Sony’s specialized 13.3-inch E Ink PDF reader isn’t gone for good after all. It’s back in stock at both Amazon and B&H.com.
After they ran a sale on it earlier in the summer it was out of stock for a couple of months.
With the heavy discount it seemed like the usual clearing stock sale when a company gets set to discontinue a product.
It looked that way for the Sony DPT-S1 at first, but now that it’s back in stock it is at least going to be sticking around for awhile longer.
With the recent release of the 13.3-inch Onyx Boox Max with better specs and lots of extra features, I thought the Sony model wouldn’t get much interest anymore but lots of people still prefer it over the Onyx Box Max because of the capacitive touchscreen and optimized software.
The only downside with the return of the Sony DPT-S1 is that it’s back up to the regular price of $799. Too bad they didn’t stick with the discounted price moving forward because it’s stll more expensive than the Onyx Boox Max, which can be had for $722 at the moment, and it offers a lot more features than the Sony, which is just a PDF reader only.
Nonetheless it’s good to have the Sony DPT-S1 back in stock. At least that way there are a couple of options for a 13.3-inch E Ink ereader instead of just one.
I wonder why the page turn is so laggy. They could easily prerender pages. I’ve made some benchmarks myself rendering to in-memory bitmaps and compressing them using some very lightweight techniques that don’t slow down decompress and rendering.
Uncompressed 1600x1200x4b: 960 kB/page
RLE compressed 1600×1200 text: <150 kB/page
lz4 compressed 1600×1200 text: < 50 kB/page
lz4 & rle compressed 1600×1200 text: < 40 kB/page
Decompressing and rendering RLE can actually be faster than uncompressed. Also lz4 decompression is only 50% slower than memcopy. Give me a SoC with 32-64 MB of RAM and specs for the e-ink panel and I can easily beat Sony's incompetent work force with zero cost.