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Old 03-14-2008, 05:17 PM   #61
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Originally Posted by ibat View Post
This font is great! It looks a bit squashed at the smallest font setting, and there are certainly more beautiful fonts out there, but it has a very clean, clear look. Free Serif is by far the most readable serif font I've seen so far on a 6" e-ink screen. Thanks again!
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Old 03-26-2008, 10:35 AM   #62
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I took the V3 on a 4-day trip with the family over the Easter weekend, and I couldn't be happier with the experience. Trips involving small children feel like moving a complete household anyway, so not having to worry about the number of books to take with me was nice. The FreeSerif font is awesome even after reading for hours, and the experience was sufficiently immersive that muscle memory activated and I started to actually try to turn those non-existent paper pages a couple of times. :-)

The only major complaint I have are the occasional crashes/reboots. Once, the device rebooted after a waiting time of 20-30 seconds, the other time it was completely stuck with the red LED on, and I had to use a tooth pick to reset the unit.

Note to self: always have a tooth pick or paper clip with you when using the V3.
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Old 04-01-2008, 03:55 AM   #63
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Note to self: always have a tooth pick or paper clip with you when using the V3.
I dont know how big the reset is on the v3, but i usually find my stylus on my pda useful for things like that, of course it doesnt help you if you dont carry a pda either
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Old 07-09-2008, 03:51 PM   #64
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Begging to differ...

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum so this is my first post.

I received a lbook V3 from the distributor in Ukraine for review purposes about ten days ago.

From my perspective, the device is not good enough. My key issues are:

1- Yes, it supports many formats but you have to tweak all of them before you load them or there are formatting and page break problems (and I do know how to fix them but I do not have the time)
2- Contrast is low: I need to wear glasses when using it (the price you pay for a long life, I guess)
3- The only thing it does better than a PDA is keeps a battery charge forever, a benefit of Viplex E Ink, not specific to the Hanlin device

Retail in Ukraine is about 1700 UAH (235 Euros or 363$). I would pay more for something with an 8 level gray scale (the lbook has 4)

I am going to try a Sony next and see how it compares
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Old 07-10-2008, 04:38 AM   #65
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Originally Posted by fdemers View Post
Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum so this is my first post.

I received a lbook V3 from the distributor in Ukraine for review purposes about ten days ago.

From my perspective, the device is not good enough. My key issues are:

1- Yes, it supports many formats but you have to tweak all of them before you load them or there are formatting and page break problems (and I do know how to fix them but I do not have the time)
2- Contrast is low: I need to wear glasses when using it (the price you pay for a long life, I guess)
3- The only thing it does better than a PDA is keeps a battery charge forever, a benefit of Viplex E Ink, not specific to the Hanlin device

Retail in Ukraine is about 1700 UAH (235 Euros or 363$). I would pay more for something with an 8 level gray scale (the lbook has 4)

I am going to try a Sony next and see how it compares

1. Known issue, hence the new firmwares with improvements (although last month it has been quite with firmware releases I must admit).

2. Turn on your lamp when reading, just as you would with a book That's the whole idea of e-ink. No backlight, improved contrast compared to other divices in natural light/reading conditions.

Explain your 8 bit level reasoning? The iLiad is the only device currently supporting 8 bit greyscale. Compared to the V3, the V3 has a more clear rendering of text and graphics.
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Old 07-10-2008, 10:36 AM   #66
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mvoosten View Post

Explain your 8 bit level reasoning? The iLiad is the only device currently supporting 8 bit greyscale. Compared to the V3, the V3 has a more clear rendering of text and graphics.
iLiad supports 16 level grayscale and Sony supports 8 level grayscale.

Dale
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Old 07-11-2008, 02:06 AM   #67
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Originally Posted by mvoosten View Post
1. Known issue, hence the new firmwares with improvements (although last month it has been quite with firmware releases I must admit).

2. Turn on your lamp when reading, just as you would with a book
I thought of that, but whenever I try it at night in bed, the lamp button immediately triggers some sort of detector and a feminine voice says "Turn off the light: I want to sleep!!!" This is not an issue with the V3. It's about some other firmware in the bedroom because it also happens with paper books...

As to shades of gray, I believe the more the better. For rendering pics and for antialiasing fonts. But this is an opinion and every one has those

Francois
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Old 07-18-2008, 12:34 AM   #68
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I got my new Hanlin V3 today. So far I'm very happy with it. I was looking for:
-Vizplex e-ink
-Long battery life (I didn't care about wifi)
-As non-DRM-oriented as possible
-Preferably with a released SDK (Software Development Kit)
-Decent native pdf support
-SD-card expandable memory (since my existing gadgets already use SD cards and I've got spares kicking around)
-Ability to create my own subfolders to organize a large book collection

What I like about it:
-It has all of the features that I was looking for above.
-Being able to create folders and subfolders is a lifesaver.
-I had no trouble at all reading the one pdf I tried. It resized (small portrait, medium portrait, large landscape) at the touch of a button. Pictures below, so you can judge the readability for yourself.
Graphical front cover
Medium-sized portrait
Large-sized landscape
-The interface is well-designed and powerful, although there were one or two cases where I felt that I had to press too many buttons to get a task done.
-It supports very many fonts, and you can easily add your own fonts/character sets to get support for pretty much any language, including Chinese/Japanese/Korean. I feel a sudden urge to upload something written in ancient runes, just because I can
-There are MANY options for configuring the appearance of your text files, from changing the size and orientation to inverting the text colors (white text on a black background).

What I don't like:
-Two of my text files, which I created myself and saved in Microsoft Notepad, were not recognised by the device. The Project Gutenberg files opened perfectly well, so maybe there's a quirk in the way Notepad saves text files.
-The page-turn speed still isn't great, although that can probably be said for any e-ink reader. It's less of an annoyance if I use the smallest or second-smallest font, so page turns are kept to a minimum.
-The contrast is good, but still not as good as good-quality paper. It looks as though I'm reading a high-quality newspaper. Again, a consequence of still-developing technology
-When the page changes, there's a (very) faint afterimage of the previous page still on the screen. I'm not sure whether that's Hanlin-specific or not. It's not enough to interfere with reading, though.
-The page-turn buttons (the ones on the side as well as the ones on the bottom) are very close to the edge of the reader. If I hold it in one hand and turn pages as I walk, my thumb is forced into a cramped and rather uncomfortable position.
-Availability. I'm in Canada, and the only reasonably-priced retailers I could find were in the Netherlands or China. I bought mine from the Netherlands, and it took nearly a month to arrive.

Last edited by Krytes; 07-18-2008 at 12:36 AM. Reason: accuracy
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Old 07-18-2008, 07:35 AM   #69
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Krytes View Post
What I don't like:
-Two of my text files, which I created myself and saved in Microsoft Notepad, were not recognised by the device. The Project Gutenberg files opened perfectly well, so maybe there's a quirk in the way Notepad saves text files.
-The page-turn speed still isn't great, although that can probably be said for any e-ink reader. It's less of an annoyance if I use the smallest or second-smallest font, so page turns are kept to a minimum.
-The contrast is good, but still not as good as good-quality paper. It looks as though I'm reading a high-quality newspaper. Again, a consequence of still-developing technology
-When the page changes, there's a (very) faint afterimage of the previous page still on the screen. I'm not sure whether that's Hanlin-specific or not. It's not enough to interfere with reading, though.
-The page-turn buttons (the ones on the side as well as the ones on the bottom) are very close to the edge of the reader. If I hold it in one hand and turn pages as I walk, my thumb is forced into a cramped and rather uncomfortable position.
-Availability. I'm in Canada, and the only reasonably-priced retailers I could find were in the Netherlands or China. I bought mine from the Netherlands, and it took nearly a month to arrive.
1) I'd suggest to use BookDesigner (look around here, there is v4 + IMPORTANT update) then convert these txt files to FB2. BD will fix the line breaks for you.
2) Page turn speed is a "feature" of the current e-ink device, you'll get used and even press the button before the reach the end of page... it's almoast certain that future readers will fix that.
3) Contrast is OK, without my contacts my eyesight is 10-15% of normal and still I can read without lights and without eyestrain No backlight, though. Again, I expect improvements for future readers.
4) About the afterimage you mean AFTER you changed to a new page or while changing? If you mean after then something is wrong. While changing it's a treat of vizplex technology. Once more, you get used.
5) I hope you haven't paid in euro Looks like for Americans the best option is to order from China.
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Old 07-18-2008, 08:49 AM   #70
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I received my Hanlin yesterday and like Krytes I'm pretty impressed with it. The screen is great, much nicer for reading than my PDA was. Entire family commented on how easy it is to read.

As with Krytes, the biggest pluses are the wide format support, file folder support (this is a major plus imho) and SD support. I've also found having the 10 buttons handy for the "goto page" option and ease of bookmarking.

I've had a play with all the various formats including mobi-pocket with the latest firmware and personally I like the fb2 format the most. EPub is nice too but until there's some automated tools for conversion I'll be sticking to fb2. oeb2epub.py does convert some of my books, but there's quite a few formatting issues especially around some special characters.

Mobi-pocket does look nice, but until the page turn speed gets closer to the 1 second the other formats take, I don't see me really using it. Which is a shame as mobicreator makes converting from oeb to mobi really simple. That said, I'm hoping epub tools will emerge in the future which will then make it my format of choice for all my books.

I also had a go with converting a few files to the wolf format, but the text didn't make full use of the display. For some reason about 5-6 lines were left blank at the bottom, with the text on the next page.

For conversion software, BookDesigner was my first attempt, but it turns out you need MS Word, I use Open Office, so that's a no go. There are two other converters though, Any2FB2 and batch2fb. Google translate the page and you'll see which are which.

CHM files were surprisingly readable, which is handy as I've plenty of reference manuals in CHM format.

Quote:
-The page-turn speed still isn't great, although that can probably be said for any e-ink reader. It's less of an annoyance if I use the smallest or second-smallest font, so page turns are kept to a minimum.
Aside from mobi-pocket format, I don't find the page turn that bad. It's under a second, which if you hit it just as you're reading the last line of so, by the time your eyes have moved to the top of the page it's ready. It does appear that different file formats take different times to page flip though.

Last edited by JoeD; 07-18-2008 at 08:52 AM.
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Old 07-18-2008, 10:41 AM   #71
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Speaking about formats, I think that nobody mentioned rtf.

The v3 opens rtf files exactly as if they were fb2. For example, let's suppose I have some text in html. Using openoffice I made the conversion html -> odt -> rtf

If there is a block of text that is centered in the rtf document, the V3 includes the first line of this block in the table of contents.

Until now, this is the best solution for non-windows trapped people, like me

Regards,

L.
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Old 07-18-2008, 03:01 PM   #72
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Speaking about formats, I think that nobody mentioned rtf.

The v3 opens rtf files exactly as if they were fb2. For example, let's suppose I have some text in html. Using openoffice I made the conversion html -> odt -> rtf

If there is a block of text that is centered in the rtf document, the V3 includes the first line of this block in the table of contents.

Until now, this is the best solution for non-windows trapped people, like me

Regards,

L.
Good point, Coolreader is the app that handles both FB2 & RTF. About the Windows comment, well FB2 is completely open format and RTF is a MS free format
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Old 07-19-2008, 06:08 PM   #73
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Not to mention epub which has just been added, if I'm not mistaken. Haven't had a chance to try it though.

Regards
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