I'm just about to buy the DS1000s, but...

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by sarikan

I'll check if Irex will accept to fix this thing under the warranty. It has been more than a year since I bought it

Hopefully you'll get good news. I have heard of them honoring repairs outside of the warranty period before, they seem to be fairly nice about that.

[sarikan]

Well, I've not only asked for a repair, I've asked for a new device. I would not be surprised if they refused to repair the device, let alone give me a new one. Looking at the messages in this forum, I can see that many others are enjoying the device, just as I was expecting to do so.
I've got enough reason to think that I've come across a faulty unit. I like the device so much that I did not contact support for every issue, but at the end, my reader died completely. Not booting with the three lights on status.
Lets wait and see what happens. Based on the outcomes, I'll look for an alternative, though I don't know how can I effort a device these days
Anyway, I'll let the forum members know what happened when things move forward.

Kind regards
Seref

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by sarikan

Well, I've not only asked for a repair, I've asked for a new device.

Based on what you've been saying, I expect they would have swapped it for a new one anyway. I don't think they would have tried to repair it.

[kleykenb]

Originally Posted by sarikan

Well, I've not only asked for a repair, I've asked for a new device. I would not be surprised if they refused to repair the device, let alone give me a new one. Looking at the messages in this forum, I can see that many others are enjoying the device, just as I was expecting to do so.
I've got enough reason to think that I've come across a faulty unit. I like the device so much that I did not contact support for every issue, but at the end, my reader died completely. Not booting with the three lights on status.
Lets wait and see what happens. Based on the outcomes, I'll look for an alternative, though I don't know how can I effort a device these days
Anyway, I'll let the forum members know what happened when things move forward.

Kind regards
Seref

- If you are in Europe then you always have a 2 year Warranty (check EU Law on this !), many companies claim only a 1 year warranty but this is BS.
- Maybe you also have an insurance that you can contact in case iRex doesn't do right with you ?

My experiences with iRex tell me that they are not nice at all when it comes to Warranty. Or at the very least it depends on who you happen to have contact with from Support (there seem to be no guidelines .. they look at it case by case !).

In your case I suspect that the problem may be with the SD Card reader or the SD Card : read/write problems on the SD card can cause instability, even boot problems. Try to use a different SD card ... try to format an SD card , and see if that helps. SD Card Reader problems seem to be the second most common problem (USB port breaking off is the number 1) with these devices.

[sarikan]

Believe me, I've tried every combination of every factor SD card in, SD card out, I've even tested things like light, heat (I did not put the device in oven). The nature of the problems remains unknown, and its occurrence has been random.
Irex just sent me pre-paid ups box to send them the device, and they said they'll be examining the device first. This is good for a start. I would be very happy to get a replacement, but in my case, even a repair is good enough.
Funny thing is, looking at other people's experience with the device, I still think I've been unlucky about my particular unit. For the next 6-8 months, for a guy living in London, with my requirements, DR1000S is still the only option. When it works, I love the device, and it does all I want, and saves me from lots of back pain, saves lots of trees. It is just that I can't effort another one if this process becomes a dead end. I've turned into the joke of my department at UCL, from being the cool guy with the fancy e-reader

All the best
Seref

[Sebl]

Hello everyone, this is my first post here, though I have been following those threads for some time. 2 months ago, I bought a sony PRS 600 for my academic needs. The screen proves a bit to small for my taste. I tried several options available in the PDF forum (including sopdf) but got an error message when trying to transform my pdf : I mostly want to read GOOGLE pdfs. (the books I read there are early 19th cent. books only to be found there) So here is my question : will the DR1000 allow me to turm pages of those special book-length image-scanned PDFs quickly enough or does each page turn take more than one second on average? I have another question : on my Sony, the metadata for the pdfs is a problem, some of it I can't change because it is protected, so I get the same title, for instance "test-title" ten times for ten different pdfs and I can no longer sort them out. The Sony does not display the "computer" file name (xxxx.pdf) which, at least, could be modified. Does the DR1000 display it? In any case, I will still have to wait for ordering one DR100 because in France and the Netherlands, they seem to be out of stock (on both websites).

[owl123]

DR1000S is fine when it comes to reading Google-scanned books. Just make sure the 'hide margins' option is switched off in the reader.

DR displays PDF file names, not meta info, which is good.

[plisken]

Response time is awful, it takes more than one second for page turn and due to bugs it is not rare that DR1000S really "thinks" hard on page turning. The record for me was about half an hour (and then reader turned off automatically).

So, in short it is no match for paper book however I have DR1000S and it saves my eyes. Thus, I would buy it again, I cannot fully like it, but I have to appreciate fact that I don't have to use computer. I read a lot pdfs from Citeseer and it is comfortable to lie on bed and read them, even if it takes more time than I wished.

In other words -- you won't love it, but it is best you can buy now (for the task you mention).

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by plisken

Response time is awful, it takes more than one second for page turn

That's a limitation of current eInk technology. Page refreshes are slow compared to older display types like LCD, etc. All of the eInk based devices will be similar.

The record for me was about half an hour (and then reader turned off automatically).

What was half an hour?

[plisken]

> That's a limitation of current eInk technology. Page refreshes are slow
> compared to older display types like LCD, etc. All of the eInk based devices
> will be similar.

Nope. The simple test -- the box "please wait" (or something like that) appears much faster than the content after the please wait dialog appears. So if you assume the delay of the please wait dialog is delay of e-ink than you can measure speed of DR1000 rendering the page.
IOW -- I am not talking about refresh rate, I am talking about rendering speed, and this what counts when turning pages (refresh rate would only be useful when reading data purely from cache).

Half an hour was pdf with a lot of graphics (not image, graphics -- lines, etc.). And it was not just one, single file, I hit such file from time to time. I have to either check what is going on computer, or simply reset DR and jump to the page after the problematic one (so I skip one page).

Cheers,

[Sebl]

Thanks a lot for your answers. I am (half) reassured on the the turning page time. I do hope it won't be more than two seconds at most. (On my Sony, it takes between one and 1.5 second at most for my google pdfs for big 400 pages books). I am also very happy to learn pdf filenames will be displayed. (I will be able to sort my pdfs by changing only the filenames). I have seen that the DR1000 is not flawless, far from it, but I think that even if other readers like the Skiff landed in Europe, they may not be as PDF-focused. So I will patiently for stocks to come back...

[owl123]

Books from Google are just pictures in a PDF format. This means they're all 'single-layered' so there should be no problems with them (at least not the kind described by plisken).

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by plisken

Nope. The simple test -- the box "please wait" (or something like that) appears much faster than the content after the please wait dialog appears. So if you assume the delay of the please wait dialog is delay of e-ink than you can measure speed of DR1000 rendering the page.

You're comparing two completely different types of refreshes with different refresh speeds. A partial refresh (like the dialog box) is a lot faster than a full page refresh. You can't compare the times between those and assume that everything else is the rendering time.

Half an hour was pdf with a lot of graphics (not image, graphics -- lines, etc.). And it was not just one, single file, I hit such file from time to time. I have to either check what is going on computer, or simply reset DR and jump to the page after the problematic one (so I skip one page).

Still not entirely sure what you're saying. You mean that it took the DR half an hour to turn a page?

[hanche]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Still not entirely sure what you're saying. You mean that it took the DR half an hour to turn a page?

My guess from what he said is that the DR simply froze and then turned itself off after half an hour. Meaning, I suppose, that the freeze wasn't complete, or the auto turn off feature wouldn't work.

[Mackx]

Originally Posted by hanche

My guess from what he said is that the DR simply froze and then turned itself off after half an hour. Meaning, I suppose, that the freeze wasn't complete, or the auto turn off feature wouldn't work.

It is linux running, the process/application doing the pdf viewing (uds), is a different one from the process handling the shutdown (sysd). So a freeze of the pdf viewer (which does end-up into an endless loops for some documents I noticed) does not harm the process doing the auto-shutdown. :-)