Review: Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is something less than “a Paperwhite with color”
It’s a decent e-reader, but it offers too few benefits for too many drawbacks.
Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is its first color E-Ink reader, but the technology still has shortcomings.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is its first color E-Ink reader, but the technology still has shortcomings.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
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.
Highlighting is one area where the Colorsoft’s screen can come in handy when reading regular books. These highlights will also sync to and from the Kindle apps on your phones, tablets, and computers.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
And that’s where we get into My Whole Thing With The Kindle Colorsoft. Ostensibly you’re getting it—and dealing with the downsides, which we’ll talk about in a minute—so you can look at things in color. But a 7-inch screen is much smaller than the size of a typical comic book or graphic novel, or of the 8.5×11-inch sheet of paper that a PDF is usually trying to imitate.
This means that, even when the colors look decent (enabling the Vivid color profile in the settings helps), text is small and hard to read, and visual details get lost. Just like on a phone or tablet, the Kindle will let you do some zooming and scrolling to magnify individual bits of a page, but it’s E-Ink, so it’s slower and less responsive than an LCD touchscreen, and it would be a frustrating way to read anything longer than a handful of pages.
And while Amazon has apparently made some additions that help improve the quality of the color display—an added display layer that improves contrast and color vividness, for example, is the addition that was blamed for the yellow band at the bottom of the screen—there are still limits inherent to color E-Ink that the Colorsoft can’t overcome.
Paperwhite on the left, Colorsoft on the right. For reading regular books, the Paperwhite is often the better experience (and it’s cheaper, too).
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
Color is still muted and not true-to-life, falling short of the “looks a lot like real paper” benchmark that monochrome E-Ink hits—Amazon’s product pages definitely oversell the vividness of the color you’ll see. Page turns are slower than on the equivalent Paperwhite, even though benchmarks suggest the two e-readers are using the same chip inside.
If you’re interested in the technical explanation, the short version (according to E Ink, the makers of E Ink) is that a color E-Ink Kaleido screen is basically just a black-and-white E-Ink screen with an extra color filter array layer added over top of the monochrome layer. That extra layer is mostly responsible for any differences you see between the Colorsoft’s screen and a monochrome E-Ink display.
Not quite a color Kindle Paperwhite
Paperwhite on the left, Colorsoft on the right. Zooming in all the way, you can see a bit of texture and graininess on the Colorsoft’s screen that’s even more apparent in person.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
The Colorsoft’s shortcomings might be less of an issue if the color screen were entirely additive, and the experience of reading black-and-white text on the Colorsoft were just as good as on the monochrome Paperwhite. But it isn’t, not quite.
The Colorsoft is the most similar to the Paperwhite in its physical design, which is so close that the two can use the same cases and other accessories. It has a 7-inch E-Ink screen with an auto-brightness sensor, a warmlight, a flush bezel, and a matte finish. And the back is made of a smooth soft-touch plastic that’s pleasant to hold. (One design tweak that I like: the Amazon logo on the back of the Colorsoft is a shiny metallic material that reflects color slightly differently as you shift it under light, a subtle nod to its color screen.)
But a frequently asked questions list on the Colorsoft’s product page enumerates where the device makes compromises to support displaying color:
- The Paperwhite offers “a slightly crisper black and white reading experience” with “the fastest page turns and highest contrast ratio of any 2024 Kindle device.”
- The Colorsoft doesn’t support Dark Mode, though there is a facsimile of Dark Mode available while you’re reading called “Page Color.”
- The Colorsoft offers “up to 8 weeks of battery life” whereas the Paperwhite offers “up to 12 weeks.”
Any Kindle’s battery life is good enough relative to a modern phone or tablet that you don’t really miss those extra weeks—charging once every two months instead of once every three months is no hardship. Page turns also felt fine to me. They were maybe a hair slower than on the Paperwhite, but the Colorsoft also benefits from the improved performance and consistency of the new chip Amazon is using in this generation of Kindles. The Colorsoft will still feel faster than any one- or two-generation-old monochrome Kindle.
But it isn’t hard to identify the screen’s shortcomings. Even without a Colorsoft and a Paperwhite side by side, you can see that the display looks more grainy and less paper-like, and black text isn’t as crisp or as high-contrast as on a monochrome Kindle. This becomes even more noticeable when reading in the device’s faux-Dark Mode.
Amazon’s default settings for the Colorsoft use bold text for books rather than regular to help compensate for this a little, though to my eyes the non-bolded text was also generally fine, at least at larger sizes.
The metallic Amazon logo reflects different colors in the light, a nice little design touch that nods to the color screen.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
To be clear, I don’t find any of these factors to be deal-breakers. The Colorsoft is a decent black-and-white e-reader. It’s just not a great one, especially not for nearly double the price of the Paperwhite. It retains the distraction-free Kindle reading experience but loses some of the visual appeal of the monochrome Kindles.
The larger, pen-equipped Kindle Scribe is already expensive for a Kindle, and I can see why Amazon didn’t want to make it cost even more by adding a color screen. But especially after using the ReMarkable Paper Pro, color just makes more sense on a larger display where big PDFs, digital magazines, and comics are easier to read.
Sure, it’s kind of nice that the Colorsoft can kind of do those things. But I suspect this reader will end up falling into a crack between two of its potential audiences—a larger and more colorful iPad is better for comics, and people who just want to read text will be better served by the much cheaper Paperwhite. There’s always next time.
The good
- It’s an E-Ink Kindle with a color screen
- The same no-distraction reading experience and book library as other Kindles
- Faster and more responsive than older Kindles
- Compatible with the same cases as the new Paperwhite
The bad
- Color E-Ink still lacks in the vibrancy and accuracy departments
- Expensive for a Kindle
- Early backlight problems seem to have been resolved, but it may be too early to say
The ugly
- Subtly grainy display that doesn’t look as high-contrast or as paper-y as the Paperwhite’s
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
