[IvoSenden]

I'm glad I skipped the PRS-600 when the battery of my much used PRS-505 finally started wearing out.
The infamous touchscreen layer of the PRS-600 caused the contrast to sink to terrible levels.
And then came the PRS-650.
Now, I'm not going to say that the PRS-650 is perfect, cause it's not. Sony still uses the same, frustrating Reader software and still sells the AC charger and the cover seperately.
Also, I noticed that when opening a book from the menu, you can still see the menu somewhat through the picture of the book cover, as if the screen didn't refresh all too well. This problem however, only appears to happen when showing the book cover. Once you're on the text pages of a book, or browsing through the menu, everything's perfectly fine.

Now, for comparing to my old, faithfull PRS-505...

The PRS-650 has a slightly higher contrast, with darker blacks, making my books just a little more readable.
The PRS-650 has 16 shades of gray, where the PRS-505 has only 4, making photo's and images appear very detailed, natural and high in contrast.
The PRS-650 has software similar to the PRS-600, which is better than the 505's.
On my PRS-505, I noticed that it got very slow when holding more than 400-500 books, so the first thing I did was pumping over one thousand books into my new PRS-650. Ok, it got a tiny bit slower, but I'm talking nanoseconds here. It handles a whole bulk of books just fine.

The new touchscreen, which is made up of infrared sensors in stead of a pressure sensitive layer, is really nice. You literally don't have to press, just touch the screen. The page turn "swipe" can be set from left to right, or right to left, but you don't have to swipe all across the screen. A tiny move with your thumb over the screen for about 1 cm (half an inch) makes your pages turn.

Some of the PRS-600 and 300 had fading text when turning pages in bright sunlight. This appears to be a problem of a faulty batch of eInk screens and I didn't notice this problem on my new PRS-650.

I'm waiting now for the update of the wonderful Calibre software. Version 0.7.19, which should come any day now, is promised to have PRS-650 support, so I can leave the awfull Sony Reader software behind me.

I made a photo of the same page on the PRS-650 and the PRS-505, next to each other in bright sunlight, to compare the contrast.

Cheers,

Ivo