Sony DPT-CP1/B 10” Digital Paper

The DPT-RP1 is absolutely perfect for reading and annotating PDF documents. I LOVE this thing! I’m going to update with a thorough review after a few more days, but my initial impressions after two days of use is that this is the device I’ve been dreaming of for years. More to come...Additional update: **DURABLE**!! (12/17)In a rather tragic accident, I tripped and fell recently. My laptop bag, containing my Sony Digital Paper and laptop went flying into the street, and the edge of the bag was run over by a car. The Digital Paper fills the bag, so it was unquestionably run over. Despite some minor damage to the case edge, my digital paper still works perfectly. My laptop, on the other hand, was obliterated. I'm amazed. If I could add 5 more stars, I would.Updated review: (few days after purchase)After several days of use, this device has already become indispensible for me.As a full time employee managing budgets, workflows, and supervising employees, this device is great - it keeps every document I need organized and accessible. The ability to print directly to the device is huge boon to my productivity. My work also relies heavily on an inordinate amount of technical manuals. This works really well for those, and the search function is extremely quick. As an aside, the acknowledgement that Sony is planning to add jump to page and table of contents functionality is something that I'm really glad to hear about, as this helps with navigation in large documents. As a workaround for the timebeing - the searchable symbols work well, and I purchased a one month subscription to Adobe Acrobat Pro to create chapter hyperlinks in the larger PDF files that lack them. There is probably a free pdf software that allows for this until the firmware update adds jump to page and TOC navigation, but Adobe Acrobat Pro on a monthly subscription basis is worth it. That said, you really could get away with using the searchable star/asterix symbols until the firmware update is released.As a graduate student, on top of fulltime work, this is a life saver. I use it for both textbooks and the inordinate amount of articles I read. The ability to have side notes for each document has been really useful to synthesize the notes I take in my textbooks. The pen works so much better than I expected - it's a great writing experience. The highlight button is a little high on the pen for really comfortable heavy highlighter use (the ability to switch button functions could be a useful firmware update), but the highlighting and erase buttons are a breeze to use. You'll probably want to stock up on pen nibs since they do wear down over time.I have the digital paper app on both my home and work computers, and you can set different sync folders on each device, which is really handy. I'm mostly syncing from my OneDrive sync folder on my home PC, and it syncs all of the subfolders flawlessly (while skipping any that don't have PDFs).I used an Ipad for several years, and was never able to focus for extended periods the way I can with this device. The screen glare was annoying and I switched to other apps too easily with the Ipad. This device really lets me focus in an unobstructed and massively more productive way. The large screen makes a huge difference over smaller eInk devices I own (including a 9.7 inch device) - there really isn't a comparison. It's a great reading and writing experience. I honestly expected to be disappointed - I really did - but I'm pretty blown away by this device (and I'm a pretty critical consumer).I've added my entire PDF ebook collection (several hundred items), and some unexpected great use cases I've found are my cookbooks and foreign language textbooks and workbooks. The ability to erase your answers in workbooks makes them infinitely re-usable, which is awesome. If you buy your ebooks in PDF format, they look great on this device.I have over 3,000 documents loaded, including lots of large image heavy 400+mb pdf files. This handles them perfectly and is shockingly fast.Honestly, this is the best purchase/investment I've made in years.

It's best to not view this device as a tablet, but instead as a bottomless laser printer. You can store approximately 10 GB worth of unprotected PDFs on the Digital Paper, which corresponds to many thousands of pages worth of material. You can also highlight text on PDFs which have text, and you can draw on any PDF. That is all this device does. It will not check emails, send texts, post selfies to Instagram, or play Angry Birds. This is a plus to me. The display is also larger than that on the iPad Pro, meaning that most academic journals and textbooks will show up at full-size. Smaller books can be displayed in landscape two pages at a time. I don't really use mine for comic reading, though it will display comics or graphic novels if you can get them in PDFs. Images seem to render kind of dark based on my very limited comic reading.This device is ridiculously thin. It is thinner than most magazines and doesn't weigh much more.PDFs can be loaded onto this device via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or USB. Wireless methods are sometimes slow or unreliable, but much more convenient than hunting around for a USB cable. You have to use the Digital Paper App, available for Windows or macOS, to setup the device and transfer files. Sony went full tinfoil-hat when designing the security model of this device. The device is completely locked down, with AES-128 encryption, and it forms an RSA key pair with the computer running the app to authenticate and encrypt communications. They will not add Dropbox or Google Drive syncing on-device. This is a feature, not a bug; it was designed this way for security reasons. You can use NFC cards to unlock the device, but it requires a weird custom Sony card format (FeliCa) only used in Japan; the international model was never localised to use standard NFC cards or phones.The pen, included in the box, is not pressure sensitive beyond 'off' and 'on', unfortunately making the DPT-RP1 virtually useless as an artist's sketchpad. The USB connector is micro-B and not Type-C. The device is occasionally somewhat slow on large files with many images. The 16-shade limitation of e-paper makes some images or diagrams render oddly. For such an expensive device, it comes with only three spare pen tips. Adding a dictionary to look up words would be really useful.If you are a professor or a graduate student, get one of these instead of staring at small LCD screens for 18 hours a day. For most other people, you would be better served by just getting an iPad and a Kindle, which combined cost less than this device.

The resolution, refresh rate, and hardware is a lot better compared to the DPT-S1.UPDATE:1. Sony updated the firmware for the device so navigation by table of contents is possible. With this update, the main pain points on using the DPT-RP1 are gone.2. It would be the perfect e-reader if it supported more formats. Currently it only supports PDFs. If it supported epub, mobi, djvu it would compete very well with the Onyx Boox Max 2 as an all-in-one reader.ORIGINAL Review:However, the software is a lot worse.1. There is no "Go To Page #" functionality, there is only a slider to go to a specific page. In a PDF with lots of pages it makes it a pain to jump around.2. There is also no way to look at the Table of Contents.3. There is no toolbar like in the DPT-S1 which had the next and previous buttons. So now to turn the page you are always forced to use gestures. I'd rather just tap on the side to turn the page like on the Kindle or DPT-S1 with the toolbar.4. There is no back button, so if you click on an annotation or link and it brings you to another page the only way to get back to the previous page is to use the page slider.5. The DPT-S1 had the concept of Workspaces, this model does not. The DPT-RP1 only allows you to see "Documents in the Same Folder" or "Recently Read". If you view Recently Read, there is no way to remove a document from the list if it is no longer relevant like in the DPT-S1.6. There is no date timestamp to show you when the the document was added when viewing the documents in the Folders. A timestamp is a lot more useful than a "New" icon.7. The cap to cover the pen's USB connector is attached by a thin piece of plastic. It looks like it could easily be broken off.