[JayBoy]

I had a Sony PRS-700 on pre-order from SonyStyle.ca (I live in Toronto) and just received it yesterday. While waiting for my reader I was reading these forums on a daily basis, especially the debate over screen quality between the PRS-505 and PRS-700, and was wondering whether I had made the right decision. While many of the impressions about the 700 are from people who have owned the 500 or 505, I thought that feedback from someone who has never owned and eBook reader before might be useful to those of you that are new to eBook readers as well.

The elephant in the room: The screen
After reading much of the debate on the screen quality when I finally got the package from Sony I was expecting the worse. Low-and-behold its actually pretty good! Completely readable. However, the contrast could be a little better, and in some lighting conditions the edges of the text do not appear 100% sharp. A lot of people have speculated this has to do with the touch screen, I've noticed that if you hold the screen on a very sharp angle under direct sunlight you can actually see a very slight speckling on the surface of the plastic over the eInk screen. This makes me wonder if this is really due to the touch screen or an anti-glare coating Sony put on the touch screen. This would explain why so many of the photos taken of the 700 next to the 505 on an angle look so bad (any light hitting the screen on an angle is meant to be diffused and therefore will not make for a decent photo). If you are expecting the screen to be just like paper you will be disappointed, but if you see this is an electronic alternative its pretty good (once again I'm not comparing to other eBook reader models as I have never owned one before).

PDF support, Search
These are the features of the 700 which ultimately got me interested in buying the eBook reader. I am a programmer, so many of my reference books are 1200-1500 pages. Many of these come in PDF version as well, so good PDF support was a must. As I often find myself going to the index of one my reference books to find sepecific information, the search feature on the 700 is a dream come true! I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the 700 understands the native PDF table of contents and allows you to select items and jump right to the page! From what I understand the 700 is the only Sony model that allows zooming on PDF files (which is great for all the charts I have), but I also heard that there is firmware upgrade for the 505 that increases it support for PDFs as well. Do any of the Gurus on this forum know what the differences in PDF handling on the 505 with the firmware upgrade and the 700 out of the box are? (I'm curious).

Other features
The touch screen is nice, it wasn't a big selling feature for me as I am just as happy pushing buttons, but the interface is intuitive and I would rather have a touch keyboard for searching than a clunky mass of buttons appended to the bottom of the device. The light is simply put "okay". Its nice that its there when you need it, from what I understand none of the clip-on alternatives are anything to write home about either, and I'm not in the habit of reading in the pitch dark to begin with so its not a big deal. I usually do not write in the margins of my books or highlight them either so the annotation feature was not a big selling point for me but after trying it out and realizing its potential I can see this as something I could make a lot of use of!

All-in-all I am very happy with my 700 (and its had some nice surprises I didn't expect). The debate about the screen is still something that bothers me not because the 700's is bad, but because I've never seen the 505's in real life and am curious if it really is that much better. Besides that all the other features are great, functionality is intuitive, speed is very snappy. Great product!

Jason