The Amazon Kindle Colorsoft is a new e-reader with the sole purpose of reading e-books. This is Amazon’s first colour E INK product, and they now have to play catch up to established players in the game, such as Rakuten Kobo, Pocketbook, Onyx Boox and Remarkable. There are some key benefits of this device. It is 25% faster than previous Kindle e-readers; you can also view cover art in the Amazon bookstore, making discovering new e-books and audiobooks easier. It also opens up alternative digital content: webtoons, manga, magazines and comics.
The Kindle Colorsoft is $279, $120 more than the starting price of the new Kindle Paperwhite and $80 more than the Paperwhite Signature Edition. It is costly. However, will customers look beyond the price for a fully colour e-reader?
The Kindle Colorsoft features a 7-inch E Ink Kaleido 3 colour e-paper display with a black and white resolution of 1264×1680 and 300 PPI and a colour resolution 150. A Kaleido 3 screen is typically able to display over 4,096 different colours. Amazon says this new device has custom-formulated coatings between the display layers to enhance the colour, a light guide with micro-deflectors to minimize stray light, and an ultra-thin coating in the display stack to improve optical performance. They built the display on an oxide backplane for sharper contrast and better image quality.
The Kindle Colorsoft is entirely based on a touchscreen, with no physical buttons. Amazon stated that, in the foreseeable future, they will not have buttons on any Kindle. It has an auto-adjusting front-lit display to automatically change the brightness of the warm and cool lighting based on your environment. The peak brightness is 94 units, with 12 White and 13 Amber LEDs.
This Kindle Colorsoft employs a dual-core 2GHZ Mediatek processor with 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage to house your digital content. Bluetooth 5.1 will allow you to pair wireless headphones or an external speaker to listen to Audible audiobooks purchased from Amazon, but Audible only works in select countries. A USB C port will transfer and charge digital content to your device. It also supports quick charging with an optional dock. It is powered by a 2310 mAh battery, which should be good for about eight weeks of light reading.
The Kindle Colorsoft is rated IPX8 and can withstand immersion in up to 2 meters of fresh water for up to 60 minutes and 0.25 meters for 3 minutes in seawater). In addition, we’ve tested your Kindle to withstand exposure to water in many popular places to read. However, your Kindle is not intended for underwater use and may experience temporary effects from exposure to water. Do not intentionally immerse your Kindle in water or expose it to seawater, salt water, chlorinated water, or other liquids (such as beverages). If your Kindle gets accidentally dropped in a bathtub, hot tub, or pool, splashed by the ocean at the beach, or otherwise exposed to water, quickly retrieve it and run it under fresh water for a few minutes.
Not only can you read books and other content in full colour, but if you would like to highlight particular words and sentences, the highlights will be in colour; at launch, there should be six colours. The Kindle is made from 28% recycled materials. The battery is made from 100% recycled cobalt, and the packaging is made from 100% recycled cardboard.
Wrap Up
I have noticed that the bezels on the side of the e-reader are slimmer than those of the previous generation of Kindle. I did not see a substantial difference in page-turn speed vs the 12th-generation Kindle Paperwhite or even the 11th-generation with a new firmware update. The Colorsoft is “slightly” faster, but it’s by milliseconds.
The real power of this e-reader is reading in colour with no distractions. You won’t receive social media updates or anything else to distract you from reading. Speaking of reading, black-and-white content seems a bit muted compared to the 12th Generation Paperwhite, Kindle Scribe, or base model Kindle. All of these other products provide a better reading experience. However, the Colorsoft makes sense when reading primarily image-heavy content, such as comics, magazines, replica newspapers, or browsing the Internet with the browser.
One of the controversies reading the new Colorsoft is the yellow band at the bottom of the display. There is some conjecture that this is a hardware-based issue with faulty screens or something that can be fixed in a firmware update. There are massive worldwide shipping delays, too, while Amazon is scrambling.
An Amazon spokesman told Good e-Reader, “A small number of customers have reported a yellow band along the bottom of the display. We take the quality of our products seriously. Customers who notice this can contact our customer service team for a replacement or refund, and we’re making the appropriate adjustments to ensure that new devices will not experience this issue moving forward.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
