I’m thinking of purchasing the Sony Ereader PRS 700. I currently use my PALM Lifedrive to read ebooks, but I need a device that will display Adobe PDF files. The Palm will do it, but it is way to small and doesn’t scale pdf properly. The Sony Ereader says it will display PDF. The one mention I’ve seen on the net regarding this device and PDF says that text PDF file work fine, but picture based PDF, not so much. I’m trying to find out what ‘not so much’ means.
Does anyone have any experience with this device and picture based PDF files? My company would pay for the device, but I don’t want to waste money, no matter who it belongs to.
Thanks.
It does a pretty poor job of displaying PDFs, in my experience. Of course, I’ve only used the 500 and the 505. Text-based PDFs are readable, but pretty crappy; you have a limited option for text size. Picture-based PDFs are illegible because the page is one big image that gets compressed to fit the display.
Maybe the 700 works differently … but I doubt it.
Maybe something like the Plastic Logic eReader would be more up your street if it ever gets to market.
The new 505 firmware does a better job of scaling and reflowing PDFs. You have at least two levels of zoom, and I’ve found the medium level works well with the PDF ebooks loaned by the local library. Still, there are some oddities. The PDF format has a hard end-of-page break that can’t be stripped out. So if you zoom in at all, you end up with alternating full- and half-pages of text. Fortunately, the .epub format looks like it might supplant PDF for ebooks, something I hope happens sooner than later as PDF is comparably terrible for reflowable text.
I imagine that picture-based PDFs would be horrible. Check out the forums at mobileread.com for better feedback than that.
Have a look at the Illiad too.
I read a faq that said to resize the pdf using pdf editing software. I did it with the document I wanted to use on this device and I can read it on my computer (resolution set at 1600x1200, but I sized each page for the same size on my screen as the device) and the pictures/diagrams were legible (barely - with a magnifying glass!). Did you ever try resizing the pdf before you put it on the ereader to see if the resolution was sufficient to view it then?
Gah! I used to be a fan of pdf many years ago. Pain in the ass to get them on something that is actually ‘portable’.