One of the strengths of the Pocketbook brand is the sheer amount of formats it supports. Two of the most notable are CBR and CBZ, the most common extension for digital comics and manga. Does the Pocketbook Color do a good job at reading on an E INK device? The answer is yes.
The Pocketbook Color displays over 4,000 different colors with a resolution of 300 PPI. You will get a great color experience, even though the PPI is dialed down to 100 when viewing color content. Normally you might think that degraded resolution would be poor with comics or colored manga, but this isn’t further for the truth. The color quality of the average comic book, manga or even webcomic is not using millions of colors, the artists are using a limited palette that is suitable for publication, the less colors that are used, the cheaper the printing costs will be. Manga is sometimes drawn and colored by a single artist and writer, larger productions have an entire team.
The pros of the manga/comic experience is that the colors look great and page turn speeds is respectable. You have total control over the luminosity, contrast, saturation and numerous other options to make the thing you are reading more vibrant. This certainly helps if you are reading content from scanlation sites. The cons are the the panel by panel view, where you can break a single page into four quadrants is not very good. All of the comics we looked at, did not play nice. Landscape view on comics and manga is also a mostly useless option, unless certain content requires it.
This e-reader is available now for $219 from the Good e-Reader Store.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
