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Old 05-02-2011, 12:53 PM   #6
delphin
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Posts: 434
Karma: 346901
Join Date: Dec 2010
Device: SONY PRS-650
Quote:
Originally Posted by pidgeon92 View Post
I am reading a PDF from the library right now on my 950. It is not a great experience. ...
If by 'not great' you are speaking literally, meaning not stellar, then I would agree.

On the other hand, I wouldn't agree if 'not great' is a euphemism for 'bad', because , at least for the example you gave of a simple text novel, the PDF reflow on the PRS-X50s is actually fairly usable once you get past the annoyance of the fact that it messes up the formatting somewhat.

Where I think there are some legitimately problems, is when you are dealing with a PDF with tables, or one that has been scanned but not OCR converted (one where the text is still represented as a bit-mapped image), because then the reflow is pretty much useless. Tables get ripped to bits, and scanned pages that are represented as images either don't change at all (leaving them too small to read), or worse, the scanned images just disappear completely when reflow is turned on (when using any font size except 'S').

Even so, I still found the Sony's a bit better than the Kindle. Unlike the Kindle, the Sony at least tries to reflow text for you, and on documents where that causes the formatting to get too messed up, the Sony PRS-x50 readers have better ZOOMING capabilities, which gives you the option to leave the font set to 'S' to preserve the formatting, and using the ZOOM feature instead of a reflowed larger font to increase the text size.

Having said that, I think for academic work, I would plan on also having at least an inexpensive Netbook available, for those cases were the smaller eInk devices just can't cut it.

Last edited by delphin; 05-04-2011 at 03:36 AM.
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