Sony Digital Paper DPT-RP1 Review - Review 2022

The best products combine bully hardware with great software. That's what makes the Sony Digital Newspaper DPT-RP1 tablet ($699.99) so frustrating: It'due south great hardware, with very fiddling software at all. It'southward a unique godsend for anyone who wants to read, edit, or annotate illustrated textbooks, periodical manufactures, or other PDF-formatted documents. Merely Sony doesn't get in easy.

Physical Blueprint

The DPT-RP1 is the largest slab of E Ink you're going to see, and nonetheless it's equally light as an actual pad of paper. Really, it's a marvel: a 13.3-inch, 2,200-by-1,650-pixel screen surrounded past soothing matte plastic, with a slightly angled dorsum that however lies flat on a table. It measures eight.8 past 11.nine by 0.two inches and weighs merely 12.3 ounces.

There's a single abode button at the top of the tablet, where the power push and micro USB charging port are. That's pretty much it in terms of controls. The design is very simple and elegant.

The screen itself doesn't accept a dorsum or front light, and has the slightly gray groundwork of lower-price Kindles. At 206 pixels per inch (ppi), it isn't every bit sharp as the 300-ppi display on the latest ebook readers, and you lot can tell that when trying to read very small text or look at maps. The xvi levels of grayscale are standard for E Ink and are fine for graphs, charts, and maps.

The device comes with 16GB of storage, of which 11.1GB is bachelor, and there's no SD card slot. Sony says the tablet has about three weeks of bombardment life. Equally with all E Ink tablets, that really depends on how many pages y'all flip. In the test catamenia, I had to recharge the unit every three or four days; it takes iii hours to charge fully. Unlike with a Kindle, you definitely have to make charging a fairly regular function of your routine.

Software

The main problem is that the software here appears to be from 2004. For ane affair, it merely reads non-DRM protected PDFs. Not ePub, non Mobi, not CBR, not library PDFs, not any other format. Just open PDF. Now, you tin can convert other files to PDF using open-source software similar Calibre; I did this with both books and graphic novels I'd previously bought from Amazon. Charts, graphs, images, and even some hotlinks stayed intact. But nosotros tin can't recommend that as a way of life, as the conversion app could break at whatever fourth dimension.

I tin can hear some of you saying, that's no trouble! You read exclusively not-DRMed or croaky documents, you're suspicious of deject services, and you might even withal be running Windows 7. If that'south y'all—great! Only you accept to understand, yous're not a mainstream user.

Marking Up

The tablet has no cloud connectivity, so getting documents onto it requires a clunky piece of PC/Mac software downloaded from Sony'southward site. You may have to disable your antivirus or firewall to install the drivers, merely like it was 2004. All the software does is give you the power to elevate and drop PDFs between your tablet and PC, and to rearrange files into folders. In one case it's ready, y'all can do this through dual-ring, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, equally long as your Wi-Fi doesn't have a portal page or domain authentication. The tablet itself has no manner to scan or download content, so you demand to use your PC.

The principal UI is just a file manager. Hit the dwelling button, and you lot can spring to a list of files or create a annotation with your pen. In a document, you can popular downwards a menu to wait at pages every bit thumbnails, expect at a list of your annotations, compare two documents next to each other, annotate a document itself, or create a side-past-side folio of notes. Weirdly, there is no way to jump to a specific page of a PDF file, only an imprecise slider and the filigree view. That makes handling long documents more difficult than it should be.

When y'all're reading, you swipe to turn pages. Swiping is responsive; the pages can be a little slow to modify, but the screen doesn't flash. There's no straight compression-to-zoom, but you can nonetheless zoom: Tap the top of the screen, tap a zoom icon, and tap the area to zoom. Once again, it's clunkier than it needs to be, and the zoom is tedious.

Sony includes a stylus to mark up your documents or to take notes. Information technology isn't a standard capacitive stylus; replacements costs $79.99. When you re-import your PDFs back to your PC, they'll contain the markups and notes. Your notes and markups also appear on the tablet's list of annotations.

The tablet is much better for annotation than for alive note-taking and sketching. Although the stylus tip has excellent grip on the screen, at that place'southward a bit of a delay when the E Ink commits, and the pen isn't pressure or tilt sensitive. Yous'll exist using it to underline, circle, right, or bullet things—non, ideally, to have full meetings' worth of notes or to draw pictures. For those uses, get an iPad Pro.

That's pretty much all this tablet does. Information technology doesn't "X-Ray" into books like a Kindle, read things out loud, translate languages, claw into keyboards, or scan the web. It lets you read and marking up documents.

PC Software

Reading Experience

The DPT-RP1's 13-inch screen makes it unlike any other e-reader, and its Due east Ink makes it different from large tablets similar the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and 12.3-inch Microsoft Surface Pro. Yes, it has competitors, and we'll become to those afterward. But it actually scratches an crawling that other e-readers tin't.

I didn't find that crawling to involve reading books, equally other e-readers read books just fine. The DPT-RP1 really opened up when I was reading textbooks, canvass music, or heavily graphical travel guides. It also made a big difference when I was looking at pages of notes and trying to blot them—I could just read more notes at a time on the large screen than I could on a smaller e-reader. I tin can see this becoming a big deal with legal briefs, for example.

The matte screen has just a flake of reflectivity, but not enough to carp me. It's very like shooting fish in a barrel on the eyes, although non quite as easy as the latest Kindles, with their college-resolution panels.

With textbooks, the margins go a swell place for marginalia. The screen is slightly larger than even a large textbook folio, and there's generally white space around the edges of the text for bullets, underlines, and doodles, all of which can be synced back to your PC for later consideration.

That said, I couldn't get into pure notation-taking on this tablet—the slight latency in the E Ink was as well disconcerting. And in a artistic context, the DPT-RP1 simply lacks versatility. I gave information technology to an creative person I know, who didn't similar the latency or the lack of pen sensitivity.

I kept wishing the tablet supported public library apps, and that at that place was a way to get files onto the it other than past syncing from a PC. E-mail? A telephone app? A browser? Dropbox? Anything?

Sony Digital Paper 27

Comparisons and Conclusions

I can absolutely encounter who will love the DPT-RP1. If you had a Kindle DX back in the twenty-four hour period, well, hello. If you're a lawyer, printing out stacks of 11-past-14 briefs to PDF and then syncing them from your role PC, you lot take a great workflow for this device. If y'all're an academic who belongs to PDF-format journals that clutter up your desk-bound, this tablet will your new all-time friend. If you lot're a musician who wants to carry effectually sheet music without it getting dog-eared, don't carp with an iPad.

If you're a creator, though, you'll probably want a 10.v-inch iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, which is a lot more flexible when information technology comes to file formats, apps, and even using a keyboard. If yous're only looking for a large ebook reader, the vii.viii-inch Kobo Aura I is much less expensive, has a higher-resolution screen, and supports more file formats.

I'g unconvinced by the ReMarkable and the Onyx Boox Max Carta tablets, although both exercise some things better than the Sony Digital Paper. The ReMarkable'due south pen is more responsive than Sony'due south, only the screen isn't nearly every bit big, and a major selling signal for the Sony is how huge the screen is. The Onyx Boox Max Carta isn't finger-bear on-sensitive and it runs an onetime, insecure version of Android with apps that are frequently quirky (that said, it does have apps). It also costs $one,000. Then even with its flaws, the Sony DPT-RP1 feels like the top choice for an extra-large e-reader.