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Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm very much in the "PDFs are better on tablets" camp, I'm afraid.
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If by tablet, you mean a device that can do smooth variable panning and zooming, then I fully agree with you. Your comments about cpu speed and memory are spot on as well.
Having said that, the vast majority of PDFs work just fine by either zooming 2x or rotating 90 and matching autocropped width to the long axis of a screen that is at least 5" and then panning vertically down the page.
Maybe one pdf in 20 is a high resolution scan that needs a lot of ram or complex drawings that need a lot of cpu to render.
Maybe one pdf in 40 has stupid colors and low contrast that render poorly in 16 shades of grey. I've seen a few scanned documents with non-white background or some kind of watermark that renders stupidly on the e-paper screen.
Maybe one pdf in 15 has fine print that I just can't seem to zoom enough, or worse, when I have zoomed it enough, I now have to pan horizontally several times to read the whole line -- this makes it very unpleasant to read.
About one pdf in 5 is multicolumn text which is nice because if I can pick the right zoom, I can see the whole column width without rotating, so maybe I can vertically pan once or twice per column.
Of course, your experience may vary because if you are getting all your pdfs from a single source or similar sources, they might all have one of these problems that just work better on a tablet with more memory, a fast cpu, and/or a color screen.
There's no replacement for a larger screen, but I think 4" x 6" (7") is probably adequate for 90% of pdfs. 6.5" diagonal is marginally adequate. Much larger than that is nice, but probably overkill.
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If you go decide to go for an eInk device, I'd strongly suggest choosing one with at least a 9.7" screen, and much better a 13.3" screen.
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I think 9" is overkill for sure (but like I said, it would be nice). 13" would let you view documents at their intended size without cropping off the white space around the edges or zooming and panning at all. Very few documents need this, but if you got a pack of architectural drawings or something, even this screen size might seem small.