Reading two-column 10pt/letter-size PDF (most academic papers are formatted this way) on 1280x800 is not a pleasant experience, whatever the physical size. The only way you can read all those tiny footnotes is using the landscape mode at full-width (otherwise there won't be enough pixels to render), which means you'll have to scroll to finish just one page.
Trust me, Retina iPad's 2048x1536 is what you want. That gives you a crisp-clear and better-than-average laser-printer quality in portrait mode for one whole page on the screen. Especially true if the papers you read contain anything with color or vector graphs.
Plus iOS has the best font/PDF rendering engine in my opinion. YMMV, though.
Trust me, Retina iPad's 2048x1536 is what you want. That gives you a crisp-clear and better-than-average laser-printer quality in portrait mode for one whole page on the screen. Especially true if the papers you read contain anything with color or vector graphs.
Plus iOS has the best font/PDF rendering engine in my opinion. YMMV, though.