MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - New 13.3" Onyx Boox. Rumours, prototype specs, first pictures

rchiang · 05-05-2016, 10:41 AM

I still haven't had a ton of playing time, but my next experiment was to play with the built-in reader:

Copying PDFs over the microUSB cable worked just fine, but it was extremely slow on a USB 2.0 port (1 MB/sec on average). I get much better speeds taking out the microSD card and using an adapter directly. There's a very nice screen and button each time for enabling "USB Drive" mode and disabling it.
Tested a Marvel comic PDF (the old ones scanned done by GIT corp). If you're not familiar with this, then these are 2-up, watermarked, somewhat dirty color scans of the original comics. It looks like most of the time was spend rendering since each page flip would take somewhere past 15 seconds.
Tested two Pathfinder RPG books and the Serenity RPG. These are very nice looking PDFs, with lots of fancy text and background images. Flipping a page would take around 1-3 seconds, depending on the graphics. Readability of the Pathfinder books was fine, but the Serenity RPG has very dark images for a background so text/background contrast was poor.
Tested a couple of CS textbooks. Both rendered at about a page per second and mixing text with diagrams (e.g. data structures, flowcharts) was easily viewable on one page.
Tested a couple of black & white comics (Bloom County PDF from Humble Bundle, Elfquest EPUB from Kobo). Both looked great and rendered fine, but again not much faster than one page per second. Reading in landscape mode with Bloom County was
Tested one dark color comic (Rising Stars Compendium PDF). Again, the overall dark backgrounds/colors of the comic made for very poor contrast, but the rendering times were decent.

TL;DR: Color comics hard to read, especially darker toned ones. Black & white comics great. Textbook-style mixing of text and images great.

Still haven't tested a 2-column, mixed text with smaller images PDF (i.e. a journal paper).

05-05-2016, 10:41 AM	#361
rchiang Connoisseur Posts: 50 Karma: 159200 Join Date: Jan 2013 Device: Kindle PW3, iPad Pro 9.7"	Testing the page speed of the built-in PDF reader I still haven't had a ton of playing time, but my next experiment was to play with the built-in reader: Copying PDFs over the microUSB cable worked just fine, but it was extremely slow on a USB 2.0 port (1 MB/sec on average). I get much better speeds taking out the microSD card and using an adapter directly. There's a very nice screen and button each time for enabling "USB Drive" mode and disabling it. Tested a Marvel comic PDF (the old ones scanned done by GIT corp). If you're not familiar with this, then these are 2-up, watermarked, somewhat dirty color scans of the original comics. It looks like most of the time was spend rendering since each page flip would take somewhere past 15 seconds. Tested two Pathfinder RPG books and the Serenity RPG. These are very nice looking PDFs, with lots of fancy text and background images. Flipping a page would take around 1-3 seconds, depending on the graphics. Readability of the Pathfinder books was fine, but the Serenity RPG has very dark images for a background so text/background contrast was poor. Tested a couple of CS textbooks. Both rendered at about a page per second and mixing text with diagrams (e.g. data structures, flowcharts) was easily viewable on one page. Tested a couple of black & white comics (Bloom County PDF from Humble Bundle, Elfquest EPUB from Kobo). Both looked great and rendered fine, but again not much faster than one page per second. Reading in landscape mode with Bloom County was Tested one dark color comic (Rising Stars Compendium PDF). Again, the overall dark backgrounds/colors of the comic made for very poor contrast, but the rendering times were decent. TL;DR: Color comics hard to read, especially darker toned ones. Black & white comics great. Textbook-style mixing of text and images great. Still haven't tested a 2-column, mixed text with smaller images PDF (i.e. a journal paper).