Quote:
Originally Posted by schmolch
The Cybook Opus does indeed look very interesting.
Very compact and light (150g), probably noticeable smaller then the Sony prs-300 and twice as fast (400MHz vs. Sony's 200MHz).
The few reports about pdf reading only complain about missing reflow, but all i need is zoom (and scroll) and that it seems to do.
No touch, notes, dictionary but a perfect screen.
What i dont like so much are the 4 levels of greyscale and only 32MB RAM.
The problem is, i cant make good judgements about many things without actually having the device.
I think i might just order one - furtunately in germany we have the right to return anything within 2 weeks.
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You'll know in 2 days whether it suits you. I briefly owned a PRS-505, and while it's assumedly a clearer screen than the 600, it's also much slower and lacks some of the zooming features, etc.
That said, I found that in landscape mode, reading technical documentation (for example, the OSGi R4 Compendium Specification, google it) was readably large, text-wise, and the various charts came through beautifully. I think, though, that while readable, I'd eventually get a headache from straining on the smallest fonts.
I did use this thing this way for about a week and was satisfied with it. In fact, I miss it. I took it back because at the end of that week, Amazon released the Kindle iPhone app and it made me decide that Kindle was the way to go. Now that Amazon has demonstrated they definitely retain the ability to remotely delete my data, for any reason, I don't want to use it anymore so I'm looking seriously at going back to Sony. I am very interested in the 600 and plan to use it similarly as you, though I won't be limited to PDF only.
I've tried the tablet PC approach to reading... that's horrible, I can't understand why anyone uses tablet PC's. They are so awkward to hold and use at the same time... but anyway, the worst part about tablet PC's is that their screens are even blurrier than the PRS-700. e-Ink is really fantastic, if you really are staring at the screen constantly it helps the eyes, but more importantly, having a 10oz thin slate with loooong battery life, that you can sit out in the sunlight and read even better is so nice to have when you have to read anything of substance, technical or otherwise.
The only reason I am hesitating on the PRS-600 right now is because I am fairly interested in the Plastic Logic reader. I'm beginning to see myself wanting two readers though, a 6" one and a 10" one. But in either case I need annotation support so that really narrows the field. Add in cost and file format support and you're not left with many choices for me (I require PDF and ePub and would like native office document support but don't require it, I can print any office document to PDF on my Mac).
So... all that said
The PRS-300 is a bit smaller. I would be afraid that it's just small enough to make the fonts too small to read, as sharp as they would be rendered. If I were you, I would consider the PRS-600 over the 300, it's not much larger, most of the mass of the device is the screen, it doesn't need all the extra margin that the300 has because it hardly has any face buttons. So the result is that their size is almost negligible in difference while the featureset, particularly if you need to work with panning on a document, is much better suited on the 600.
So there's my input.