MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Looking into a new e-rader, will be reading a lot of Pdf's

vxf · 12-22-2010, 05:35 PM

Not to sound like a broken record... I posted earlier about the iPad... but believe me, it's still the best option for PDFs.

I am a PhD student, I read 3-400 pages of PDFs a day these days and I annotate them. I tried the iRex models, the Kindle DX and the SONYs (900 and 950). IRex was buggy, sluggish and overall poorly built. The DX would be great, but no touchscreen, which stinks if you want to annotate. The SONYs worked, but the screen is a bit too small for a full-size PDF and the annotations cumbersome to export.

Eventually, I got an iPad. With a stylus and iAnnotate, it's a pleasure to use. Sure, the screen is an LCD and thus heavier on your eyes than e-ink. But the larger screen is a must for PDFs and the annotation system (iAnnotate save annotations directly in PDFs, so you can view them on any other PDF software) is light years ahead of SONY.

Now, if you are interested in simply reading (and not annotating) PDFs and don't care too much about tables and graphs, then I would recommend a PRS950. As I mentioned, the smaller screen forces you to read PDFs in landscape mode, thus displaying a third of a page. For text, that is not an issue. But if you have figures, tables, graphs, then it becomes unpleasant.

12-22-2010, 05:35 PM	#8
vxf Guru Posts: 944 Karma: 1490348 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Norman, OK Device: Sony PRS 350, 900, 950; Kindles (ALL of them!); Kobo Aura One	Not to sound like a broken record... I posted earlier about the iPad... but believe me, it's still the best option for PDFs. I am a PhD student, I read 3-400 pages of PDFs a day these days and I annotate them. I tried the iRex models, the Kindle DX and the SONYs (900 and 950). IRex was buggy, sluggish and overall poorly built. The DX would be great, but no touchscreen, which stinks if you want to annotate. The SONYs worked, but the screen is a bit too small for a full-size PDF and the annotations cumbersome to export. Eventually, I got an iPad. With a stylus and iAnnotate, it's a pleasure to use. Sure, the screen is an LCD and thus heavier on your eyes than e-ink. But the larger screen is a must for PDFs and the annotation system (iAnnotate save annotations directly in PDFs, so you can view them on any other PDF software) is light years ahead of SONY. Now, if you are interested in simply reading (and not annotating) PDFs and don't care too much about tables and graphs, then I would recommend a PRS950. As I mentioned, the smaller screen forces you to read PDFs in landscape mode, thus displaying a third of a page. For text, that is not an issue. But if you have figures, tables, graphs, then it becomes unpleasant.