Penn State University has decided to roll out an ebook reader program by making the PRS-505 portable reader from Sony available for checkout. The program became quite popular and I was unable to get one myself, however, a colleague managed to secure one so I was still able to play around with it for a few weeks. My main goal was to test the reader’s capability of displaying datasheets and scholarly journals.

In short, I was a bit disappointed when I could not clearly read either without converting each page to an image first. It was pretty clear that copying a simple PDF to the device, although it does have some basic PDF viewing capability, was not going to result in something readable. In the case of the journal article, the device would split text in a strange way which sometimes resulted in fragments of words alone on a page. Scaling some datasheets to make them readable crashed the device requiring a hardware reset. Two positive notes are that the ebooks that were loaded on the device displayed really well and that the device was able to reproduce color JPEGs as fairly detailed grayscale images.

I hate to end this review on a negative note, however, this device is pretty useless for my needs so I will wait for the next model and hope.

 
del.icio.us | digg