[jedd]

Howdi 90x users,

I'm a long time user of (and advocate for) the PB360 - I like it so much I bought a 360+ for my other half for Christmas. It's fantastic for novels, and I generally use only epub or mobi files on it. I did try doing some relatively small PDF's with it - but only the once, as it was a spectacularly unpleasant experience. It was a single Lonely Planet chapter, say about 15 pages, but quite dense in terms of bitmaps and navigation was just sssooooo slow - in the realm of 30+ seconds to render a new screen.

Which leads me to my questions.

I'm thinking about getting a 902, probably to never leave the house, for reading my collection of technical PDF's - thinking of things in the format (but never with the title) of those 'Dummies' books - which are probably around 10" diagonally. These tend to be heavily text, multiple fonts and frequently grey backgrounds, typically greyscale only (or at least colours that I can live without), and the occasional embedded bitmap image.

From what I've researched on this forum, I believe that:
o contrast isn't quite so good on PDF font rendering (but may be solved in an upcoming firmware release) compared to, say, some of the larger kindles
o responsiveness is pretty snappy on PDF's of this type
o my initial research conclusion is probably right - the PB902 is one of the better (usability, price, ergonomics) options for a ~9 inch e-ink reader

So, finally, he says, getting to the point, what I'd love to know from anyone who's done this with their 902 (or similar)

How usable are such PDF's in terms of page-flipping, delay on heavy-image pages?

How usable are 100% graphic / scan PDF's (I've got a couple that would be handy to read this way, but it's not a show-stopper) and how painful is it to navigate around a single page if I need to zoom it to read? Note, I'm happy to go landscape if needs be. I note that these files are usually around the 30-50MB - is that a major performance problem for a machine with 256MB of RAM?

With a zoomed-in PDF, is this easy enough to control the level of zoom so that on a normal 10" text book, I can get rid of the 2" of wasted blank space around all the margins, and most importantly retain that 'page position' when I move to the next page? Do subsequent page loads zoom to the middle of the page, or do they show the top & left margins and require a shuffle across and down? Apologies if this is a spectacularly dumb question.

To cut a long story short isn't my style - so thanks to anyone who read this far.