iRex iLiad hands-on videos posted

[Alexander Turcic]

E-book veteran Henrycat was so kind to make some hands-on videos of his iRex iLiad in action. You can download them packed in a RAR file from RapidShare, or directly from us (if RapidShare doesn't work for you).

Don't miss our ongoing discussion, with talk about the videos starting somewhere around page four.

[Snappy!]

hmmm ... some thoughts after viewing the videos:

1. Cool handwriting there ... no recognition engine I suppose? Slight lag visible.
2. Page flipping speed is quite slow isn't it? The actual blanking of the screen is acceptable, but there is a very noticeable delay between the flip-switch press and the blanking of around 1~2 seconds or more in some scenes. Is it just pdf files or is it the same for text files?
3. Keyboard entry ... keys do not provide any visual feedback that it is "pressed" ... or is there audio feedback that I missed out in the clip?

I'm mostly surprised by the lag between page flips. Its hardware specs is not shabby at all and I've seen slower machines perform better. Does eink really need such a long prep time before it can refresh its display?

[CommanderROR]

@snappy you can read inthe other thread that this delay is mostly due to badly programmed viewer software. the actual refresh time is a lot faster...most of the time is taken up with loading the content of the next page.
it takes 4-5 secs at the moment..watch the little light that starts blinking...that means the device is busy calculating...don't ask me why they still haven't got better software...

[ath]

Originally Posted by CommanderROR

it takes 4-5 secs at the moment..watch the little light that starts blinking...that means the device is busy calculating...don't ask me why they still haven't got better software...

It was most noticeable in the berserk.pdf AVI, but I can't say how that file is structured. Presumably page images ... but in what resolution? Close to that of the device, or way off? Some resampling may be going on here. What colour depth? Are the images being dithered to greyscale on the fly as well? As for decompression ... I think the XScale coprocessor is targeted to audio processing, so I suspect this is done in 'soft' floating point.

Or is the PDF already tailored to the iLiad device?

[Henrycat]

Originally Posted by ath

It was most noticeable in the berserk.pdf AVI, but I can't say how that file is structured. Presumably page images ... but in what resolution? Close to that of the device, or way off? Some resampling may be going on here. What colour depth? Are the images being dithered to greyscale on the fly as well? As for decompression ... I think the XScale coprocessor is targeted to audio processing, so I suspect this is done in 'soft' floating point.

Or is the PDF already tailored to the iLiad device?

I just unzip my berserk releases, resized the pages to 1024x768, converted to grayscale (16 colours), and made the pdf.

I tried to see if there was any big difference between color and greyscale (rendering time), but can really say i could notice anything...

Beter have them in grayscale in any case

[Snappy!]

Originally Posted by CommanderROR

@snappy you can read inthe other thread that this delay is mostly due to badly programmed viewer software. the actual refresh time is a lot faster...most of the time is taken up with loading the content of the next page.
it takes 4-5 secs at the moment..watch the little light that starts blinking...that means the device is busy calculating...don't ask me why they still haven't got better software...

hmmm ... in that case, I hope its easy to port/xcompile other ereaders like FBReader and the likes ... they definitely work faster in loading files, pdf, html or otherwise.