Amazon has resisted using E-Ink’s color panels for years, largely because they didn’t quite work as well as standard grayscale versions. Sure, you can get color, but you’ll be sacrificing the fluidity that came with the faster refresh rates available on proven grayscale panels. It looks like color E-Ink has evolved enough that it’s no longer an issue, so we’re finally getting the Amazon Kindle Colorsoft.
That’s right, there’s now a color Kindle in town and it vows to bring those colorful hues without sacrificing the high contrast, fast page turns, and fluid reading experience that made the Kindle one of the best e-readers available today. Sure, it still won’t be as pretty as an iPad’s screen, but you can now read your graphic novels in vibrant colors while still enjoying very long battery life.
The Amazon Kindle Colorsoft uses E-Ink’s Kaleido panel, similar to other color e-readers out there. However, it uses an entirely new display stack, including a newly-designed oxide backplane that enhances contrast and makes it easier for the tiny bits of ink onscreen to move around at a fast rate. There are also new LED pixels that have been optimized to enhance colors, while being brighter than previous iterations to make the colors feel more vivid. According to the outfit, these changes will also allow you to zoom in on images (which we all do with graphic novels) without getting pixelated results.
It comes with a 7-inch, 300ppi display that delivers the same paper-like experience as their grayscale e-readers, albeit with the ability to display colors, instead of simply shades of gray. Not only can it show images in beautiful colors, you can also highlight onscreen text similar to the way you’d do it on real paper with highlight markers. That’s right, your ebook pages can now look like the pages of your textbooks from high school and college. No word on how many colors it can display, though (for reference, Kobo’s color e-reader from this year does 4,096 colors).
The Amazon Kindle Colorsoft has an auto-adjusting front light that automatically brightens and dims, depending on the ambient lighting in the room. You can also manually adjust the lighting in a range from white light to warm amber, depending on your personal preference. Battery life remains good despite the new color panel, with Amazon claiming eight weeks between charges, so you probably won’t need the optional wireless charging dock (you plug it in once a month, you’ll be fine). It comes with 32GB of storage, by the way, so it should be able to hold a good load of books, graphic novels, and whatever other reading materials you like to keep on hand.
According to Amazon, the new color e-reader is waterproof, so you can take it to the bath or around the pool. No word on exact waterproof rating, though, so best not to risk immersing it, but it should easily withstand common splashes and spills. Is it really as fluid as Amazon claims? Based on early reviews, it is for the most part. However, it does perform frequent refreshing when viewing larger, image-heavy pages, as well as when you’re zooming in on images, so color e-readers still have some ways to go on that end.
The Amazon Kindle Colorsoft is available now.