Comments on: Plastic Logic Reader Demo – 4 second pageturns?

By: HH

HH — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:17:56 +0000

Seriously, this is comparing apples and oranges. As Bryce said, Plastic Logic demo shows document switching and page seeking. Not simple page turns. I didn’t see any noticeable lag between Kindle and Plastic Logic page turns …

The whole article is going on about 4 seconds page turns – which is wrong. OK you like Kindle, so do I. But if you want to write a reasonable review, please try to be fair.

By: switch11

switch11 — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:37:45 +0000

great point – thanks for the comment. agree with you totally on the vertical integration. though they have said they’ll have 3rd party apps.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:28:43 +0000

So the software can fix this, and the reasoning goes as follows, if you watch the beginning of the video you can see that between “views” the screen is a standard e-ink display and can re-draw in about a second.

So the physical hardware can refresh faster, what is the software pipeline? Well it looked from this video and others that the PL Reader was doing the render “on the fly” which is to say it got the page you wanted, then internally rendered it, then displayed it. While flexible that can be slow, a much better solution is to pre-render to the screen format and keep the pre-renders around. However …

And this is also telling, switching between documents was kind of slow and that suggests one of two things, either their storage solution is really slow, and/or they have really kept a lid on RAM (probably to save battery power).

As an engineer I also recognize that “make it work, then make it fast” is a mantra often repeated. I wish they hadn’t made the decision to vertically integrate since I’m sure that a dozen entrepreneurs each putting their software on the same platform basics would (and may in the future) generate a much better system overall.

By: Kindle: One Year Report « random($foo)

Kindle: One Year Report « random($foo) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 07:39:49 +0000

[...] alternative (the Plastic Logic reader form factor and feature set look great, however the performance might be a bit of an issue – having already gone through one horrible reader, I don’t [...]

By: May Kindle Summary, interesting news « Kindle 2 Review – Kindle DX Review, Books

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:29:45 +0000

[...] Plastic Logic Demo finally revealed. Looks great except for page turns slower than a lazy snail. [...]

By: switch11

switch11 — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:13:18 +0000

perhaps they sort it out by release. if they don’t they’re in trouble.
i’m surprised they’d do a demo with these slow, slow screen refresh speeds.

By: switch11

switch11 — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:12:21 +0000

interesting.
the microsoft office support is impressive and necessary given they are positioning themselves as a business device.

the ‘beam documents to each other’ feature is pretty impressive too.

By: lisa

lisa — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:47:18 +0000

two things might make me switch from my kindle2:
1.)3G wireless support , BlueTooth and WiFi support. I love my kindle2, but I cant get on the network at home. have to bring it to work to sync, unless I want to hack it.

2.)Supports Word, Powerpoint, PDF, and a lot more. Good. Amazon’s email it to yourself solution is a step too many for me.

By: Bryce

Bryce — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:49:08 +0000

That’s switching between documents.

How long does it take to go back to the kindle home screen to pick a new document?

Also that’s not a “page turn” it’s a “seek” which is done very differently between the two because the kindle works in lines and the plastic logic works in pages.

It’s all software, it’ll be sorted by release for sure.

Look how fast the menu was.