I'm continuing a manga reading discussion from
the iRex forums (and following a request by the user Avenger) here, because Mobileread handles attachments better and also because if you're reading this, this is relevant to your interests™.
Unlike the less-than-stellar way in which the DR handles full color images and images with lots of tonal gradations (the post on top of this thread), the DR does pretty well while dealing with black and white images and line-drawn art.
Disclaimer, etc.: The material is from a manga that is freely readable on the web, so I hope I have not violated any copyright terms. Contact me if you feel I should take down these images. This manga is typical of most, i.e. black & white and line drawn with some large dark patches (which might bring out ghosting issues). I am not responsible for the actual content of the manga.
The original images were NOT processed for display on either the DR or the PRS (with Calibre, for instance).
Picture 1:
Can I say that this sort of stuff looks *gorgeous* on an e-ink display? Someone actually reading this on the Sony will probably want to view it in landscape mode (kills the joy if reading it, IMHO), but I kept it this way for comparison. The Sony does not let you get rid of that page bar AFAIK, which the DR does. If the image is not the same aspect ratio as the device, both add black borders (the color of which you cannot currently change). On the DR, you can carefully pick the zoom region so that the top and bottom of the page are cropped, and there are no black bars. This is a little tricky, if at all possible, on the Sony (without pre-processing).
Picture 2:
I expected something like this to bring out ghosting issues, but there is none of that on either device
Picture 3:
This picture has an overlay of a close-up shot.
Surprise! It looks like Sony runs a poorer scaling/resampling algorithm. Notice that both images are scaled by the readers to be about the same size in physical space, and since both readers have similar dpi, the will have about the same number of pixels as well, so there is no excuse for the Sony. This may also not be a scaling issue at all, but rather an artifact of dithering itself. The Sony might be trying to compensate for color loss that just isn't there in this black and white image.
I really like the way DR handles crisp scans of line art. Plus, the bigger size.
Picture 4:
This image has large shaded regions, but there is no noticeable ghosting on either reader. It is also clear that the Sony looks cooler (more blue) than the DR (more yellow), as we already knew.
Picture 5: (Ghosting Test)
I tried to bring out an instance when ghosting is seen clearly. Some comics with large black regions might exhibit this. I used the ghosting test patterns
from a related thread (links to
ghosting_test_pattern.jpg and
ghosting_test_all_black.jpg), and had both readers display the test pattern (seen below among attachments) for 5 minutes. Then, I switched to an all-black image. Notice that this is a
worst case scenario, and one that you will rarely encounter with typical usage.
The DR retains a stronger residual image from the previous page (AKA the "ghost") when compared to the Sony (ideally, both should display an all-black image). This is not necessarily all bad, as I will explain in the refresh rate test below.
Refresh rate test: This is a motion capture from my point-and-shoot, so forgive the sub-par video quality. You can
download the video if the following youtube video does not load.
The DR is WAY faster than the Sony at flipping pages. If you look at the slow motion video, you'll see that the Sony is doing some real fancy stuff while refreshing the screen, and spends twice as long doing it (the Sony has barely begun its refresh cycle before the DR is done). This results in less ghosting, but at the cost of refresh speed. Considering that this sort of ghosting is not usually apparent, I prefer the DR's philosophy.
By the way, if you have a particular comic/document that suffers from ghosting on the DR, you can simply insert white pages in-between pages that tend to retain residual images. This is, more or less, equivalent to a longer screen refresh (like the Sony), but you can control where and when it is done by inserting white pages. Of course, hopefully someone will incorporate this into the DR software soon, so you should be able to select a special "ghostbusting" reading mode and have the best of both worlds.
Other thoughts:
1.
Of blacks and whites: The average white value was about 176 in each channel (RGB, higher the better) on the Sony and 167 on the DR (0 - 255 scale). Likewise, black was 54 (lower the better) on the Sony and 48 on the DR. The actual color values depend on the white balancing on the camera, the ambient lighting and the color reproduction of the camera. My camera isn't the best at color reproduction, so this only tells us the relative difference in whites/blacks as far as the camera is concerned. These are averages involving the same regions of a single image on both readers under similar lighting conditions. I did not average over several images as I cannot guarantee that the conditions are the same.
The whites on the Sony are a *tiny* bit whiter, while the blacks on the DR are a *tiny* bit deeper. Keep in mind that the color temperature (and where the other in-between shades are) affect the overall perception as well.
2.
Some thoughts on navigating/organizing comics on the DR: The DR lets you dump your images into a folder and treats each image as a separate page. This is the fastest way to read comics on the DR (PDFs are much slower), and you can organize different comics into a hierarchical folder structure. This is not optimal, but I can live with it until I get my (long overdue) CBR viewer done, or someone ports something else that handles this. The Sony does not let you organize images, unfortunately, but you can gather images and create an LRF using Calibre.
The DR also has more zooming and panning options. There is no two-page viewing option (yet), but you have page flow and can pick pretty much any zoom level. Also, panning actually makes sense on the DR because of the much faster refresh rate.
Hope that was useful to other readers. As usual, I've included original images and higher resolution pictures (as well as the video) in a .zip file (
download here) for archival purposes.
Cheers
