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I was going to start a new thread, but you guys beat me to it. So I will just cut and paste what I was going to write into here.
I have mixed feelings about how well the Reader handles the format. Overall, I am happy with it. However, it is far from perfect at this point, so take that into account before making any kind of purchase decision.
The readability quality appears to vary from title to title. Really light colored brush strokes / pencil lines somewhat disappear and are barely visible. This appears to be a general problem with the reader as viewing several digital camera shots from my last vacation in Japan pictures of white clothing or white colors the object appears to lose definition and gets somewhat lost into the background. Dark heavy lines and brush strokes show up really well, and this is the optimal way to view pictures on the device.
There appears to be 2 main ways most people will be reading Manga on the reader.
1. Store bought ebook book formatted Manga.
2. Viewing self obtained titles in .jpg format.
There is also a 3rd option of converting a series of sequential .jpg’s into a .pdf but early reports so far have been that the resulting image quality is pretty poor, so for right now at least this is probably not a great option.
1. Ebook formatted Manga for the reader:
Ironically for me, the sample Manga that comes packed in with the Reader (Peach Fuzz) has been the poorest on general readability. While the image on Peach Fuzz is extremely clean, it has a lot of light brush strokes that completely disappear against the background. Some of the text is also incredibly small and it was hard for me to read in standard vertical mode. Switching the size from S, M, L, had little effect as the image appears to be locked into a specific aspect ratio and it will only let you zoom to the point of the image filling to the screen borders, not beyond. Small text legibility such as liner notes or sound effects translations can be quite difficult to read without proper eye squinting.
Reading in Landscape mode however is pretty nice, as the image is a lot larger and thus the text readability is quite a bit better. At this point each page is split into two halves (top and bottom) and you scroll through the two halves either via the joystick or the page button. However, even with the increased image size, the light brush strokes still get lost into the background, and I was also getting some “stair stepping” on diagonal lines.
Page refresh time hovers around 2 seconds, which is in line with standard books.
I have not bought any additional Manga from the connect store so I cannot speak for the other titles. I am curious however whether it is an issue specific with this title, whether it is an issue with the Manga ebook format, or whether it is an issue specific to Tokyo Pop and how they are converting their titles.
2. Viewing Manga as sequential .jpg’s:
Reading Manga as raw pictures on the Reader has some advantages and some serious disadvantages. First off, I was having none of the readability problems with scanned .jpgs and I tried a variety of different content. All of the content appeared perfectly readable in S size in standard Vertical mode. The zooming of various levels also lets you get pretty close to the pictures so you can pick out the fine details. And at least with the titles I was viewing, the image frames itself right to the screen borders and views really well in Landscape mode using the L size.
However, organization of .jpg’s is really poor. With the reader’s flat file structure there is no way to organize any of your pictures. You cannot create subfolders, and every picture just gets dumped into the same root directory. So if you have a large collection of several hundred pictures, navigating between the different titles can be confusing and difficult. While the reader will remember the last picture you left off at when you turn off the unit, there is absolutely no way to bookmark pictures, so if you decide to jump to a different title or read a standard text book, you will have to manually remember where you left off at.
Navigation of zoomed pictures is also fairly cumbersome. In standard vertical format, M and L zoom levels cut the picture on all 4 sides so you will have to use the joystick to scroll around the various parts of the page. Every time you scroll, the page refreshes. so this is an option you probably will not want to maintain for every page. In L size Landscape mode the image is framed on the left and right sides and you only have to scroll down the page, which is cut into approximately 3 sections. In theory L size Landscape mode makes for some pretty good reading. However, as soon as you turn a page in Landscape mode, the panel section remains where it was on the previous page. For example, if you are on the bottom panel section and turn the page, the picture is on the bottom panel of the new page. So you have to manually scroll up to the top panel of each page every time you turn the page.
Page refresh times of standard .jpg file sizes take approximately 3 seconds to fully refresh which is not bad. However high quality images of over a meg can take upwards of 15 seconds, which is completely unusable. So if at all possible try to make sure your picture file sizes hover around 300k.
Please take into account I have only had my reader for less than a week. A month from now my views and opinions on this matter might change completely. I am hopeful a lot of the issues will work themselves out over time either through firmware updates, the community coming up with workarounds, or companies learning to format better for this device. So I am convinced things will only get better from here.
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