For programmers or Anime creators: Best resolution for pictures on the PRS-505!

Originally Posted by igorsk

If you want to confuse people less, please use proper terms...

I'm sorry but as a true fan of manga and anime I consider it my duty to confuse people MORE. To many are catching on to the fact that it isn't all tentacle porn and Sailor Scouts. This leads to WAY to many "friends" raiding my library at home. (Blast it, gimme back my Team Medical Dragons! I already had to rebuy my Maison Ikkoku since I couldn't get them back from the local senior center.)

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by stxopher

I'm sorry but as a true fan of manga and anime I consider it my duty to confuse people MORE. To many are catching on to the fact that it isn't all tentacle porn and Sailor Scouts. This leads to WAY to many "friends" raiding my library at home. (Blast it, gimme back my Team Medical Dragons! I already had to rebuy my Maison Ikkoku since I couldn't get them back from the local senior center.)

[coosmac]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

I find the 505 works fine for most anime, although I do use an 8 Gb memory stick. The images, especially in black and white comics look great, any potential issue is all about the lettering in my experience - nice big fat fonts work fine, itty-bitty thin fonts are nigh-unreadable.

agree 505 works great with manga.

I just do combine files in acrobat (no compression)
try to keep file size below 50meg. it's about 400 ~ 600 pages.

opening a book(combined pdf file) takes about 10 ~ 15 sec
flipping thru pages takes just about same as e-books.

I have say that quality/speed of your memory stick makes huge diffrences in speed.

[ProDigit]

Originally Posted by igorsk

If you want to confuse people less, please use proper terms...
Japanese comics = manga.
Japanese animation = anime.

You are right;the terminology is like this these days.
I'm more active in the anime networks than in manga,that's why the error on my part.
*Edit: Title adjusted*

BTW, one of the first animes that got shipped and became popular in Europe and USA was by Manga Corp. People over here called anime "manga",just because all we had was anime from Manga (the black cross with a red sun on the back - logo). Only later on the term Manga was used in Europe for the comic books,and anime for the cartoons.
It took a long time for the comic books to become popular here vs the anime (Japanese Anime became popular around the '90's, Manga about 10 years later).


(in attachment a screenshot of the animes of those days...)

[TwiSteDCBloSsoM]

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

You'd be better off using manga2ebook for that... http://kmfstudio.com/another_version...nga2ebook.html

Yes I do know of the program. If you read all of my post you'd notice that I said I don't understand how to use those programs. I need like a freaking video of someone using it step by step, because I just don't get how to use it. Which is why I found my own method. I just listed my method for people that don't understand that program or comiclrf.

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Nice program; it saves to PDF however. It's good if you want to create pdf anime; I still think the best is anime in jpegs, in a compressed folder,to be uncompressed to a folder in the reader.

However,I'm less convinced the prs505 is made for anime.
The internal memory gets full rather fast with anime (10-100MB/book), and it's small screen isn't really optimized for images.

It'd be nice to have an anime/comic book reader available someday for those higher resolution (preferably archived) jpegs.

That dude was doing a lot of work to get a PDF-archive. Manga2Ebook automates that.

And when you've got the original image files, it'd just be sensible not to "convert" it to anything else and then delete the originals. The LRF-collections I've made are just containers to use for the sony reader. If something else comes along, i'd just reconvert the originals to something else. If needed.

Originally Posted by TwiSteDCBloSsoM

Yes I do know of the program. If you read all of my post you'd notice that I said I don't understand how to use those programs. I need like a freaking video of someone using it step by step, because I just don't get how to use it. Which is why I found my own method. I just listed my method for people that don't understand that program or comiclrf.

OK.. thought the "usage"-tab of that program explained enough.... But whatever fits you.

Originally Posted by stxopher

I'm sorry but as a true fan of manga and anime I consider it my duty to confuse people MORE. To many are catching on to the fact that it isn't all tentacle porn and Sailor Scouts. This leads to WAY to many "friends" raiding my library at home. (Blast it, gimme back my Team Medical Dragons! I already had to rebuy my Maison Ikkoku since I couldn't get them back from the local senior center.)

That's why I opt for scanlations. My collections of manga are now kept in their acid-free transparant bags while I can read the digital version.

[TwiSteDCBloSsoM]

My mind works very weird. I have to see as well as have a step by step and I mean literally step by step explanation or I won't understand which is why I haven't been able to use comiclrf or manga2ebook.

[pozo]

Hey there, thanks for the info, it's very helpfull. I have a kind of aversion to any black box program like Calibre (which implements comic2lrf I believe) so I'm going to do my own conversions using irfanview.
Calibre managed to increase filesize for 1 volume by 50% (2.03 MB uncompressed cbz to 3.02 MB lrf) so that's not really desirable either

I'll only recieve my reader next week or so (just ordered at waterstones, regular 'land' shipping to the Netherlands). Therfore I'm not able to experiment myself yet, but I do want to start converting my collections.

I have a few questions on which I was unable to find information/experiences:
I have a scanslated manga in jpg with varying resolutions, from 750 to 810 in height and 450-500 in width. I understand from this forum that the images will be stretched/shrunk to fit correctly.

1. If I was to resize them all to [width]x800, and view them in landscape mode to maximise viewing space, would I need to rotate them clockwise 90 degrees too?
2. Or should I just make them all height 767 as there is not much of a difference?
3. Nevermind this one, silly question now that I've thought about it.Will it help to store them as 8 grayscale level PNG's? Will the reader use the same levels or still adjust something? And what fileformat is faster (if any), GIF or PNG?
4. Should I pad the width to 567/600 (depending on portrait/landscape) or does that make no difference for the viewer?

Thanks for any answers :-)

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by pozo

I have a kind of aversion to any black box program like Calibre (which implements comic2lrf I believe) so I'm going to do my own conversions using irfanview.
Calibre managed to increase filesize for 1 volume by 50% (2.03 MB uncompressed cbz to 3.02 MB lrf) so that's not really desirable either

Calibre is the exact opposite of a black box program. It sounds more like you don't understand all the possible settings and configuration options. Also, a cbz is compressed by definition - the "z" in cbz stands for zip, contrast with cbr which should be compressed with rar.

[pozo]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Calibre is the exact opposite of a black box program. It sounds more like you don't understand all the possible settings and configuration options. Also, a cbz is compressed by definition - the "z" in cbz stands for zip, contrast with cbr which should be compressed with rar.

Let me refine my statement:
I don't like to work with programs I haven't created and just 'do things' with a few boxes to click, or which would require me to look into the sourcecode to see what it 'really' does. I'm certainly not saying Calibre doesn't look like a very good program, just dat I don't see how its comicbook conversion is working.

Secondly I'm quite sure the cbz was uncompressed, as I made it myself using WinRAR and storing the contents of a manga folder (jpgs) as an uncompressed zip, with cbz extension. The zip was 2.03 MB according to windows, and the folder (non-resized jpg images) was also 2.03 MB.

I had the setting for 64 colors, which increased the filesize. Experimenting with 8 colors leads to really ugly dithering, which was less visible in my own creations using Irfanview. I realize though that Calibre might use the 8 absolute color levels as that a reader can show, whereas Irfanview might opt to include either more more light or dark greys.
Here's a pic: left Calibre 8 levels, right irfanview

[acidzebra]

Okay, winrar is a compression program, a zip file is a compressed archive, a jpg file is (generally speaking) a compressed image, and when you stash a bunch of compressed images into an archive using a fairly loose compression method your total file size will not decrease or may even increase a little. That is as clear as I can make it.

I suggest you run "comic2lrf" (just that, no parameters) on a commandline and note the many options it had - as far as I know most if not all of these options can be set somewhere within calibre too. I will grant you that not every option seems to be in the same place in the GUI.

I have an 8 Gb memory stick, I couldn't care less about a few MB more or less, and you might want to experiment with the various options of comic2lrf. It took me several experiments to find a setting I like, and sometimes the settings which are fine for one comic need to be tweaked a little for the other.

[pozo]

I'm fully aware of what a zip/rar is and does, no need to explain that any further, but thanks for trying anyhow My main point was that the files increase in size over their jpg counterparts, that I packed them in a cbz so that Calibre could read them is irrelevant.

Thanks for the tip on the commandline version. Calibre shows all the same functions it seems, but that's nice to know anyway This topic (1st post) and comic2lrf seem to disagree a bit about the actual screensize. Calibre uses 584x784 appearantly. This will cause the software to either resize on the resolutions mentioned here or the ones produced by calibre right?

Small addition: size is not an issue here, I want an as good as possible image quality 'on the reader', not on the PC. That the lrf was larger than the cbz was more something I noticed and not a real issue.

[FangornUK]

ponzo, comic2lrf sharpens the image slightly by default to improve legibility of the text in comics on the Reader, it also "normalises" the images. It uses 64 "colours" to encode the images, not 8, which is optimal for the PRS500, the PRS505 could go higher.
The 584x784 resolution is optimal for LRF as there is no scaling.
All the decisions were made from extensive testing I did when developing comic2lrf to produce the most optimal image quality on the PRS500 Reader.

[pozo]

Ah, thanks for the reply! Unfortunately Waterstones' shipping service is quite slow so I can't test anything yet...

[ProDigit]

like mentioned,the pictures so far are JPEGS not yet inserted in a lrf.
It would not surprise me if their resolution has to lower in a LRF file.
but there are several reasons why I would not include jpegs in an LRF file.
You can do the test yourself, by opening the rar on the first post,include it in an LRF and look at the results.
I'd recommend so far to use separate jpegs in a folder per book, for anime or comic books,unless their page fits in an .lrf file.
You have to know that the LRF screensize is smaller than regular Jpegs.
The only other reason to put images to LRF is if you really want them to be in one package.
Remember that images in LRF will automatically be resized to fit the screen,unlike jpegs,which can be looked at in full size!

The sizedifference between an LRF or separate jpegs is negligable,since every jpeg loses a little space on the internal flash space (probably stores files in blocks of 4kB, any file smaller or smaller of amultiplication of 4kB will be rounded off to the nearest blocksize; eg: a 58kB file will take 60kB on a disk if the formatting has 4kB blocks).
In that the difference in size between LRF or separate jpegs is negligable.

I'd also want to recommend to open jpegs in MS Paint, and save them. Paint somewhat optimizes encoding, with perhaps 2-5% loss of quality, but often resulting in a photo 25% of the original size.

For reference: my Nikon D40 camera takes 6.6Mpix images.
The filesize is about 3MB/file. They take about 40 seconds to load on a PRS-505 reader.
Opening the picture in an editing software will save the file as a 625kB file, loading time about 5-10 seconds per file.
Opening in paint after cropping/resizing to the right resolution mentioned above, and saving results in a 165kB file, with loadtime of less than 2seconds per picture.
My wife uses Gimp, and lightroom, as well as photoshop; but there's something about MS Paint that makes files much smaller!
So,try out yourself!

Also, in the beginning I'd recommend to compress images to 256tints grayscale. Now I think it's better to convert images to 256-16bit color images (in light of possible future color ebook devices).