MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - sony prs-600: a review

campee · 09-03-2009, 01:33 PM

I bought the Sony PRS-600 yesterday at the Sony Store in Palo Alto, California. I have a large collection of IT related PDF documents that I wanted to read at the beach, on airplanes, etc. Sadly, this is not the device for me.

When you open a PDF, the default display mode is full page view. For some reason, it leaves roughly one inch of the screen on each side of the document as blank space and centers the document in the middle of this blank space. The PRS-600 screen is 4"x6". When you open a PDF, it only uses 2"x4" of the screen. It's taking an 8.5" x 11" document and putting it in a 2"x4" box. It's basically unreadable unless you feel like squinting and holding it an inch from your face. For the record, I'm 29 and I have perfect 20/20 vision. Ok, so that's useless. But wait, you can zoom in on the document, right?

There are two ways to zoom in on a PDF on the PRS-600. You can increase the font size, which actually does make the document readable, provided that the document supports PDF reflow. I have found that my collection of books is hit or miss in terms of whether or not the document supports reflow. I can fix the documents that don't support reflow by processing them in Adobe Acrobat and converting them. Problem solved there, but it's kind of time consuming to process multiple 600 page documents one by one. Once you increase the font size, all of the diagrams/special formatting in the PDF get screwed up and become unreadable. You have to set the font size back to "small", squint to see the graphic, and then change the font size back to medium/large to continue reading the document. What a pain.

The PRS-600 also supports the ability to zoom in on your PDF documents, which provides better results than resizing the fonts. It basically treats the page you're looking at as an image and zooms in/out on it. If I zoom in like 30%, the page takes up 100% of the screen. Why this isn't the default mode of viewing PDFs is beyond me. I can read the text and view the images/diagrams just fine in this view. However, when it comes time to read the next page, the zoom level resets and I'm back to incredibly small and unreadable text. I have to zoom in on the page again, click on the + icon to zoom in repeatedly until I get to the level that I like, and then I can read the page again. Repeat over and over. Annoying.

I haven't tried buying a book from Sony to see what that experience is like. I don't even own a Windows or Apple computer to install their software on. I just load my PDFs onto a memory card from my Ubuntu laptop and stick it in the reader. That process works very well, actually. Too bad that reading the document leaves so much to be desired.

I'm probably going to return this device. Unfortunately, they're going to charge me a 15% restocking fee. I guess that's cheaper than being stuck with a $300 device that isn't very useful to me.

09-03-2009, 01:33 PM	#1
campee Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Sep 2009 Device: sony prs-600	sony prs-600: a review I bought the Sony PRS-600 yesterday at the Sony Store in Palo Alto, California. I have a large collection of IT related PDF documents that I wanted to read at the beach, on airplanes, etc. Sadly, this is not the device for me. When you open a PDF, the default display mode is full page view. For some reason, it leaves roughly one inch of the screen on each side of the document as blank space and centers the document in the middle of this blank space. The PRS-600 screen is 4"x6". When you open a PDF, it only uses 2"x4" of the screen. It's taking an 8.5" x 11" document and putting it in a 2"x4" box. It's basically unreadable unless you feel like squinting and holding it an inch from your face. For the record, I'm 29 and I have perfect 20/20 vision. Ok, so that's useless. But wait, you can zoom in on the document, right? There are two ways to zoom in on a PDF on the PRS-600. You can increase the font size, which actually does make the document readable, provided that the document supports PDF reflow. I have found that my collection of books is hit or miss in terms of whether or not the document supports reflow. I can fix the documents that don't support reflow by processing them in Adobe Acrobat and converting them. Problem solved there, but it's kind of time consuming to process multiple 600 page documents one by one. Once you increase the font size, all of the diagrams/special formatting in the PDF get screwed up and become unreadable. You have to set the font size back to "small", squint to see the graphic, and then change the font size back to medium/large to continue reading the document. What a pain. The PRS-600 also supports the ability to zoom in on your PDF documents, which provides better results than resizing the fonts. It basically treats the page you're looking at as an image and zooms in/out on it. If I zoom in like 30%, the page takes up 100% of the screen. Why this isn't the default mode of viewing PDFs is beyond me. I can read the text and view the images/diagrams just fine in this view. However, when it comes time to read the next page, the zoom level resets and I'm back to incredibly small and unreadable text. I have to zoom in on the page again, click on the + icon to zoom in repeatedly until I get to the level that I like, and then I can read the page again. Repeat over and over. Annoying. I haven't tried buying a book from Sony to see what that experience is like. I don't even own a Windows or Apple computer to install their software on. I just load my PDFs onto a memory card from my Ubuntu laptop and stick it in the reader. That process works very well, actually. Too bad that reading the document leaves so much to be desired. I'm probably going to return this device. Unfortunately, they're going to charge me a 15% restocking fee. I guess that's cheaper than being stuck with a $300 device that isn't very useful to me.