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LDBoblo · 11-07-2010, 12:37 PM

I bought a Kindle 3. I kinda expected it would be OK, and a nice incremental upgrade from my Sony PRS-505. By that, I mean the text rendering would be slightly better, and the response times would be slightly better. After playing with them for a while side by side, I have to say that I'm much more satisfied with the basic performance of the Kindle than I thought. It's not amazing or anything, but quite good, and the price was very fair.

I do not use the Kindle store, and I do not have any MOBI books, but I do make my own PDFs for my Sony, and have moved many of them over to the Kindle, just to try out. I was irritated when I discovered that when auto-resizing my 6" PDFs, it would cut out intentional white space. I have overcome this issue by defining the corners of the page imperceptibly, and while there's a little more margin than I had intended, it's quite minor.

What struck me right away, as it has many others, was the darkness and density of the text compared to older Vizplex. Typefaces that I thought little more than tolerable on the PRS-505 became, dare I say it, rather pleasant on the Kindle. I went back to some font test files to see how other typefaces would look, and came away pretty impressed overall. Even my Chinese fonts, which discouraged me from making any Chinese ebooks for the PRS-505, were pretty readable, and some rather good on the K3. There's still room for improvement...I'd still really like to see higher resolutions, but I've reached the threshold where I'm actually kinda satisfied with the way text looks for now.

The speed of the device is also OK. It still isn't really up to some types of reading and navigation, but it's a very welcome jump up from my old Sony...far from just a little improvement.

I've got things I don't really like about the Kindle of course, and I'm sure that if I took advantage of other aspects of the device, I'd uncover even more gripes, but in the 2 areas where I was really let down by the PRS-505 as a reading device, the K3 has impressed. I hadn't expected that.

I took a photo of my K3 and Sony in the same lighting and decided to crop out some text and juxtapose them directly. Can you guess which is which?

11-07-2010, 12:37 PM	#1
LDBoblo Wizard Posts: 1,385 Karma: 16056 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Asia Device: Kindle 3 WiFi, Sony PRS-505	Curses, I like the Kindle 3, sorta. I bought a Kindle 3. I kinda expected it would be OK, and a nice incremental upgrade from my Sony PRS-505. By that, I mean the text rendering would be slightly better, and the response times would be slightly better. After playing with them for a while side by side, I have to say that I'm much more satisfied with the basic performance of the Kindle than I thought. It's not amazing or anything, but quite good, and the price was very fair. I do not use the Kindle store, and I do not have any MOBI books, but I do make my own PDFs for my Sony, and have moved many of them over to the Kindle, just to try out. I was irritated when I discovered that when auto-resizing my 6" PDFs, it would cut out intentional white space. I have overcome this issue by defining the corners of the page imperceptibly, and while there's a little more margin than I had intended, it's quite minor. What struck me right away, as it has many others, was the darkness and density of the text compared to older Vizplex. Typefaces that I thought little more than tolerable on the PRS-505 became, dare I say it, rather pleasant on the Kindle. I went back to some font test files to see how other typefaces would look, and came away pretty impressed overall. Even my Chinese fonts, which discouraged me from making any Chinese ebooks for the PRS-505, were pretty readable, and some rather good on the K3. There's still room for improvement...I'd still really like to see higher resolutions, but I've reached the threshold where I'm actually kinda satisfied with the way text looks for now. The speed of the device is also OK. It still isn't really up to some types of reading and navigation, but it's a very welcome jump up from my old Sony...far from just a little improvement. I've got things I don't really like about the Kindle of course, and I'm sure that if I took advantage of other aspects of the device, I'd uncover even more gripes, but in the 2 areas where I was really let down by the PRS-505 as a reading device, the K3 has impressed. I hadn't expected that. I took a photo of my K3 and Sony in the same lighting and decided to crop out some text and juxtapose them directly. Can you guess which is which? Attached Thumbnails