Whenever I asked around on academic circles about this, the ipad was the consensus. The kindle DX does an ok job according to the people I talked to, but the slow page turning drove people crazy when trying to understand a complicated paper referencing previous math/diagrams.
I really wish the academic world wasn't standardized around formats that only work for print. There are some LaTeX->html converters out there, that could presumably be used to make epub, but I have no idea how well they work.
Your peers are generally correct. I used a DX for technical papers and PDFs after going through the conversion hell you are stuck in (albeit with a Sony Reader) and then jumped to an iPad when it came out. The best advice I can offer is to hop over to mobileread.com and check out the forums to see what the current state of the art is. Back when I was doing two or three conversions a day the tools to use were Rastafarian and PDF2LRF but I am guessing there are better options available now. You may also want check out Calibre, which is an ebook library management app but one with a lot of built-in conversion routines.
Holy cow, could a project have picked a worse name than "Rastafarian"? If one searches for "Rastafarian", you can guess what turns up. But even "Rastafarian pdf conversion" seems to drop the "pdf" and returns lots of results for converting to the Rastafarian religion. Same for "convert".
I guess I'll have to go trolling through the mobileread.com forums, but just damn.
I really wish the academic world wasn't standardized around formats that only work for print. There are some LaTeX->html converters out there, that could presumably be used to make epub, but I have no idea how well they work.