Any experience on Boox Max as a PDF reader?

[xvan]

Hi!, I was the owner of a Boox A60, so I know of Onyx software rough edges. I tinkered a lot with it and on average my experience was satisfactory. I'm now the owner of a paperwhite, pretty happy with my general purpose reading.

So I was hoping you could share your experience with the onyx boox max, limiting to academic PDFs usage.

This is the only "neutral" review I found, and it's a bit old.

The price of these devices is quite significant on my budget, but with the Carta dpi increase a second hand DPT-S1 doesn't seem a choice (the cheapest winning bid I found is ~700USD on ebay).
I also read good reviews about Booxtor's international customer service, living on South America where these devices are not sold it's worth to consider that.

So what I want to hear about is (please limit to pdf's):

1- What was your experience with heavy +100MB PDFs?
2- What was your experience browsing pdf books (search functions)?
3- What was your experience making highlights and annotations?
4- How does an exported pdf looks like after highlights, notes and annotations? (Any sample is welcome )
5- Do you consider that the weight of the device affected your experience? Do you think the ~130g difference with the DPT-S1 would have changed that experience?
6- Cloud synchronization: What was your experience with google drive and/or dropbox / anything else?

Ideally I'd go for a DPT-RP1, but seeing the Japanese release date on June 5th, I guess the English release can't be earlier that late September / October.

Do you think it's worth the wait for the Next Gen of readers, considering they'll come with the same screen as the Max Carta?

Thanks for your comments.

[Icey]

I use super heavy pdf (more than 500mb, no OCR only image with very small text) and it's a pain. Especially when i want to switch from a page to another one

For more lighter pdf (20 50mb) it's ok

also the small resolution is not enough for me

for the weight it's tottally ok

[xvan]

Originally Posted by Icey

I use super heavy pdf (more than 500mb, no OCR only image with very small text) and it's a pain. Especially when i want to switch from a page to another one

For more lighter pdf (20 50mb) it's ok

also the small resolution is not enough for me

for the weight it's tottally ok

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I read that above 250 dpi is the minimum for the typical ebook use case. The Carta generation is not quite there, but it's closer than Pearl.

Nice to hear that the weight is not a concern.

[Icey]

i think with carta it's gonna be ok
you have to know that i'm very picky
also about the contrast that is not great on pearl, i really need to be in a place with ALOT of light to be comfortable.

For me, the main problem is that it's...s...l...o...w to switch pages, especially for accademic documents that you need to go from a chapter to another often.

Also, you have to know that Onyx did a great job in the last updates, that the onyx became much more faster to turn pages.

[Solvaring]

I love my max, page turn was very slow at first, couple firmware updates later and I have few complaints. I use it almost exclusively for PDF documents. I'm not seasoned enough in e-readers to have qualms over things such as DPI, i'm young and i have slightly better than 20/20 vision, I love my boox max.

Only thing I don't like about my max is the quick launch bar on the home screen, there are options to add icons to the bar, but i can not find a way to remove icons from the bar and this really really really bugs me.

[plusz]

For me Max it good enough. Reading is very comfortable. Reading scanned documents is not that pretty but is good - it's like reading cheap newspaper or old book.

Speed could be better but for me it is at acceptable level keeping in mind that I can read the whole A4 page at once without any paging/scrolling. If you need to jump around the document often, you will be disappointed. I don't know any e-ink reader good at that. Perhaps the A2 mode would be useful for such need as it indeed speed up the device.

[mdp]

I have always used Ivan Ivanenko's "PDF Reader", and very happily so. His product has been recently rebranded "Lirbi Book Reader and PDF".
But it did not seem to have a "double page" mode, so today I tested "ezPDF Reader": VERY remarkable.

To encomiate the quality: my only trouble with Ivanenko's one is that the auto-trim margins may sometimes enlarge the cropped page without re-rendering, resulting in a jagged image. So, I normally pre-crop my PDF files using Briss. But Briss does not always work. In the video that will follow, I show a PDF file that Briss could not crop but that ezPDF did crop through a full interface - it worked on the tablet what could not on the desktop!

The speed is, in relative terms, lightning fast.

Please find a video, just uploaded, at https://youtu.be/OLBRi7qFRKI

(But do test - well not the OP, who is deciding - Ivan Ivanenko's)

[mdp]

[proof of concept]

[mdp]

The "Raspberry Pi Cookbook, 2nd Edition" from Simon Monk (O'Reilly 2016) weighs 129 MB. It is a proper "vector and raster" PDF (mentioned focus on big size suggests scans, this is a properly formatted book).

On Ivan Ivanenko's PDF Reader, it took around 18s to open completely (i.e. the GUI appears at the end of loading). Page flipping is immediate. Search works as intended - traditional "prev/next" (although the version I am using, which is *very old*, has a glitch in showing the word highlighted).

On ezPDF Reader, it took around 10s to show the GUI, and patently still worked under the hood. Page flipping is immediate. Search works quite well - collects thumbs of relevant pages -, allowing interaction while the under-the-hood collection of the results runs until completion (I searched for 'test' and it took a while to search all of the 500 pages, but you could browse the results while they are built). Although MaxCarta is not multicore, you do not feel the need (well of course if will be very welcome in the next versions...)

ezPDF Reader has plentiful annotation tools - I will test later.

[pochopsp]

I don't have a Eink android device but on my android smartphone I use EbookDroid, it is light, fast and reads every format, including PDF.

[mdp]

Originally Posted by pochopsp

I don't have a Eink android device but on my android smartphone I use EbookDroid, it is light, fast and reads every format, including PDF.

Unfortunately, I tried EbookDroid in the same session that brought me to ezPDF - also EbookDroid should have "horizontal scrolling / landscape multipage" - and it returns an error relative to OpenGL.

Would be great - it is also GPL...

[joblack]

Generally PDFs are working fine. Academic papers are converted from Latex to PDF so they are not that huge in file size.

If you have a scanned PDF with XXX mbyte size you will get some slowness but the same can be found with PDF readers on my PC.

I remember newspaper in PDF which needs several seconds to render on a quad core 4 ghz Intel processor PC.

[Randy11]

Originally Posted by joblack

...
If you have a scanned PDF with XXX mbyte size you will get some slowness but the same can be found with PDF readers on my PC...

In this case, Pdftk could help to reduce the size, it can produce a cleaner file.