[Frenzie]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's where we differ. I consider smooth scrolling and smoothing to be essential, rather than a minor convenience .

KOReader generally automatically zooms and crops in the most optimal fashion, hence making that unnecessary. When it doesn't, it's still very easy to crop manually. I find this much more useful overall than zooming and panning more smoothly, especially when it's once versus every page. Incidentally, KOReader scrolls fairly smoothly, see here. In practice you normally just don't scroll though, because there's simply no point to it. You can also see how it autocrops that particular document perfectly, which is par for the course in the documents I read.

On my desktop I can easily affect similar cropping, but on a tablet or phone type OS it's all very limited at worst and very difficult at best. Additionally, the lack of page down on my phone and having to scroll by necessity rather annoys me. Bubble is pretty much the only app I actually appreciate because of the intelligent way it zooms and deals with pages.

Sure, I agree that it is a luxury item. I'm a well-paid job and I can afford life's little luxuries like a large-screen iPad. If I were a penniless student, I certainly wouldn't be able to. Not me that mentioned architectural drawings, by the way. I use my iPad to read Egyptology books and journal articles.

My point is primarily that, at least for me, a tablet is a redundant, inferior version of stuff I already otherwise already own (and need!) for other things. An E Ink device is not redundant because it brings a different type of technology to the table even if it is more limited in many ways. Of course that's entirely the manufacturer's choice. You can clearly see that in principle the display is capable of much more. See, e.g., games on a Nook from 5+ years ago and another Nook. Clearly the rest of the hardware is a much more limiting factor than the E Ink display technology.

If I felt wasteful I'd get a tablet as well, but only one that clearly offered me something extra, like being able to draw on it properly. As it is I already have that from my regular, much cheaper Wacom tablet that's "only" good as a computer input device. (Although for all I know it can be used on Android and iPad with Bluetooth or something, but that aside. :P)

A 9.7" screen is about the same screen size as a typical hardback book, so for me it's ideal for reading page-scanned PDFs.

A 10" E Ink device would be great, but for me the existing ones that I've seen (and that are affordable) are pretty useless resolution-wise. Although I don't like iPads much in general, I'd definitely much rather get an iPad Pro or some such, in spite of the backlit screen, which has a roughly comparable PPI to my H2O.