Some Thoughts on Sony's DPT-S1 (Digital Paper System)

[ewemoa]

Been using a U.S. English version of Sony's DPT-S1 with 1.3.x firmware for a few weeks and have some thoughts to share.


The short of it is that I'm happy to be using one.


The following are some details covering info that I didn't find elsewhere before purchasing.  May be this will help for other folks who are considering

Viewer
  The "Table of Contents" for a PDF file is usable unlike (AFAIU) for Amazon's DX.  It works like this:
    -with an appropriate PDF displayed, press the menu button followed by the table of contents button
    -along the left side of the screen there should be an area displaying some table of contents entries - the area to the right of the table of contents entries displays a smaller version of some page in the PDF
    -if an entry has any children, this is indicated via a different icon to the left of an entry's text
    -touching an entry with children leads to all children entries being displayed (but they replace what entries were displayed before) - the area to the right of the entries is updated to display the corresponding page of the PDF
    -touching the page causes the table of contents area to disappear and the full-size version of the page is displayed instead
 Apparently no clipboard - no copy / paste -- however, this may be possible from firmware version 1.4.x (at least in jp version) - long-pressing a word in a PDF does bring up a menu with items 'Highlight', 'Search', and 'Google' though
 Doesn't seem possible to flip pages while zoomed in -- however, apparently possible from firmware version 1.4.x (at least in jp version)
 Although there are 4-page and 9-page views, there doesn't appear to be a dual-page view

File Transfer
  Both the internal memory and the micro SD card are accessible as mass storage devices -- I've only tested under *NIX, but don't believe it's any different under other operating systems -- no extra software necessary to access one's content (given which company made this device, this was quite a (pleasant!) surprise for me)
  Have successfully removed and replaced the micro SD card while the system is in standby mode -- not sure whether this is safe...

Browser
 Doesn't appear to let one view HTML files that reside in internal memory or the micro SD card
 Doesn't seem possible to view pages rotated (though that works for viewing PDFs)
 Didn't expect to use the browser functionality, but as slow and limited as it is, better to have something than nothing - too bad it doesn't seem possible to save the current page as PDF (like one can do in FF)
 Appears to limit one to using up to 3 windows

Miscellaneous
 The current time doesn't seem to be displayed anywhere useful -- I actually did a search via the browser to find out the current time once... Pressing the menu key while at the home screen displays the current time in the top left corner of the screen
 The UI smells of Android here and there:
  dialog boxen
  pop-up kbd
  notification area
 Did not find a way to transfer files between internal memory and micro SD directly
 Doesn't appear to be any auto-cropping of whitespace
 Wikipedia's 'download as pdf' and 'create a book' functionality seems particularly useful -- though haven't found it convenient to access that functionality via the device itself...some of the created PDFs turned out pretty decently
 Didn't expect to use the stylus to create notes, but much to my surprise I've come to use it -- I could just barely adjust to the lag -- now it doesn't bother me too much -- I used to dream of having a white board where I could restore the content...this device reminds me of that forgotten dream
 Didn't expect to use the workspace feature (basically one can 'save' a set of tabs and name the set) but though there are various things that are wanting it's a fair bit better than nothing


That's it for now.  May be I'll update this from time to time...

[mouser]

Thanks for posting! For those who aren't familiar, this is a large format e-reader that is appealing for those of us who have been looking for a digital replacement for reading full-sized (i.e. academic) pdfs and ebooks:
http://store.sony.co...-catid-digital-paper

Doesn't appear to be any auto-cropping of whitespace

that's too bad -- i've found it's a useful feature when space is limited on a mobile device.

Didn't expect to use the stylus to create notes, but much to my surprise I've come to use it

nice.  so will it remember notes you write in the margins while reading pdf files?

[ewemoa]

Doesn't appear to be any auto-cropping of whitespace

that's too bad -- i've found it's a useful feature when space is limited on a mobile device.

-mouser (June 28, 2015, 05:33 AM)

If it's any consolation, it's much less of an issue for this device because of the 13.3 inch factor...

Didn't expect to use the stylus to create notes, but much to my surprise I've come to use it

nice.  so will it remember notes you write in the margins while reading pdf files?

-mouser

I didn't try myself, but I think so -- perhaps the following will help answer the question:

  http://richardmineri...-at-lambda-jam-2014/

Note that this particular write-up was from before the price cut.

[wraith808]

If we're dealing with a purely paper replica of reading, I actually prefer to keep the whitespace.

[ewemoa]

I have come to appreciate that aspect more while using this device.

I still have some difficulty reading some content though -- for this, the zooming seems to help (some overlap with cropping I guess) but zooming settings are not retained per page and at least for the version of the firmware I have at the moment, one cannot navigate to other pages without first "unzooming"...

Anyway, this device feels like it's almost there

[ewemoa]

The current time doesn't seem to be displayed anywhere useful -- I actually did a search via the browser to find out the current time once...

-ewemoa (June 28, 2015, 04:11 AM)

Just found that pressing the menu button while on the home screen displays the current time at the top left of the screen...

[ewemoa]

Tried connecting the DPT-S1 to an Android device via USB cable (with an adapter).  The timing appears to be a bit tricky, but occasionally it seems to work such that the micro sdcard within the DPT-S1 will show up accessible within typical file explorers on the Android device.

[ewemoa]

Some notes for future reference

Succeeded in updated the firmware to 1.5.x by:

1. Unzipping the .exe file representing the update
2. Copying the DPT-S1 Updater.package file (one of the extracted files) to the root directory of the DPT-1's internal memory
3. Performing a recovery restart of the device via the Testmode app (see http://www.mobilerea...wthread.php?t=235661)

After a somewhat lengthy wait, the update seemed to complete.

Appreciate being able to navigate to different pages while maintaining the current zoom level.

[ewemoa]

Still investigating but ATM it looks like some of the PDFs I've been annotating on the DPT-1 are being corrupted.  Not so badly that they can't be opened by a number of viewers, but bad enough so that some programs will refuse to process the content.  I haven't yet come across any other reports of this so for all I know it may be some kind of pilot error

After trying a few things, I've found that using the mutool command line tool via its "clean" subcommand seems to fix things (at least in limited testing).  Came across mutool while reading the mupdf man page

gs (from the same folks) seems to be able to repair as well though IIUC one's annotations may get lost in the process -- that might be specific to the way I've been invoking gs though, so there may be better ways.

[kalos]

If we're dealing with a purely paper replica of reading, I actually prefer to keep the whitespace.

-wraith808 (June 28, 2015, 12:13 PM)

exactly, people use that whitespace to take notes

[IainB]

...exactly, people use that whitespace to take notes

-kalos (March 20, 2016, 06:15 AM)

Har-de-har. Very droll.

That DPT-S1 looks rather slick. I've been wanting to try one out for ages. For example, I can't quite figure out what it does with PDF documents that are image content only. Does it do the OCR, or what? And if it doesn't and so you OCR the document using (say) PDF XChange Viewer, or something, can the DPT-S1 make use of (and search/read) the OCR'd text?

[ewemoa]

Don't know, but if you point me at a sample PDF (please make it a safe one), I might see how it behaves

[IainB]

@ewemoa: Here are two small, single-page .PDF docs. They contain the same single-page visual material, but one is just an image document - so its text is visible but not copyable/searchable - and one is the image document which has been OCR'd, so its text is copyable/searchable.
You can download them from the links:
Test file Image only.pdf
Test file Image-OCR.pdf

The test is, using the DPT-S1, can you copy/search and otherwise operate on the image-only document in the same way as you can with the image-OCR document?

[ewemoa]

Results were:

  Test file Image only.pdf - text did not appear selectable, nor were any searches for text successful
  Test file Image-OCR.pdf - text could be highlighted (creating an annotation), selected for searching the file, and directly searchable

On a side note, it's been my impression that copy/pasting (in the ordinary sense) isn't directly supported on this device -- after I long press on text that is selectable, a "menu" of sorts with three options appears.  The "menu" lists "Highlight", "Search", and "Google".  AFAICT, "Highlight" is for creating an annotation, "Search" is for searching the same document, and "Google" is for using the selected text in the web browser -- though IIUC by making a query to Google.

[IainB]

@ewemoa: Thanks for the feedback. Pity. I guess it's not as OCR-smart or useful as I had wanted, but it still seems to be an excellent e-reader, albeit a bit pricey.

[ewemoa]

I'm still happily using the DPT-S1 even though it only supports PDFs (and there's no obvious way to install additional apps -- it appears to be a custom-job of quite an early version of Android).  Certainly got a lot more experience converting things to PDF

another option?

On a side note, quite interested in the upcoming Onyx Max (possibly to be available some time in April?) -- it's reported to be heavier but is supposed to run Android 4.0.x (possibly will eventually run 4.4.x) and likely will be capable of using other formats:

http://www.mobilerea...wthread.php?t=267140