Cool Tech Reviews

We first mentioned the Sony Reader for eBooks back in January because the E Ink paper-like display was incredibly slick and might actually make reading books on an electronic device a reality. At the time it was supposed to come out in April, but April came and went and then we heard that the launch had been pushed off until fall.

Well, fall is here and so finally is the Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500 which is available at a rather pricey $349.99 (although there is currently a $50 promotional credit towards eBook purchases). Nothing seems to have changed - it has a 6 inch diagonal screen and is only 0.5 inches thick and weighs 9 ounces. The rechargeable internal battery is good for 7500 page turns (turns are all that count for E Ink displays) and you have to load content from a PC via USB. It has 64MB of internal memory plus it can take Sony Memory Sticks or SD memory cards to hold more.

As far as content goes, the eBook Connect store is also open and the titles all seem to be 1-2MB in size while the prices seem fairly reasonable given the outrageous prices of new hardcovers and paperbacks these days. Clicking on a title (e.g. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown) conveniently shows you the discount off the print retail price which was 20% on all titles I checked. Of course, as I mentioned in my original review, most printed best sellers get discounts of that order at the big chain stores so the discount isn’t overly compelling. Besides the premium content, you can also use the Reader for files in BBeB Book, Adobe PDF, TXT, RTF, and Microsoft Word formats although the latter requires Word installed on your PC to do a conversion. The Reader also has a feature for downloading RSS content so you can read news, blogs, or whatever at your leisure.

I still think there’s a place for something like the Sony Reader, but I’m afraid that the price (Reader plus eBooks) is going to scare off a lot of folks. What may save it is the ability to read free content - think of it like an iPod, only for text.

Back in January, we mentioned the Sony Reader for eBooks as one slick gadget with its E Ink display. It still is slick, but Sony seems to have real problems getting it out the door:

One of Sony’s most recent sought out devices, the PRS-500 eBook reader is going to be delayed once again. Sony Electronics brought the PRS-500 with them to CES this past January and had announced a Spring 2006 launch but then pushed it to the summer of 2006. Sony is now saying a fall launch seems more likely.

No word on the reason for all the delays, but supposedly it will be ready for Holiday shoppers.

At last week’s Consumer Electronic Show, Sony generated a lot of buzz when it introduced its latest handheld viewer for eBooks, the Sony Reader. It’s about the size of a trade paperback, but only a half inch thick.

Sony is avoiding the problem of limited content that plagued some of its earlier eBook reader offerings by arranging with a number of publishers for content with 10,000 titles expected to be available via the Sony Connect online store when it launches in April. They will be priced about 20-25% less than normal books and use a proprietary copy protection scheme which allows viewing on six other devices. As a plus, the Reader will also display Adobe Acrobat pdf files, Microsoft Word doc files, and RSS feeds with images. It could be the newspaper of the future except that the only way to get content on it is via a PC directly or via memory cards.

However, the most amazing thing about the Sony Reader is the “electronic ink” display. Yardena Arar at PC World:

E Ink’s electronic ink consists primarily of millions of tiny microcapsules, each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a transparent liquid. The ink is printed on plastic film attached to electronic circuitry; depending on what type of charge is applied, the white or black particles move to the surface of the capsule, thus forming images.

Sony says the Reader’s E Ink displays can produce four scales of grey at a resolution of about 170 pixels per inch–more than twice that of most conventional displays, and roughly on a par with the resolution of newsprint.

Unlike conventional backlit displays, which go dark when they don’t draw power, the E Ink screen needs power only to change the image by moving the white and black particles. In fact, when you power down the Reader it still shows the last page viewed. Sony says the Reader’s rechargeable built-in lithium ion battery will power some 7500 page turns between charges; you can recharge via a conventional AC adapter or a USB cable, both included.

How good is it really? Gizmodo:

To give you an idea of just how good this display looks… I walked up to the counter, looked at the text on the screen and asked, “So when will you have working units to play with?” The reply: “This is a working reader.” I mistakenly thought the text on the screen was some kind of plastic overlay—that’s how ink-like it looked.

We’ve mentioned E Ink before, and one of these days they’ll have color, but for right now the grey scale display seems to be fine for emulating books plus it can be electronically magnified up to 200% for the visually impaired. Since it’s not an LCD, it’s viewable from all angles and looks fine in sunlight. It really seems to be "electronic paper."

What’s the downside? Well, the Sony Reader is expected to retail for $299 to $399 which is fairly pricey and these days very few folks buy books at the full retail price so 25% off isn’t necessarily that great. I think the biggest use may well turn out to be for reading free documents from the Web and Sony will be glad they enabled it. Be aware that similar devices are expected to be introduced by other manufacturers, so that prices will likely fall.

There’s more coverage at Engadget (see also [1]), and Gizmodo.

Martyn Williams at InfoWorld:

E Ink, a U.S.-based developer of electronic-paper type flat panel displays, has developed a color version of its screen technology and is showing it at the FPD International exhibition that opened Wednesday in Yokohama, Japan.
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It’s based on similar technology to the company’s monochrome displays that are already in production and can be found in a handful of products like Sony’s Librie electronic book reader.

The main difference is the addition of a color filter. The prototype on display in Yokohama is a 6-inch display with 400 by 300 pixel resolution. That works out to 83 pixels per inch which is half that of the commercial screen used in the Sony e-book reader.

E Ink anticipates the display will be ready for commercialization at the end of 2006, said Bischoff. Potential applications include ATM screens, digital camera viewfinders, and mobile phones, he said.

The E Ink press release has more and some photos. Aside from the lightweight form factor,

E Ink’s electronic ink technology creates an image that looks like a printed page from all angles and maintains the same contrast ratio under all lighting conditions, including direct sunlight. Aimed at handheld devices, the display uses up to 100 times less energy than a standard liquid crystal display (LCD), so product designers can shed weight and greatly extend battery life.

Besides the color display, they are also showing a “tablet sized” greyscale display:

E Ink Corporation in USA, the leading supplier of electronic paper display technology, today announced that LG.Philips LCD, one of the world’s leading innovators of thin-film transistor liquid crystal (TFT-LCD) technology, and E Ink have built a 10.1″ flexible electronic paper display.
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Less than 300 microns thick, the paper-white display is as thin and flexible as construction paper. With a 10.1″ diagonal, the prototype achieves SVGA (600×800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with 4 levels of grayscale.

E Ink® Imaging Film is a novel display material that looks like printed ink on paper and has been designed for use in paper-like electronic displays. Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. As an additional benefit, the E Ink Imaging Film uses 100 times less energy than a liquid crystal display because it can hold an image without power and without a backlight.

No word on any applications or dates for this one.