Quote:
Originally Posted by cze
Hmm. I see. Thank you very much! (You almost conviced my that my choice will be between the iliad and the sony 505. The biggest advantage of the sony of course is its price. But the iliad would come with a bigger screen, many more capabilities (note taking, wlan, djvu? etc), so i will have to think about this a bit more.) Maybe you can help me with a few more questions?
1. In the comparison matrix from mobileread i see that the iliad will take about 0.5sec more for page turning. Can you confirm this? Is it recognizable for you?
2. In the meanwhile i also found that the sony ebook library seems to give me a supposedly reliable idea of how the pdf files would look on the sony 505. For a lot of files, this does look not so bad. But there seems to be no option for switching "reflow" on/off or rotating screen, but switching from "S(mall)" to "M(edium)" in lower right seems, in some pdfs, to switch from page view to reflow view. Now, is this "emulation" of the sony's pdf displaying capabilities really reliable?
3. Do you know if the current sony firmware supports jpeg2000 in pdfs? (As in (some?) google book pdfs or pdfs from archive.org.)
4. Is there a nice way to share (via samba?) pdf files from a desktop pc to the iliad, meaning that i have the iliad connected to my wlan router and can browse with it through the files i have on the desktop and then download and read one of them comfortably?
5. Is it possible (and cheaper) to buy the cheaper iliad (Book Edition) and add wlan capability via CF or USB?
6. Concerning the nice zooming feature of the iliad you described: do i take your description ("once and use it for the entire book") right in that it is possible this way to let the iliad "remember" a zoom frame i draw in page 1 for the following pages like a temporary crop of white border? Is there such a zoom feature with the Sony (or does one have to manually crop pdfs in advance on a desktop pc)?
Thanks again, mgmueller, for your again very helpful informations!
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Question 1:
I've got iRex iLiad and Sony 505 with me, so I directly can compare. The comparison won't be fair, as I don't use the very same book on different devices...
I've just tested it. May not be representative, would have to check various formats.
But for that single check, I can confirm: In that test, iLiad IS slower than Sony 505 in page turns. 0.5 sec seems about right.
Never did recognize it, though. You just get a feeling, when to turn. On iLiad, I do it about 2 lines before the end of the page.
Question 2:
They actually all look fine. Sony 505 has a brilliant display (as opposed to Sony 700), always crisp and clear.
Question is, whether the document still is readable.
You can send a document to me, I'll take a snapshot and post it here.
You change the orientation for Sony 505 within the settings. You change it in general, not just for the single book.
If you zoom in, the PDF automatically is reflowed, you can't stop that. Before Sony's firmware update, the PDF as a whole simply was zoomed, without any changes in the layout. I was fine with that, but it only had "fixed" zoom levels, whereas iLiad can zoom freely.
After the firmware update, zooming was replaced by reflow.
I don't really like it. I'd prefer the option zoom OR reflow.
With reflow, of course the entire layout/linespacing, is changing.
One of my "problems" might be, using "low qualilty" PDFs, sometimes from OCRed scans. Maybe it looks better with "professional" documents.
But in my documents, reflow simply doesn't look that good.
On iLiad, nothing changes, I just zoom in and out as I please - with the touchscreen it's extremely convenient as well.
And of course, iLiad can change the orientation "on the fly" within the document.
I've just compared a single document in Sony library and on the Sony 505.
For that single book, the "emulation" is perfect.
But Sony only has "S", "M", and "L" as zooming levels, no "XL" or "XXL".
For the existing zoom levels, layout was identical on both units.
I've checked on my UMPC, which has 7" and only 1024 x 600. So it's kind of comparable. But still, eInk and TFT look very differently, so it only can give you a very rough idea.
(On the other hand, using the same resolution and screen size, eInk should be superior. So, when you're fine on the PC...)
Question 3:
If you send a respective file to me, I'll test it on the units you're interested in.
Question 4:
Haven't done it, but I've read the posts in the developer's section.
It seems to be working fine.
Personally, I don't need it. I'm either at home, with my entire library within reach. Or I'm travelling and have my UMPC with the entire library with me.
PLUS: Most of the readers (exception: Kindle 2 and Kindle DX
=) offer storage capacity for >> 1000 ebooks. So I wouldn't see the need to store the majority of my books elsewhere.
Question 5:
Honestly, I have NO USE AT ALL for the WLAN capability.
I've only ever used it for 2 features:
a.) Firmware updates. But you could do this easily via Ethernet as well, you won't do it too often. And posts in the forum state, there won't be any further firmware updates for iLiad anymore. (Fine by me, the OS more or less seems perfect to me.)
b.) In the developer's section you find a cool tool for downloading daily comic strips via WLAN. Nice and working perfectly. But I prefer downloading the ones I'll actually read manually.
There is NO webshop, you could access (similar to Amazon's Whispernet via WLAN).
-->What's your intention/demand for WLAN? Is it the feature, you describe under question 4?
As far as i know (but I may be wrong here) you CANNOT add WLAN functionality afterwards via USB or CF. BeBook has announced that feature, but obviously it has to be supported by the OS. As far as I know, iRex DOESN'T support that.
Question 6:
Yes, iLiad remembers your zooming level through the entire document.
Can be a different one for every single book, of course.
There's even a "hack" (another advantage of iLiad, having tons of applications) for a "fullscreen" mode.
There's no such feature on Sony 505 (or any other device I've tested), that's really bound to iRex' touchscreen.
For Sony, you would have to crop your PDF on the PC accordingly.
There are lots of posts concerning that feature.
Imagine PDFs with 2 columns.
Or scanned PDFs with different margins within a single book.
And: You can scribble on your PDFs via iRex' tablet/pen.