Amazon Kindle Colorsoft review: good color is a good start

The $279.99 Kindle Colorsoft features the same color E Ink technology used in e-readers like the Kobo Libra Colour but customized with a new display stack, brighter LEDs, and special coatings. Colors appear more saturated and a little more vibrant on the Colorsoft’s seven-inch screen than they do on the Libra Colour, while screen refreshes are faster and contrast is notably better, making black lines and borders in comics look darker than they do on other color e-readers. The upgrades also make browsing Amazon’s store more engaging, with book covers that better grab your attention.

Despite an issue with screen discoloration affecting some devices, the Kindle Colorsoft has the best color screen of any e-reader I’ve tested. But its price has me wishing for more upgrades, like a larger screen and stylus support. The color screen doesn’t add enough to the Kindle experience by itself to justify the extra cost.

When you’re reading in black and white, page turns still feel instantaneous, like they do on my 11th-gen Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition. They’re a little slower when displaying larger color images like comics, as the Colorsoft performs a full-screen refresh every time you turn the page to maximize image quality. (Amazon says a full refresh only happens with “images above a certain size,” but it happens even on pages with smaller color images.) The Colorsoft’s refresh feels a bit faster than other color e-readers, though, and isn’t really a distraction. It’s also much faster than the Remarkable Paper Pro, which uses a different color E Ink display technology.

The Colorsoft’s speed improvements are most apparent when it comes to zooming and panning a page, such as enlarging a panel or text in a comic. The e-reader temporarily switches to a lower-quality image while you’re moving around the page, before re-rendering everything at high quality when you’re done. It’s a trick all e-readers use, and the Colorsoft does it more responsively than other color options. It’s still a small step behind the performance of black-and-white e-readers and nowhere near as fast and fluid as a tablet with an LCD or OLED screen, but the Colorsoft never feels like it’s struggling to keep up.

Highlighting passages also benefits from the new color capabilities. The Colorsoft lets you choose between four different highlight colors — pink, yellow, blue, and orange — and filter them by color. But Amazon should have taken this feature a step further. There’s no way to label the highlighter colors, so it’s entirely up to you to remember that you use blue to save inspirational quotes, for example. The highlight colors are carried over to the Kindle mobile app, and while highlighted passages are organized by color when exported as a spreadsheet or PDF, you can’t limit the export to just a single color.

On an e-reader as expensive as the Colorsoft, I would have also liked the option to highlight with a stylus like you can on the Kindle Scribe, instead of having to tap on the screen, wait for on-screen controls to pop up, and then drag the highlight box over the text. The lack of stylus support makes the Colorsoft feel a step behind the more affordable Kobo Libra Colour.

One thing I didn’t expect to appreciate about the Colorsoft’s screen is the lack of customization. Competitors like Boox give you extensive control over refresh modes, brightness, vividness, and contrast. I find it overwhelming and much prefer Amazon already optimizing the Colorsoft’s screen for me.

The only option available on the Colorsoft is switching between standard and vivid color modes — the latter of which boosts the intensity of colors in less-saturated imagery. The difference between the two is subtle enough that I tend to leave vivid mode on all the time, but I did notice the effect while reading the first volume of Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man: Married with Children. The red in Spider-Man’s suit had more visual impact in vivid mode, while the Green Goblin’s armor looked more gray than green in standard. I just wish Amazon hadn’t buried the options in a menu that blocks a large portion of the display, making it hard to do a quick before-and-after visual comparison.

Although Amazon’s upgrades genuinely improve the Colorsoft’s screen, they don’t solve all the problems with E Ink’s Kaleido technology. It’s still limited to 4,096 colors, which leaves color content looking desaturated and flat compared to devices with LCD and OLED screens, which can display millions of colors. If the iPad is like flipping through the glossy, vibrant photos in a print copy of National Geographic, the Colorsoft is more like the washed-out color photos on the front page of a newspaper.

Text and black-and-white imagery are displayed at 300ppi on the Colorsoft, but that resolution is halved in color mode. I had no issue reading Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, but the fine print in speech bubbles in Spider-Man and Marvel’s Fortnite x Marvel: Zero War crossover was difficult to read without constantly zooming in and panning around. Color E Ink screens in general also have slightly less contrast than black-and-white displays as a result of the extra RGB filter layer that Kaleido relies on to display color. With screen lighting turned off, the Colorsoft’s display looks a bit darker than a black-and-white e-reader like the Kobo Clara BW or the Paperwhite. The difference is subtle, though, and easy to compensate for by keeping the Colorsoft’s light on, even outdoors.

Shortly after the Kindle Colorsoft started shipping, some users reported seeing a yellow discolored strip across the bottom of the e-reader’s display. My review unit also exhibits the issue, but to a lesser degree than others are seeing, based on images shared on Reddit. The discoloration on the Colorsoft I tested is so subtle that I’m not sure I would have noticed it had others not mentioned it. My iPhone’s camera picks it up better than my eyes do.

It’s still not clear what is causing the problem — some speculate it’s an issue with an adhesive used to manufacture the screen — but Amazon has acknowledged it and says it’s working to fix the issue and to ensure that new devices won’t have the discoloration. The company is also offering refunds or replacements to those who have an affected Colorsoft, but Amazon’s product page shows an expected delay of three to five weeks. I recommend waiting until Amazon confirms it has fixed the issue before you buy one yourself.

Amazon claims the Kindle Colorsoft can be used for around eight weeks on a charge (four fewer than it claims for the 12th-gen Paperwhite), but that’s when reading for just 30 minutes a day with the screen brightness set to just above half and wireless features disabled. In reality, you’re going to be charging it more frequently than that. I find the colors on an e-reader’s display to be more pronounced with a brighter screen, so in my testing, I had the Colorsoft’s screen lighting set to 75 percent. After an hour of reading a comic requiring full-screen refreshes with every page turn, the battery lost 5 percent of its charge. I estimate I’d get about three weeks out of the Colorsoft’s battery between charges — longer with a mix of color and black-and-white content.

As with the latest Paperwhite Signature Edition, the Colorsoft includes wireless charging in addition to its USB-C port. But without magnets, properly aligning a wireless charging puck is frustrating and not worth the effort. You’ll only be charging it about once a month, so plugging it in for a few hours isn’t a big inconvenience.

There are a lot of color e-readers now, but in terms of availability, user experience, and screen size, the Colorsoft’s primary competition is the Kobo Libra Colour.

Without lighting adjustments, the Colorsoft’s screen looks cooler and more neutral than the Libra Colour’s, which skews slightly warm. But the difference is negligible once you turn up the Colorsoft’s warmth slider and the Libra Colour’s natural light slider. The Colorsoft’s improved contrast also gives its screen a darker overall tone, with colors that look more natural and vivid. On the Libra Colour, imagery is warmer and brighter, which reveals more details in darker areas of an image. I prefer the Colorsoft’s vibrancy and focus on color accuracy, but I wouldn’t describe the Libra Colour’s approach as inferior. It’s a matter of preference.

The Kindle Colorsoft also feels slightly faster than the Libra Colour when turning pages, but the difference is mostly negligible unless you’re zooming and panning images. The Kindle feels more responsive to finger gestures and just a bit snappier when switching between the low- and high-quality versions of the images.

While sideloaded content looks as good on the Colorsoft as content purchased from Amazon, I had to rely on Amazon’s online Send to Kindle service to preserve the color content of PDFs. Copying them to the e-reader from a MacBook Pro over USB-C (through the Android File Transfer app or Amazon’s recently updated app) resulted in the PDFs showing up on the Colorsoft in black and white, and others have experienced the same. I didn’t have that issue when sideloading to the Kobo Libra Colour, so if you don’t source your ebooks from Amazon, you may have to learn to live with a few extra steps to get them on the e-reader properly.

Overall, I think the Colorsoft’s screen is better than Kobo’s, but there are some other aspects of the Libra Colour’s design that I prefer. Amazon’s focus after discontinuing the Kindle Oasis may be “touch-forward,” but mine isn’t. I’m still a big fan of physical page turn buttons, and I prefer the asymmetrical design of the Libra Colour, with its larger grip that makes it much easier to hold in one hand. On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally triggered a page turn on the Kindle Colorsoft when adjusting my grip. I also find the Libra Colour’s sleep / power button, which is located on the back of the e-reader, harder to hit by mistake. The Colorsoft’s button is located on its bottom edge next to the USB-C port, and I’ve unintentionally woken it up a few times while trying to plug in a charging cable without looking.

And while the back of the Colorsoft has a smooth, slightly rubbery finish, I feel like I have a better grip on the Libra Colour, thanks to the etched texture on its rear panel.

If you want a compact color e-reader with access to a robust ebook store that will make comic books and manga look good without requiring a deep dive into screen settings, the Kindle Colorsoft has the best color E Ink screen you can get. It’s also the ideal option if you’re firmly entrenched in Amazon’s ecosystem.

If you’re not as concerned with color accuracy or don’t want to be stuck in Amazon’s world, the Kobo Libra Colour is a cheaper alternative at $219.99 that still looks good and performs very well. It skips features like wireless charging but gives you the option of using a stylus ($69.99) for easier highlights and basic note-taking, and it has page turn buttons. Amazon’s bookstore is more comprehensive than Kobo’s, but I found it much easier to sideload content from other sources onto the Libra Colour, including ePUB files and color PDFs, which showed up with actual color when copied over using USB-C.

As for whether this is the right Kindle to buy: the Colorsoft is basically the excellent Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition with a color screen, but for $80 more than the Signature Edition and $120 more than the standard Paperwhite. That’s a lot to spend on a color screen. Adding features like stylus support, basic note-taking capabilities, or even a slightly larger screen to better accommodate content like comic books — you know, like a Kindle Scribe — would have made the Colorsoft easier to justify.

While I’m glad to see that Amazon attempted to improve the current generation of color E Ink technology, it’s still a bit disappointing, with washed-out colors and lower resolutions. If you’re already a happy Kindle user, consider the 12th-gen Paperwhite instead. A color screen just isn’t a must-have upgrade.

Photography by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge