Saturday, May 10, 2008

iLiad iRex pictures

As there's some interest in the iliad and other ebook readers, and as a follow-up to my previous post describing my general impressions of the iliad, I thought that posting some pictures would be interesting... Clicking on the images shows the original image size (note that the grain is in fact due to the iso setting rather than the iliad !)






This first picture shows an A4 PDF, not resized, and perfectly readable. As you can see, no problems either with the viewing angle.






The 16 gray levels work well enough for reading some comics :)






Another comic, close up.






One of the great thing with a reasonable resolution and antialiasing: you CAN put A4 scans of partitions, and IT IS readable :) -- here the Turkish March, from a freely available document scanned by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (thanks!).






As you can see, the poor quality of the pictures (and the not-so-great white balance) are due to the actual lightning conditions :) -- and you can also see how well an e-ink device reacts to a direct spot lamp...


Finally, as it's one of the main use of my iliad and one of the main reasons I actually bought one, an A4 research paper:






As you can see, it's readable (albeit a bit small), with the PDF reader I use simply set in fullscreen mode.






Zooming on the same document with the camera (ie without touching the iliad) -- you can see how such A4 PDF documents are actually readable, without any kind of resizing (apart the fullscreen mode). The PDF reader application can also zoom the document if it's really necessary (using a simple gesture with the stylus), but I rarely use this feature (usually only for some diagrams if they are too small, not for the text itself).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks!

Maxim said...

Thanks for a great post! I am a doctoral student who has to read a lot of stuff and now a great amount of it in scanned pdfs (JSTOR for example), as well as I thousands of books in Arabic (my language of research). I usually read PDFs on my HP Pavilion tx 2500 tablet, but it tends to become too heavy and hot after a while, so I am considering buying on of these readers (I am thinking about either Iliad or sSlick). I wonder if I can ask you for a favor to take some pictures of a PDF I would email to you? That would be really helpful in making my decision. Disregards my request if you are short on time - I will totally understand it. Thanks again

Nicolas said...

Maxim: sorry, I don't have my iRex...
Looking quickly at the eSlick device, it's only a 800x600 screen -- the iliad would be a much better fit imho for PDFs. One of the new iliad has a 10" screen too, which should be great for research papers (sadly it's rather on the expensive side).