Two weeks with a Sony PRS-700: Ergonomic factors
In this entry, I’m taking a closer look at what the device is like: what are its ergonomic factors, and how is the display? (As usual, click on any picture to see it full-size.)
Ergonomics
We’ll start with an ergonomic overview. The screen itself is about the size of a paperback book page, with a resolution of 800 vertical by 600 horizontal—167 pixels per inch, just slightly more than the iPhone’s 160 ppi density, or twice-and-change an ordinary monitor’s 72 pixels per inch. It’s not quite enough dots per inch to look just like a real printed sheet of paper (you would want to get into the 300 DPI range for that), but it’s enough to make nice fonts that don’t look completely horrible.
The tablet is pretty thin. All told, it’s about a centimeter thick, the same thickness that my Contour plastic case makes my iPod Touch. The left edge is curved outward, kind of like a book spine, and the right edge is beveled to suggest the curvature of the paper pages on a hardcover book with a curved spine. Cute little psychological touch, I suppose.
(Note: The above photo is only meant to show relative scale. It was taken using a flash, and ends up making the 700 look bright and the iPod Touch look washed out. In actuality, the Touch is a good deal brighter.)
The power button is a slide switch on the top edge of the reader; the backlighting is in the same place on the bottom edge. This is nice as it avoids the problem commonly associated with the Palm Pilot and its derivatives of accidentally turning the power off when you meant to turn the backlight on or off, or vice versa.
Buttons along the front of the reader include a “back” button, page backward and forward, “Home”, “Search”, magnification/font size,and “Options”. In addition to the buttons, paging backward and forward can be controlled by sliding one’s finger or the stylus from left-to-right or right-to-left across the touch-screen. (Oddly enough, the preset was for left-to-right to be the page-forward slide, and I can’t think of any context in which that makes sense. Luckily, it was reversible in the “Options” panel.)
I would much rather be able to page forward or back with a single tap to the left or right of the page the way I can in Stanza—sometimes the touchscreen does not even notice my page-swiping at all. But the pagination buttons are in a reasonable position for using with my left thumb in either portrait or landscape orientations.
Display
This is my first experience with an e-ink screen, and all things considered I have to say it’s not bad, even if it’s also not quite as good as I had hoped. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the high-resolution monochrome LCD on the Sony Clié 415 that was my third PalmOS PDA.
Recently, I picked up a Clié 415 for my Dad as an e-book machine, in the hope he would find it a good reading gadget. I remembered many happy hours spent reading on a 415 myself, so surely it would be so for him, too. However, when the 415 arrived, I was chagrinned to discover that my memory had played me false, spoiled by the time I had spent since then reading from color PDAs, and Dad said reading from the 415 hurt his eyes.
The e-ink screen on the PRS-700 puts me in mind of what my faulty memory thought reading on the 415 had looked like. It isn’t black on white like real ink on real paper, but is more on the order of almost-black on light grey. It still has a better contrast than the almost-black-on-dark-or-lighted-green LCD on the Clié 415, but not as good as that on my iPod Touch. (I’ve heard it said that the non-touchscreen Sony has better contrast, but I have no way of comparing them since I’ve never had one.)
Monochrome isn’t necessarily a bad thing for reading. As many people were heard to say in the waning days of the monochrome LCD PDA, most books are just black ink on white paper anyway. (Though if you ask me, the staunchest defenders of monochrome PDAs were those who couldn’t afford color ones.) The display also does a fairly good job of rendering photographs in greyscale.
A Glaring Flaw
There are a couple of ways in which it could be better, however. One problem the screen has is also one my Dad remarked on for the 415: excessive glare. I’ve never had much trouble with glare reading on my iPod Touch, but sitting in front of my window to read in the available light with the 700 made the problem much more obvious.
I suspect part of the glare issue is the matte finish of the 700’s screen which tends to spread the glare rather than just reflect it, and another part is that the 700 does not generate its own light like an iPod Touch. Hence, the screen on the Touch cuts through glare that blocks sight of the 700’s e-ink. Thus, reading in natural light becomes an exercise in angling the 700 just so, so you’re getting the benefit of the illumination without the backscatter.
Another flaw, which it has in common with the iPod Touch, is the touch screen’s tendency to smear. In conjunction with the glare, smears can be quite obvious. Of course, it just takes a soft cloth to wipe them away.
Backlight
One of the advantages the Sony has over the Kindle is that the Sony has a built-in backlight whereas the Kindle does not. But how good of a backlight is it?
Unlike the backlight on the Sony Clié, which was a green “Indiglo” glow that evenly backlit the entire screen, the PRS-700’s lighting might more properly be called a “sidelight”. It consists of four LEDs spaced along each of the left and right edges of the device, somewhat reminding me of the lights around an actor’s dressing-room table. The backlight has two settings—low and high—but there really isn’t that much difference between them in terms of the amount of light they shed.
As you might expect, they cast more of their glow at the edges of the screen than at the middle. They are somewhat effective in moderately dim light, but more effective in the near-dark. Either way, they stick a soda straw into the heart of the reader’s battery and slurp slurp slurp, bringing its charge duration down from days to shorter than an iPod Touch’s.
PRS-700 vs. iPod Touch
Some people pooh-pooh the idea of reading on an iPod Touch or iPhone because they don’t think staring at a glowing panel all day is good on the eyes. But the lower contrast, glare factor, and uneven backlighting of the PRS-700’s screen might actually be harder on the eyes than a high-contrast, evenly-lit iPod Touch screen (which can be flipped from black-on-white to white-on-black for lower-glare reading).
I realize I have had more bad things than good to say about the 700 in this part of my review, but that’s not to say I don’t like it. I will have some better things to say about it in my next column in this series, when I look at how well it reads the various different formats of e-book. Perhaps, with the aid of Calibre, LRF, ePub, and PDF are enough after all.
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