[time-nuts] Kindle and HP service manuals ?

[Robert Atkinson]

Hi,
I did post last night but it seems to have gone into the bit bucket.
I have had a Sony PRS-505 for over a year. I agree with Russell, It's great for books, I have about 200 on mine at the moment. An often missed point, it's also an MP3 audio player. The screen size and resoultion make it poor for PDF's though. Computer generated ones are just about readable, most scanned ones are useless. There was a software update that improved things a little, but not much. I keep "emergency" datasheets on mine, but that's about it. I also had trouble with the manual for my Canon digital camera. The security watermark comes out at 100% density and obliterates the text. B.T.W the sony is a Linux based devive so there are hacking possibilities.

Robert G8RPI.

--- On Mon, 11/5/09, Russell Rezaian <rrezaian at motorola.com> wrote:

> From: Russell Rezaian <rrezaian at motorola.com>
> Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Kindle and HP service manuals ?
> To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" <time-nuts at febo.com>
> Date: Monday, 11 May, 2009, 9:46 PM
> 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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