Electronic Dictionaries from Sharp

By Oli
At 1:23 AM · Thursday, 21 August · 2003
To Japan · Life

I’ve been impressed by the screens on the high-end Sharp models PW-9800 and PW-9700. Both these dictionaries seem to have huge screens compared to other electronic dictionaries we tried. Strangely they are advertised as 5.4" which should give a 240x320 dpi resolution, the same as other dictionaries. I’m not sure if it’s due to a cleaner font or what, but they’re great, especially compared to the dark Canon Wordtank screens. The main difference between the two is the dictionaries included; the PW-9800 is more for the office/family, and the PW-9700 is more for study. The PW-9700 has half the number of dictionaries, but for someone studying English or Japanese the only differences are:

English to Japanese Dictionary
The PW-9700 uses Grand Concise (360,000 entries). The PW-9800 uses Genius (95,000 entries).
Thesaurus
The PW-9700 uses the Concise Oxford Thesaurus (365,000 entries). The PW-9800 doesn’t really have a thesaurus, but has a book on similar words called Luigo (1,800 Japanese entries, 1,200 English entries).
Katakana・カタカナ Dictionary
The PW-9700 lacks a katakana dictionary. The PW-9800 uses Personal Katakana (28,000 entries).

The PW-9700 obviously kicks arse for studying for both of us - Miwa won’t run into “word not found”, and I get a decent thesaurus. The lack of a katakana dictionary isn’t a big problem either, because of the (far) more extensive E-J dictionary and katakana’s generally obvious English basis.

I also played briefly with Seiko, Casio and Sony dictionaries. I found the Sharp ones were the easiest to use, mainly because of several features made possible by the big screens. For example when using the Super Jump function to jump between dictionaries, the list of dictionaries also contains the entry word from that dictionary. I can see the hiragana beside any kanji or compound without even needing to jump. If I do jump the previous dictionary page remains open at the top of the screen, with the new ‘jumped-to’ dictionary page appearing below. These two features make the dictionary less modal, and give me an exit strategy. Seiko dictionaries also do this to a certain degree, but because the screen is smaller it’s not as useful.

I hope to make a table comparing all the dictionaries, but I don’t know if I’ll just buy something before finishing. It would be nice to take screenshots and do a detailed comparison though, and the market is certainly far more diverse than two years ago (“buy a Wordtank”). Maybe when we get a digital camera… ;-)

Discussion...

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1. Comment by Patrick  · 14 Sep, 2003 · 4:23 AM

Hi! I am called Patrick from HK. I am just searching for info about Sharp PW-9800, and find your webiste from yahoo.com. Actually I cannot buy it in HK, so I try to find out whether I can buy overseas or Japan. I have watched your comment and also believe that 9800 is a better model. OK! Thanks a lot for your info and wish more people giving comment to your article! ^_^!

2. Comment by oli  · 17 Sep, 2003 · 12:01 PM

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for the comment, but I actually bought the Sharp PW-9700 (not the 9800). I don’t know if you just made a mistake or completely didn’t understand my article ;-)

The PW-9700’s E-J dictionary is four times bigger than the PW-97800. And the PW-9700 includes a thesauraus, but the PW-9800 doesn’t.

I bought mine from Amazon.co.jp. It’s now merely 17,200yen (!)The price has gone up to about 27,000yen though

You can also check out Kakaku.com where the cheapest price is about 20,000yen

Peace - oli

3. Comment by Victoria  · 20 Feb, 2004 · 9:05 PM

Great write up on the dictionaries. I think you have convinced me to buy the 9700! Thanks for the time it took to write.

4. Comment by Shaheed  · 7 Apr, 2004 · 12:46 PM

Hey Oli,
Just recently started looking around for a J/E electronic dict. and found your article. How does the Sharp one that you bought compare with the new Canon G50 … I’ll paste a small article that I found about it on the net. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

REVIEW: CANON G50 ELECTRONIC DICTIONARY
A Review by Quinlan Faris


So What makes the G50 any better than the Canon Wordtank IDF-3000 or IDF-4600? The main feature that most people were excited about was the inclusion of the Reader’s and Reader’s Plus English to Japanese dictionaries. The Reader’s English to Japanese dictionary has an amazing 270,000 entries plus a phrase search and example sentence search function, and the Reader’s Plus piles another 190,000 entries onto that. Remember, the Canon IDF-4600 had only 95,000 entries in the Genius English to Japanese dictionary.

One of the most exciting aspects of the G50 is the improved kanji dictionary. With the Kanjigen in the Canon G50 you can still search for kanji by the on or kun reading, the reading of individual components, the radical, and the number of strokes. You can also use any combination of these methods together. What the Canon G50’s Kanjigen brings is twice as many compounds and two very significant new functions.

The first is that once you have found the kanji that you were searching for in the Kanjigen, you can hit the related terms button, and kanji compounds starting with that kanji are displayed horizontally just as in the normal dictionaries. The IDF-4600 had about half as many compounds, and they were displayed vertically. Of course this listing is a Kanji to Japanese dictionary, so if you need an English definition you have to use the Jump function. It’s just one extra step and is not too inconvenient. Also, there is a jukugo, or kanji compound search function. Just hit shift and then the kanji dictionary button to bring it up. With this all new kanji compound dictionary you can search through all the compounds found in the entire Wordtank. The kanji dictionary also includes an all new kanji name search, where the irregular readings used in people’s names are included in the search.

The second new function was not announced, or at least I didn’t here about it until I bought the G50. When you are looking at a kanji in the Kanjigen dictionary, you can push the Spelling button and it will animate the drawing of the kanji displaying not only the stroke order, but also the direction of the strokes. I believe it will do this for 2,600 of the kanji listed.

The related terms button also has use outside of the kanji dictionary. For example, if you press related terms while looking at the word neko (cat), Japanese phrases using the word neko are displayed. If you do this from the Japanese to English dictionary, the definition of the phrases are given in English. The G50 has a 52,500 entry Katakana dictionary, which is a significant improvement over the 16,000 entries in the IDF-4600. The Japanese to English dictionary is the Kenkyusha’s New College Dictionary, and moves up to 95,000 words from 80,000 in the IDF-4600.

Two sizes of character display are now standard in all the new electronic dictionaries, and the G50 is no exception. Of course the wildcard query with the ‘*’ and ‘?’ remain the same as the IDF-4600. There is a new bookmarking function, four memos, and a marking function.

5. Comment by oli  · 18 Apr, 2004 · 12:15 AM

Hi Shaheed,

the best bet would be to go to an electronics store and check them out side by side. That would be the best way to find out what one is easier to use.

From reading the article the new Canon has a couple of nice features:

The Sharp 9700 kanji dictionary has kanji compounds (in another tab) for the kanji you look up, but these are only the kanji dictionary’s compounds (ie usually only 2-3 kanji compounds). It sounds like the Canon one takes kanji compounds from all the dictionaries. This could be useful if you look up a lot of long multi-kanji words in the J-J dictionary.

There’s no drawing animation on the Sharp 9700, that’s a really sweet feature for a beginner. I’ve kinda got the feeling for how most kanji should be drawn, but occasionally I find one that I have to refer to my paper dictionary to check.

I also think the Canon models have a flashcard function that shows you the kanji/words you’ve bookmarked, then once you push a button shows you the English (or vice versa). This would be pretty convenient for studying. The Sharp 9700 both remembers what you’ve looked up per dictionary and allows you to bookmark words/kanji per dictionary, but I don’t think there’s a flashcard function.

Apart from that, I imagine the dictionaries are fairly comparable; eg the Sharp has 4 moji sizes for most dictionaries, but the sample phrases are mostly from the Business Letter Writing guide. This article seems popular so if I have time I might try to do a comparison with screen capts.