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Sony PRS-600: Improved font support, as well as touch screen
July 31, 2009 | 8:48 am
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By David Rothman
I hate the fonts on most E Ink readers. They don’t stand apart sufficiently from the background.
But the Sony PRS-600—discussed earlier—just might offer bolder fonts than typical models.
Let hope that the impressions from this screen shot, picked up from the Kindle 2 Review, will hold up in real life. Improved screen contrast would also help.
PRS-600 specs: Touch screen of six inches, maybe flexible, SD and Memory Stick support, size of just 
4.87 by 4.87 inches, weight of ten ounces, ePub capability, and possibly MP3 audio recording rather than just a player.
The big question is whether there’ll be WiFi, as opposed to Kindle-style wireless dependent on phone companies. Use of WiFi rather than cellular would be one way of dealing with the complexities of an international rollout.
Sony will also offer the PRS-300, with a five-inch nontouch screen and audio or card slots. That’s the 300 on the left; the 600 on the right.
Homework assignment: Look over the manuals for the 300 and 600 and share your insights from them.
Technorati Tags: Sony PRS-600,Sony PRS-300
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Comments:
No wireless of any kind depicted in the manuals; no hint of an antenna, a microphone, or a line in.
The 600 screen *will* unquestionably be better than the 700 because without the need for the side-lighting gap the eink is closer to the surface but it will also be covered by the touchscreen overlay so odds are the 300 will have better image quality.
Without WiFi or wireless this is just another machine. Very disappointing if that’s the case. At the IDPF conference Sony said that wireless was coming, so let’s wait and see.
Like Felix said, there will definitely not be any wifi or audio recording on the 600 since there are no mentions of the required parts in the service manuals (which is exactly the place information like that would be).
As far as font support goes, I have no idea where you’re getting that information from. The main issue with the current Sony readers is that the included fonts are sub-par. There is only a Roman font that gets fattened up for faked bolding and slanted for faked italics. If Sony were to include a complete font family (that included true bold and italic faces, along with a true small caps face ideally), it would make the text that much more readable. Thankfully, you can add your own fonts to the reader and reference them from the stylesheet for epub files. But unfortunately this doesn’t work for LRX files purchased from the Sony store.
I also don’t see any mention of wireless in the manual, but I do see OpenSSL. SSL is used for secure web communications (https). It is also used for other public key encryption, so it might be used for DRM, but I can’t find any mention of that. Anyone know if any of the supported ebook formats use SSL for their DRM? If not, then access to the Sony store?
Well, it takes longer for wireless-equipped gadgets to reach market because they need FCC certification.
So any wireless Sony reader would perforce show up later than an equivalent-technology unconnected gadget.
Not impossible that a model 900 will pop up later.
maybe a PRS 900 with 9.7″ display and 3G.
Those dimensions on the 600 can’t be right, not 4.87″ square for a 6″ device.
@Rob – the OpenSSL has been used in the 500/505 series for DRM encryption issues.
@Felix – I did a side-by-side comparion of the PRS-300 and 600 today at the Sony Style store in Boston. The image quality seems to be quite similar, thus the touch screen of the PRS-600 does not affect the clarity of text!!!
I also liked the PRS-600′s immediate response to touch and button inputs, while the reaction time of the PRS-300 felt sligthly “sluggish” (more like the PRS-505, which I handled afterwards in a different store). Display refresh itself is quite rapid for both PRS-300 and 600.
Only the PRS-300 had price tags attached, thus aparently they didn’t yet have the PRS-600 in stock (only the two tethered display units).
If you’re buying the PRS-600 without testing, you are wasting your money. The touch screen is great, but touch screen film they put over the screen prevents this thing from being a reader. It caused the screen to be hazy, cloudy and downright unreadable for any lengthy period of time. Hurts my eyes after about 2 minutes of reading.
All we can pray for is that PRS-900 Daily Edition doesn’t end up like this trash that they tried to push out early just to say they had touch screen before the Kindle.
Sony exec guy that approved this, I hope you got fired for it.
And the guy that approves the final PRS-900 Daily Edition, I hope you learned the lesson.
On a good note, the PRS-300 pocket edition is smaller, more portable, CLEAR READABLE TEXT. It does not have an expanded memory port, but you can connect it to a PC to download.
There is nothing wrong with the display of the 600. It doesn’t hurt the eyes at all. I can read it comfortably for hours. Touch screen is great. It is prone to reflection, and so positioning the device relative to light is important.
I could care less about wifi or dial-up – really, how hard is it to connect it to a computer, which of course also charges the battery.
I love the fact that it handles most formats, and conversion through Calibre works quite well for those formats that the Sony doesn’t handle.
Popped a 16gig SD card in there – could fit close to 20,000 books.
Of course the next generations will do color, be lighter, have higher resolution and capacity, larger screen etc. I’d be worried if I was in the print business.
I’ve got a 600, and a 505. Image quality/resolution is identical; glare on the 600 is slightly more pronounced.
600′s screen refresh is faster, and not always whole page. The use of the dictionary is nice (but could be implemented on a 500 type interface), but the inability to use the onscreen keyboard when annotating is a minor annoyance.
I’ve spent literally thousands of hours using my 505, and hundreds with by 600, and noticed no glare nor pain with LRF/LRM files…
The screen can wind up rendering PDFs rather small, and a pair of reading glasses may avoid some eyestrain due to small text. And Letter sized PDFs can wind up rendering pretty small. (45% of full size.)
For my own generated content (NPC lists for my Traveller game, drafts of house rules, ship designs) it’s wonderful to be able to annotate. I wish I could afford the larger 2121…