Yes, you are right about manual activation taking a bit to get used to it. It is like learning a certain way to balance your mental focus and your eyes at the same time. Every now and then I will get the hang of it and I find myself scanning nearly at superreading speeds and find that I am consciously taking it all in - reading a paragraph at a time. Then I get so excited that I lose my focus and I look right at some specific words and mentally verbalize. But, then I just try to get back into it and keep on going.
I know that if I keep this up I will master it. In the end the photoreading system is beginning to feel like a sneaky way of teaching speedreading with added benefits as well. But maybe, that is just the spontaneous activation of a stack of speedreading books that I photoread as a syntopical / direct learning experiment. 
