Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - 9:56 AM KDT
Name:
taro
Home Page:
http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/04/07/20/bus_ink001.cf
Finally there's an English review by a journalist who <gasp> actually </gasp> used the product. It's looks like those mega-brains at Sony screwed-the-pooch again.
Ink still beats digital pages
By Phred Dvorak / Tuesday, July 20, 2004
The Wall Street Journal
TOKYO -
...Now the world's two biggest consumer-electronics companies - Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of Panasonic devices - are giving the digital book a whirl in Japan, though not yet anywhere else.
....I took the Librie with me on a coffee run....with only four levels of gray shading, the images often looked rough. The Librie's relatively small screen was also a problem. Rather than shrinking the original page to fit the display, the publishers of "Cyborg 009" decided to put one frame on each page. The resulting story pace was so slow I got bored, even in the middle of a pitched battle between cyborgs and evil robots.
Part of the problem is that the Librie display's response is excruciatingly slow. "Turning" a page takes a full second, and using the jog wheel to move the cursor through menus is frustrating.
....Where the Librie really fails is in its handling of digital content. It can only view content that comes from a site run by Publishing Link, a Sony-affiliated company.... content expires after 60 days. The only English-language books I saw being offered were textbooks.
....Though it costs the same hefty $370, Panasonic's SigmaBook reader gets right a lot of what Sony gets wrong..... SigmaBook is also better suited to reading comics because it has two screens. At 7.2 inches, they are bigger than the Librie's and capable of more tonal gradations. But the device is also twice as thick and almost twice as heavy as the Librie.....
In general, though, the SigmaBook services are complex and confusing to use.
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