Sony e-book Reader PRS-505

I have the PRS-505, well worth the money.

Haven't seen the PRS-700, but the PRS-505 which I have is almost the same as looking at white paper from any angle.

I have had no problem putting ebooks onto the PDF reader and all have turned out fine, it is very easy to use just drag and drop the PDF's you want using the reader software which comes with it.

The reader also comes with a zoom facility so you can view the text in small (S), medium (M) or large (L) size which is very handy.

You can put photos, music on as well.

Nice little machine.

I've owned - and loved - the Sony Reader PRS-505 for some time now and am very happy to recommend it.

Nothing (yet) is perfect though and it does have a few faults.

Here is a quick review...

1. The screen. Very little glare and easy to read in even quite bright sunlight. It also has a pretty good resolution. It is black and white only, so books and documents with color pictures don't always display clearly.

2. The controls. The page turning buttons are not well placed for a right-handed reader (being half way up the side), but the left hand options are much easier to use because they are in the bottom lh corner, where your thumb would naturally be. Not a big deal, but for me, a minor irritation.

3. Storage. Ample. I have hundreds of ebooks in mine and am nowhere near filling up the native storage capacity. But even then you can expand it with a Sony stick or an SD card.

4. Battery life. It is claimed to last for 5000 page turns, but I do find that thebattery drains in a few weeks if left unused. Charging is easy via the supplied USB cable, but if you are travelling for a long time without computer access, you'd run out of juice. You can recharge from an outlet, but you need to buy a charger as an extra.

5. Getting stuff loaded onto it. You install software on your computer (a bit like a very cut down version of the iplayer software) that acts as your interface betweent he computer and the Reader. In other words, you need a computer to load books onto it. Not a big problem for most people, but maybe this should be made clearer in the ads.

6. Display. You have the option of three magnification modes. When viewing a regular paperback novel, the lowest magnification mode shows an less than an entire page on the screen. As the screen is about half the size of a paperback, the text is fairly small, but still quite readable (I wear reading glasses and it is fine for me). The other two magnifications are good, but will obviously result in more page turns!

I've take some pictures that show, in as close to actual size as I can manage, the text size of a regular paperback novel at the three magnifications.

There are a lot of books available as ebooks now - not as many as I'd like, but still a good selection. So for vacation reading it is ideal. The only criticism I have is that ebook versions of regular paperbacks are still priced too high, in my opinion.

Now, on to the important question of PDF ebooks.

Here we have a very patchy result. Let's start with the problem. Most PDF ebooks that we are familiar with are created for Letter (or A4) sized paper. And almost all use huge margins.

What this means is that when you shrink them down to the screen size of the Reader, the result is a page that is less than a quarter of its original size. And the font shrinks accordingly. So a book that is written in a native font size of 14pt will end up displaying at magnification#1 with about 3pt text.

Hat's off to the screen resolution of the Reader that even at this tiny text size, the characters are still well formed, but frankly, you'd need the eyesight of an eagle to comfortably read it. With my glasses on I can 'just' read it, but it isn't great.

Using the magnification options doesn't always help. Sony recently upgraded the firmware inside the Reader to make it more able to read PDF files, but the result isn't yet perfect. The biggest problem is that some PDFs behave well, but others refuse to magnify correctly. it is a very hit and miss affair.

I've yet to find a PDF ebook or report that I can't read at all, but the effort sometimes gets in the way of the enjoyment.

It is to be hoped that Sony will further improve their software in the future, or that ebook creators will offer Reader compatible download options (it isn't hard to create a separate file that is optimised for the reader, but until enough people own them, why bother?)

I hope this helps!

Martin