Soldato
- Joined
- 31 Mar 2006
- Posts
- 6,606
- Location
- Sydney Australia
Part 1
The Sony PRS-500 is an e-ink reader designed with the intention of eliminating the good old paper based book. I love reading books and since moving to this country I have more than filled a tall book case with books that I have purchased. The approximate value per book is £7 - £15 so I have over the last 3 years spent around £500 - £600.
Much like back in the day when I built my CD collection up to around 2000 CDs I reached a critical mass with both storage and portability. The answer to my CD situation was simple, buy an MP3 player. Problem solved.
Now Sony has presented us with a solution to the book/library issue, the answer not being that dissimilar to the MP3 payer, the ebook reader.
The PRS-500 uses a relatively new technology called e-ink. The 6inch diagonal screen is actually filled with small capsules containing charged pigment. When the charge applied to each capsule is adjusted, they will appear as black, white, or multiple shades of grey. Though the screen is designed primarily for text, it can also display drawings and photographs. The resolution is 800-by-600 and about 170 pixels per inch, which is more than sufficient for nice smooth letters. The display as no preferable reading angle and does not suffer from being in either dim light or bright sunshine any more than would a page in a book
As yet this technology is in the beginning stages of development so its response time leaves something to be desired taking just under a second to turn a page but in terms of reading it is more than enough. The other down side is of course that it will not do colour however this is currently in development. The upside of eInk technology is that it does not require any power to retain the information on the display. The only time it uses any power is when it is actually changing something or flipping a page. Sony states that one charge will last a whopping estimated 7500 page turns. Since purchasing the reader around 3 weeks ago, I have only charged it once.
So on to the unit itself. Weighing in at 9 ounces or around 255 grams and measuring 175mm x 125mm x 10mm it is small enough and light enough to slip into a bag and not really notice the difference. Design wise it is not the most attractive of things, the main eyesore being the 5 way control on the bottom right of the face. Whilst being very usable it is far from aesthetically pleasing. The rest of the control layout in my opinion was not particularly well thought out although I will expand on this a little later.
The unit has 64MB on board storage which can be expanded via a memory slot on the side and accepts either the Sony Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro or standard SD cards to a 2GB capacity. Top marks to Sony for using non proprietary storage media, a trend that we have started to see in most of their new devices such as their new DSLR and their MP3 players.
The Bottom of the unit contains the input connectors and the headphone jack socket. As you can see it accepts the standard mini USB jack as well as a Sony proprietary connector for the optional docking cradle. The cradle is personally an option I can do without as it really just adds another piece of plastic to my computer desk surface. The other input is for the charger which is just a standard transformer that will switch between 110V and 220/250V without issues. The transformer itself has a standard 2 pronged connector so you can swap it with the appropriate lead thus eliminating the need to buy a new power supply for every country you visit.
There are two controls on the side of the Reader, one being the rocker volume buttons and the other being the power switch.
The other controls are on the front of the Reader, two buttons on the left side to turn pages and a size button to change the size and rotate the displayed text and images. Along the bottom there is another larger button for turning pages, a mark button for marking the page where you left off in a book and also the 5 way controller for navigating through the menu system. Running along the bottom of the screen are 10 buttons which have various functions which I will go into in Part 2.
The PRS-500 will accept a decent range of text formats. Sony Style lists the compatible formats as follows: BBeB Book, Adobe® PDF, TXT, RTF, Microsoft® Word (Conversion to the Reader-requires Word installed on your PC). It will also handle MP3s however this greatly shortens its impressive battery life. Whilst not doing an impressive job at it the Reader will also display JPEGs but it does reduce them to a 4 Grey Scale image at a 170pixel resolution. This for me is not really an issue as I didn’t buy it as a photo storage device especially since I can quite happily fill my Nikon D80s 4GB in one shooting session.
Each eBook weighs in at around about 300-500KB so I can roughly fit 4000-7000 books (here’s hoping that my math stands up!) which far exceeds any real desired capacity. Of course once you start putting the larger PDFs and MP3s onto this the space does diminish at a significantly higher rate.
The Sony PRS-500 is an e-ink reader designed with the intention of eliminating the good old paper based book. I love reading books and since moving to this country I have more than filled a tall book case with books that I have purchased. The approximate value per book is £7 - £15 so I have over the last 3 years spent around £500 - £600.
Much like back in the day when I built my CD collection up to around 2000 CDs I reached a critical mass with both storage and portability. The answer to my CD situation was simple, buy an MP3 player. Problem solved.
Now Sony has presented us with a solution to the book/library issue, the answer not being that dissimilar to the MP3 payer, the ebook reader.
The PRS-500 uses a relatively new technology called e-ink. The 6inch diagonal screen is actually filled with small capsules containing charged pigment. When the charge applied to each capsule is adjusted, they will appear as black, white, or multiple shades of grey. Though the screen is designed primarily for text, it can also display drawings and photographs. The resolution is 800-by-600 and about 170 pixels per inch, which is more than sufficient for nice smooth letters. The display as no preferable reading angle and does not suffer from being in either dim light or bright sunshine any more than would a page in a book
As yet this technology is in the beginning stages of development so its response time leaves something to be desired taking just under a second to turn a page but in terms of reading it is more than enough. The other down side is of course that it will not do colour however this is currently in development. The upside of eInk technology is that it does not require any power to retain the information on the display. The only time it uses any power is when it is actually changing something or flipping a page. Sony states that one charge will last a whopping estimated 7500 page turns. Since purchasing the reader around 3 weeks ago, I have only charged it once.
So on to the unit itself. Weighing in at 9 ounces or around 255 grams and measuring 175mm x 125mm x 10mm it is small enough and light enough to slip into a bag and not really notice the difference. Design wise it is not the most attractive of things, the main eyesore being the 5 way control on the bottom right of the face. Whilst being very usable it is far from aesthetically pleasing. The rest of the control layout in my opinion was not particularly well thought out although I will expand on this a little later.
The unit has 64MB on board storage which can be expanded via a memory slot on the side and accepts either the Sony Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro or standard SD cards to a 2GB capacity. Top marks to Sony for using non proprietary storage media, a trend that we have started to see in most of their new devices such as their new DSLR and their MP3 players.
The Bottom of the unit contains the input connectors and the headphone jack socket. As you can see it accepts the standard mini USB jack as well as a Sony proprietary connector for the optional docking cradle. The cradle is personally an option I can do without as it really just adds another piece of plastic to my computer desk surface. The other input is for the charger which is just a standard transformer that will switch between 110V and 220/250V without issues. The transformer itself has a standard 2 pronged connector so you can swap it with the appropriate lead thus eliminating the need to buy a new power supply for every country you visit.
There are two controls on the side of the Reader, one being the rocker volume buttons and the other being the power switch.
The other controls are on the front of the Reader, two buttons on the left side to turn pages and a size button to change the size and rotate the displayed text and images. Along the bottom there is another larger button for turning pages, a mark button for marking the page where you left off in a book and also the 5 way controller for navigating through the menu system. Running along the bottom of the screen are 10 buttons which have various functions which I will go into in Part 2.
The PRS-500 will accept a decent range of text formats. Sony Style lists the compatible formats as follows: BBeB Book, Adobe® PDF, TXT, RTF, Microsoft® Word (Conversion to the Reader-requires Word installed on your PC). It will also handle MP3s however this greatly shortens its impressive battery life. Whilst not doing an impressive job at it the Reader will also display JPEGs but it does reduce them to a 4 Grey Scale image at a 170pixel resolution. This for me is not really an issue as I didn’t buy it as a photo storage device especially since I can quite happily fill my Nikon D80s 4GB in one shooting session.
Each eBook weighs in at around about 300-500KB so I can roughly fit 4000-7000 books (here’s hoping that my math stands up!) which far exceeds any real desired capacity. Of course once you start putting the larger PDFs and MP3s onto this the space does diminish at a significantly higher rate.
