life was still reading "full." I was amazed.
3.) Has anyone else noticed the incredible
decrease in file size? What was a 4mb PDF for a longish book is now 800k for the same text! I've now downloaded about 40 epub books from Feedbooks and all of them are about 20-25% the file size of the same book formatted as a PDF. That's the functional equivalent of increasing the memory of the Reader by a factor of 4-5 or so! I may stop using the SD card (which I understand drains even more battery life).
4.) Boot-up is faster. Navigation is faster. Waking up from sleep is really faster. Yay!
5.) The PDF reflow works (sort of) with choppy line endings (as others have mentioned). At least is does actually reflow and change the text size.
6.) The font size changes with epubs is excellent. (With only one slight glitch in the chapter titles of the Feedbooks epubs I've been reading -- at the Medium font size, the first line of the chapter titles seems to be flush right and sometimes cuts off some of the text.)
I'm so impressed with the epub format! I think I'll replace all my PDFs with the equivalent epub versions and not look back. Thanks, Sony. Thanks, Hadrien.
Brooks