but even then 10" screen of big ipad vs 7.9" with both at the same resolution.
Yeah the big iPad is still smaller than a letter sheet, but that 2" makes a noticeable difference in readability. It's going from small to...smaller basically. Detail will be there either way cause the resolution now, it's just a matter at what distance you'll be reading at.
My wife says the same thing. The print just gets a bit too small for comfortable studying if you view it at full screen on a mini, especially on the PDFs that aren't formatted as forgivingly. Now, I got her the original mini last year, which she absolutely loves. She was never interested in the fullsize iPad, but the mini's size and weight is a perfect fit for her.
But as a grad student she pretty much lives off journal articles--her reason for wanting an iPad to begin with. So she gets PDFs and loads them up on her mini for reading and marking up and notating. It was great at first, but lately she's been getting annoyed at having to zoom in to a comfy size and scroll the text into view as she reads it. She's been debating getting a full-size iPad the next time around to make studying PDFs easier.
Heh, part of the reason I got rid of my 3rd gen recently (while keeping my mini) was cause I'm done with school soon, so I figure I have less need to read PDFs, textbooks, and other fixed format stuff.
She's on the non-r mini, and she uses Good Reader to work on her files. I dunno if it's the resolution that's the issue, we'd have to compare pdf reading and annotating on the two models side-by-side. But it sounds more like a size issue. It's taking the text of a full 8.5X11 sheet of paper and shrinking it down.
This might be fine for reading, but then she's also tapping around to highlight words and sentences. It's harder to get that precise touch on text that's too small, so she finds it easier to zoom in a bit and read/annotate that way. It's a trade off she wouldn't have to make with the full-sized iPad. But for that, she'd have to give up the size and weight of the mini. So she's weighing those pros/cons in considering her next model.
It's a matter of both size and resolution for me, but it depends on the font/size choices in the file. Some have small enough fonts that you have to zoom in cause the resolution isn't there, others are ok resolution wise (if a bit ugly) but still are small enough that you want to zoom in to make the text larger for readability. Textbooks are generally extra sucky cause they usually have small text on relatively big ass pages. Stuff like Inkling (completely reformatted books) is a godsend for those.
One little tip in case she isn't making use of it, crop the page view down if possible. If the stuff I had to work with you could usually crop down a decent chunk off all the edges to give a little extra zoom without sacrificing the full page view. I believe GoodReader has an even/odd page crop too in case the pages have different margins (like with printed pages).
honestly mine looks worse than some of the comparison shots online when it comes to colors being off.
