Sony introduced a 13 inch slate for reading and writing on documents last year. The company calls it Digital Paper, and it’s kind of a Kindle on crack with a big high-resolution, high-contrast display and a pen for taking notes or scribbling doodles.

Now a US distributor has announced it’ll begin selling Sony’s Digital Paper in the United States in May. But it won’t come cheap. Worldox plans to charge $1100 for the writing slate.

sony digital paper_01

To be fair, Worldox isn’t positioning Digital Paper as a consumer device. It’s aimed at professionals in legal, higher education, government, and other enterprise markets — where a paperless device with long battery life and note-taking abilities might be worth the high price.

The device features a 13.3 inch, 1600 x 1200 pixel E Ink Mobius display, an optical touchscreen for finger input and an active digitizer for use with a digital pen. It has 2.8GB of available storage plus a microSD card slot and supports WiFi.

Sony Digital Paper measures about a quarter of an inch thick and weighs less than 13 ounces.

Unfortunately, as The Digital Reader points out there’s one big caveat: the device only supports viewing and editing PDF files. There’s no support for any other formats and no support for third-party apps.

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14 replies on “Sony 13 inch Digital Paper E Ink slate coming to America… for $1100”

  1. Opinions on the internet sure are like…Brad I think you nailed it: given the target market, this use case and price could work out great. It’s not for broke college students, shocking!

    1. Yep.. it’s clearly a nice device and the high price is at least partially due to economies of scale. It’s likely Sony expects to sell hundreds or thousands… but not hundreds of thousands of units.

      At the same time, the tech is intriguing enough that consumer-centric bloggers (like me) can’t resist writing about this thing. If there was a $300 model I’m sure it’d turn a lot of heads… maybe not enough to be profitable though.

      It’s also be nice if it supported more than PDF files… but that might be good enough for the target market… maybe.

  2. $1100 and .pdf only. This would be perfect for the U.S. Government if it only cost more.

  3. Oh not again Sony, you had one job, one job! To replace paper everywhere, the device needs to be affordable, and as a student churning through vast amounts of paper, that still isn’t affordable!

  4. Who knew Sony could still whip out a super mega niche device in this day and age?

  5. $1100, only works on PDF files, no third-part apps. Yeah, I don’t see them selling many of these.

  6. ” it’s kind of a Kindle on crack ” this made my day….. lol
    on topic: too expensive 😉

  7. In a year or two we’ll hopefully see a lot of no name versions in the same format for a lot less. I’d pay $150 for the device.

    1. That seems to be the way things work out. When Sony came out with the Walkman, there were other companies offerring something similar but at a much lower price. I agree $150 would be a better price, perhaps by one of the companies that make a similar device.

      1. On second thought I think an even lower price than $150 could be achieved pretty soon. To get there the device should be dumbed down. “Wait what?” some might say, wasn’t the problem that it only could process pdf files. Well, exactly. The problem is that it tries to natively process the files. That is not needed since I have a much better processor in my pocket already: a smartphone. With low energy bluetooth support. All I need from the device is a large eink screen, a chip with bluetooth that takes whatever image the phone sends and displays it. Chromecast for eink, sort of. But it also has to detect raw touch input and send it back to the smartphone, for processing.

        Please go for it, all you no name eink manufacturers out there! 🙂

  8. Typical Sony. Too little, too late, too much money, and not
    ready for prime time.

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