Sony Digital Paper Dpt-cp1

[Lavonda Busing]

TheKindle e-reader - and the e-ink display - came out 10 years ago. In one fell swoop, reading books on paper was finally about to come to an end, hundreds of years after the printing press dominated the way we disseminate information.

The Kindle was revolutionary because e-ink was anything but flashy, feature-rich, or techy. It simply looked and felt like real words on real paper, except that it was a battery powered digital device, and that took a lot of innovation to make happen.

Unfortunately the majority of consumers are simply not interested in drawing. As much as we like to believe everyone is a creative at heart, the reality is many people use their electronics for work and play rather than for art.

But then it ended up doing a lot more, perhaps too much. Not only could it replace printed books and documents, but it also had two cameras, face-to-face video calls, desktop publishing, music and movie production, cameras, the web, Facebook, and so on.

There is 16gb of onboard storage, enough to store thousands of PDF files. The CP1 has both wifi and bluetooth as well as a micro USB port, all of which work to seamlessly connect to the Digital Paper app on your Mac or PC. You can drag and drop PDFs into the app, and there are also syncing features, if you annotate, highlight, or add side notes to your PDFs, or want to regularly backup the documents you generate.

The Kindle Paperwhite is the gold standard in e-readers, even though there are a few other models. If you like to read books, or want to get (back?) into reading books, this thing will certainly do it for you.

The Digital Paper from Sony, however, displays PDFs like it was made to do so (it was). Text, images, formatting - everything works as it should. If you want to read PDFs - which can include practically anything from books, to documents, to web printouts, to magazine spreads - the DPT-CP1 is a dream.

And if you want to read ebooks, the conversion from ebook formats like .EPUB and .MOBI to PDF work effortlessly, compared to the other way around. Calibre does it in seconds. You can buy Kindle books from Amazon and read them on the Digital Paper. Simply download the Kindle app for Windows or Mac, which then places Kindle content in your Documents folder, and then use Calibre to convert them into PDFs.

Of course, the size difference between a Kindle Paperwhite and a DPT-CP1 is noticeably different. But the Digital Paper is so thin and lightweight that you can still hold it with one hand and not feel any fatigue.

For us, we actually prefer to have a larger page with more text - even for ebooks - since it feels more like looking at a book the way it was designed, rather than zooming in on a small piece of a paragraph everytime you turn a Kindle page.

But for anyone who wants to be able to enlarge text on the fly, the Sony Digital Paper is not there yet. You can change the conversion font size in Calibre, and once you figure out what your preferred font size is, you can convert all your books to the same font size (and font type too). But still, that's a lot of work to bump up a digital document's text size.

Again, the benefit here is you can still mark up the recipes, just like you could on paper. And you can have the Digital Paper on and visible during the entire cooking process, without it turning off during the moment when your hands are full of cake batter (read: iPad).

The above suggestions are just a sampling of what people can do with a device that replaces their collection of papers. But those are ideas based on reading documents. If you start to imagine all of the paper you use to write on, the Digital Paper from Sony becomes even more interesting.

The Digital Paper does have a couple calendar templates, but even more useful is you can upload your own PDF templates to use as a personal organizer. For example, you could create your own PDF that has sections custom to your daily planning, like fitness or diet tracking, or hourly notes.

How do you create a template? You could use anything that saves to PDF, like a word processor, or Photoshop, or better yet, simply draw your template on the Digital Paper. And then in the Digital Paper app, save that PDF as a new Note Template. How easy was that?

As a device for personal organization or as an ereader, the Digital Paper from Sony can still be a little too expensive for most people to consider, despite how amazing it is. But for educational institutions and corporate offices, this thing is going to take over very soon.

And not just in taking notes and printing essay drafts. Each student takes home hundreds - if not thousands - of pages of text for each class, in the form of re-printed copies of reading material, custom course booklets, and of course text books. Lots of them.

The only way for text books to make money is if they continue to churn out updates, which force college book stores to carry the new editions, which force students to purchase additional thousands of pages of text books, rather than buying used copies after another student is finished with a course.

Will there be those who figure out a way to steal digital textbooks rather than pay for them? Yes, of course, like anything out there. Someone was photocopying textbooks decades ago to avoid paying for expensive books, just like there are pirated Kindle books available today.

But the details of how to curb piracy are little distractions from the inevitable storm that will take over college campuses, when e-ink PDF readers/writers like the Digital Paper replace dorm room laser printers and college book stores.

What about video production? Is there a place for the Sony Digital Paper in the production environment? Of course. Again, as a baseline, imagine anything you would use paper for, and replace it with the Digital Paper from Sony.

For example, if you use Call Sheets on your productions, instead of trying to edit them on a computer and print them out late at night (sometimes impossible to do at a hotel), create a Call Sheet PDF and use it as a template. Fill it out as you go, change it up throughout the day, between productions, and sync it to your computer if you want to email it to crew.

One more thing: if you're a narrative filmmaker who works with scripts, imagine being able to do away with the hundreds of print outs every time you read, edit, or collaborate on a script. Most scripts and treatments can add up to hundreds of pages of print each week. Switching to a digital system could be a very significant change in the narrative filmmaking industry.

But for most people, the 10-inch version is a much more practical size for a device that you may use for reading, note taking, and a variety of other daily functions. It also fits in a small bag or purse better than a 13 inch device.

The website e-ink experience may even disapoint you enough to not want to use the device anymore. Kind of like that old iPad you have in the corner now, which you thought you would use for one thing, but then you tried to use it for everything, got frustrated, and then put it away for good.

Lastly, there is the now-discontinued Amazon Kindle DX, which had a 9-inch screen and featured the best of both the Kindle ecosystem, as well as PDF reading. You can still find used versions for sale, but at this point it's pretty outdated.

Because this is a new, emerging product category, you can expect there to be a lot of improvements in the future. Right now, there are still lots of features that are lacking, which might prevent certain buyers from taking the leap today.

For example, having more options to edit a PDF on the device itself, rather than forcing the use of the app, would be super. Being able to adjust text size, layout crop, and simply copying and pasting PDFs within the device would be great. Moving around a large textbook could be easier, such as returning to the last page after clicking on an annotation.

If we can take notes on it, shouldn't we also be able to pair a bluetooth keyboard and type on it as well? That seems like a simple win. In fact, because of the long lasting battery life, the Sony Digital Paper could be a much more dependable tool for traveling writers than their current computers or tablets.

And if we're going to start using this daily in all aspects of our lives, we're going to need a little more assurance of dependability, like stress tests, scratch free screens, or at the very least, screen protectors.

And of course, the front light. Even though we know one will most likely add weight and bulk, which will sacrifice some of the beautiful design of the DPT-CP1, a front light is essential. This might be the one reason why many will wait to buy into the Digital Paper system further down the road.

Kermit the Frog famously sang "It's not easy being green", and he should have added that it's not cheap either. Sony has added a new 10-inch model to its Digital Paper line and this thing is essentially a sheet of paper that never runs out. The idea is to help reduce the amount of ink and paper you use, which could be a big deal if you work in an environment where there is typically lots of printing and annotation of physical documents. The new 10-inch Digital Paper model is called the DPT-CP1 and it is meant to be notebook-sized.

It slips into the Sony Digital Paper line along with the larger pre-existing 13-inch DPT-RP1 and offers the same reading, annotating, and note taking capability that was offered with that original version. Along with the rollout of the smaller Digital Paper product, Sony also has a new Digital Paper Mobile Application for Android and iOS devices. That app offers users quick sharing of documents and notes for on the go folks. The app will launch in June 2018 for both devices.

The display of both Digital Paper devices is glare-free making them usable in direct sunlight. The devices are 0.23-inches thick and weigh 8.5 ounces for the 10-inch model and 12.3-ounces for the 13-inch version. Both are designed to give the same feel you get when writing on paper thanks to the non-slip panel. There are two tips included for the stylus with one providing a pen-like feel and the other a pencil-like feel. Internal storage is 16 GB with 11 GB user accessible; Sony says that is enough for 10,000 PDF documents.

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