PRS505 or HanlinV3

[wmac]

Hello,

I am PhD student and I want to obtain a reader to avoid printing too many papers and articles which are mostly in PDF format (mostly IEEE, ACM and ScienceDirect, ...).

I also have tons of PDF e-books and I am terribly keen to read some of them.

1- Which of the above (PRS505 with updated firmware or Hanlin V3) is more suitable for reading PDF files?

2- Which one is likely to work for a longer time ?

BTW I don't have higher budget to buy bigger size reader.

Thank you very much for your help.

Mac

[emellaich]

I really don't think you will be satisfied with either of these. As a PhD myself, I don't think six inch screens are well suited to reading academic papers. In general, most of these are not actual text; they are just scans (pictures) of pages. As such they don't resize easily to fit on a smaller screen.

Also, diagrams and tables will give you problems even when you find things that do reflow to the appropriate page size.

I do believe that I heard someone mention that the new Hanlin software does not support image zoom in pdf's -- it allows you to resize fonts. If true, this would be a problem for those pdf's that are only images/scans. Can someone confirm this????

MLH

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by wmac

Hello,

I am PhD student and I want to obtain a reader to avoid printing too many papers and articles which are mostly in PDF format (mostly IEEE, ACM and ScienceDirect, ...).

I also have tons of PDF e-books and I am terribly keen to read some of them.

1- Which of the above (PRS505 with updated firmware or Hanlin V3) is more suitable for reading PDF files?

2- Which one is likely to work for a longer time ?

BTW I don't have higher budget to buy bigger size reader.

Thank you very much for your help.

Mac

I's really about your source material.
Most of the eBook readers in the meantime go for reflow in PDFs.
Meaning: The layout structure of text documents is changed by the readers, they break it down entirely differently.
To me, that's a "No Go". The original idea behind PDFs usually is, keeping the layout intact. Especially in scientific documents, I find it extremely annoying, if the document looks totally different on my readers.
For your average "Stephen King" on the other hand it may be the perfect solution.
But even for those I prefer zooming over reflowing.
On iRex iLiad for example you can zoom and pan, the layout remains intact.

You can download Sony's library software and use it on your PC. It gives a very good impression, what you'll get on your reader.

[wmac]

Thank you very much for the information you both gave me. At least I know I should not expect a good experience with PDF files.