[time-nuts] Kindle and HP service manuals ?

Russell Rezaian rrezaian at motorola.com
Mon May 11 20:46:25 UTC 2009


I don't have a Kindle, but I do have both the Sony Reader (501) and 
the iRex iLiad.

Here are a few comments based on my experience.

I don't think the Kindle is officially sold in Europe yet.  Both the 
Sony and the iRex readers are available in Europe.  May not mean much 
for you, but might make a difference if you care about things like 
ease of warranty support.

Big point:  Most of these devices have screens that are too small to 
display an A4 or US Letter PDF page at full resolution.  So you 
either need to scale the document, which in  my experience works 
poorly, or view part of the page.  Partial page views (where you view 
in full resolution, but have to scroll around the page) are easier to 
read but require you to do a lot more page flipping.

Which brings me to my next point.  Screen updates on the e-ink 
displays are slow, it takes few seconds to update  the pixels for 
every page change.  For reading a novel this is not a major problem. 
For reading a technical document where you are going one page at a 
time this is also not a problem.  If you're searching through a 
document and need to flip through a lot of pages this probably will 
be a problem.

That said, the e-ink displays are actually really nice to read. 
Contrast is not close to what you get with real paper, but compared 
to most computer displays there's no refresh flicker at all, and good 
ambient light makes things easier to read rather than harder.  These 
displays are very pleasant to read compared to CRT or LCD.

Regarding small screen size iRex announced a new device with a more 
or less A4 resolution display.  This looks like it might be really 
nice for manuals and technical documents.  This box is also about 
$1000.00 US, so I have not bought one.  I probably won't buy one any 
time soon either, simply as I can't justify the expense as I already 
have a couple of the smaller readers already.

I hate to say this as I do like these devices, but if you're trying 
to read a technical document and also work on an instrument at the 
same time I really think you're probably going to have the best 
results with just printing the document out on paper.

The reader devices are getting nice, but they're not really ready to 
replace paper for challenging situations.

Now, if you want to read a tech manual (or a novel) on a long train 
ride, or on a plane ride, then I strongly recommend one of these. 
They're best for the sort of situation where you are just going to be 
reading page after page, but don't want to carry a lot of bulk.
--
Russell

At 7:47 PM +0000 2009/05/11, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>I tried the other day to follow a calibration procedure in a HP
>service manual and was severely tempted to print all the 350 pages
>of it because clearly using pdf files on a laptop sucks when you
>have one hand on the probe...
>
>Has anybody tried if amazons's Kindle is any good for such use ?
>
>I know the display is around 200 dpi resolution, but I wonder if
>the screen-size is too small for it to matter ?
>
>Poul-Henning
>
>--
>Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
>phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
>FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
>Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
>
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