It has been a bumpy start for Amazon’s $280 Kindle Colorsoft, the company’s first E-Ink book reader with a color screen. The company delayed shipments for a few weeks to correct a problem where a faint yellow band would appear across the bottom of the screen, something that has apparently been fixed for current versions of the reader (Amazon says it has made “the appropriate adjustments” to fix the problem but hasn’t been specific about what those adjustments are).
Amazon didn’t send us a Colorsoft for review at the time, maybe in part because of this problem early reviewers had, but we finally got one a few weeks ago and have been using it since then.
My main takeaway is that I don’t mind the Colorsoft, but it also doesn’t solve any problems I was having with the monochrome Kindle Paperwhite, and it doesn’t meaningfully solve the big problems with color E-Ink. It also makes the experience of reading regular text subtly worse, which accounts for the vast majority of my Kindle activity. I’m curious to see future riffs on the idea, but this initial implementation leaves me cold.
What’s different in color?
The 12th-generation Kindle Paperwhite on the left, the Colorsoft on the right. This is with the brightness and warmlight set to the same levels—the Colorsoft’s screen also takes on a slightly more purplish hue here.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
Even if you spend most of your time reading monochrome text, the Colorsoft does insert splashes of color wherever it can. The setup and sleep screens are all in color. Every book cover in your library or on your home screen is in color, and highlights can be made in four different colors (yellow, pink, blue, and orange).
These colors are the same as you get in the Kindle mobile and desktop/web apps, and highlights you make on the Colorsoft will show up in the same color in the other apps (and vice-versa).
Comics, PDFs, webpages, and other color content will also display in color on the Colorsoft’s screen (though for webpages, you’re stuck with the same limited web browser the Kindle has always had, and most pages won’t render anywhere close to correctly). Colors won’t be represented as accurately as on an LCD or OLED screen, since E-Ink supports just 4,096 colors, rather than millions. But the broad strokes will look mostly correct.