brianm said:
I must say first that the PDF reader does work, you can see pdf files.............. however, I took 3 random books from different authors and sent them to Kindle for conversion. Then I loaded the original pdf files along with the converted and moved to my Kindle DX. Each native pdf had some type of problem............ie; print VERY light
Very light print happens when the PDF is in color and the Kindle tries to map colors to the various 16 shades of gray. A color that's vivid on a color monitor will be barely visible in a gray-shaded screen and some gray background will be much too dark, in fact, to read some lighter foreground lettering on it. This happens with the Web too.
The Kindle 1, just for example, with its limited 4 shades of gray has more 'contrast' because it can't render in-between shades and gives only the more-dark and the more-light.
The conversion process tends to avoid "translating" the most extreme colors, or it translates them into less shades, but I've had Word Documents converted with mostly b&w translations and then used CutePdf to 'print' a web article in PDF format, which is then converted by Amazon or my MobiPocket Creator for use with my Kindle 2 and the shades of gray do come through.
I have many converted PDF documents and, for my material (normal PDFs formatted for express layout purposes, and not books put into PDF format), they are much better in PDF format on the DX probably because they are multicolumnar. with rows of text running across outside table headers and footers, which the converters don't often interpret correctly.
If you read some of the text in a conversion from a complex PDF, it often won't make sense because it is picking up the wrong text from the wrong column.
Since you're happier with the text-reflowed conversions (bigger, normal text re-flowed to fit the space), you are probably converting simple (free?) books with just lines running across the page and no special layout or formatting and no tables, maps, or diagrams. The latter 3 are horrific on converted PDFs.
As for the small fonts -- yes, because the screen is smaller than an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. For that reason we have the option to turn the DX sideways and the fonts then enlarge to fill the width of the screen, but we have only the top half or so of the page that way and must "NextPage" to get the bottom of the page. Turn it sideways and you get quite an improvement usually. Be sure to hold it vertically when doing auto-rotation. When held parallel to the floor, changing the orientation doesn't cause an auto-rotation.
See some of the differences between vertical and landscape mode at my
http://www.pbase.com/andrys/kindleplus