Not black and white: Colour Kindle is pretty but imperfect

Amazon’s Kindle is decisively the most popular e-reader brand, allowing the e-commerce giant to take its time bringing a device with a colour screen to market.

And yet, though the Kindle Colorsoft is great for comics and adds an appreciated pop to book covers, it feels like a first draft of what the product should ultimately become.

If you’ve seen a recent Kindle Paperwhite, you’ll know more or less what to expect from the Colorsoft, as it looks and feels practically identical. That means there’s a seven-inch touchscreen that sits flush with the device’s black plastic bezels, no page-turn buttons, an adjustable backlight that can also add an orange tinge for reading at night, and IPX8 waterproofing so you can read safely in the bath.

But you’ll notice the key difference between the two devices immediately when you turn the device on and log into your account, as all your books now have full-colour covers. The hues add a lot of appeal to the tomes in your library or the store, and even apply to the covers shown when the device is in standby. But you shouldn’t expect the solid vibrancy of an LCD tablet.

The Colorsoft is great for comics.

As with other colour e-readers, there’s a texture to the screen here that looks a bit like old newsprint, and colours appear light and pastel, as though they’re dots or lines of ink on a white page. There’s an option in the Kindle’s settings to make colours “vivid”, and I think this leaves illustrations and comics looking much better. But it does make the texture more obvious in chunks of flat colour and messes with the tone of photos.

When you have a book open, the amount of benefit you get from the Colorsoft will obviously depend on how much colour is present. Comics are wonderful on the device, and if they were originally printed in a small format they fit the screen beautifully. If they were originally larger (and if they’ve come from the Kindle store), they’re best read in Guided View, where you get a full look at each page for context and then move through each panel blown up as big as possible.

Multi-colour highlights could be a boon for note-takers and students.

There are, of course, other publications with colour; picture books, novels originally printed in multiple pigments, and reference texts with images included. Being able to see all of these more or less as intended opens your Kindle up to a lot more content from the store (and makes the $13-a-month Kindle Unlimited library more appealing). It also means you can send over your own documents and PDFs without making them greyscale, and you can make highlights in multiple colours.

Ideally, all this would be additive to the Kindle Paperwhite experience, and it would just be a matter of whether you wanted to pay $80 extra for colour. But unfortunately, the Colorsoft is inferior when it comes to reading monochrome content.

Black-and-white Kindles feature sharp, dark text against a light background, even when the light is completely off. The Colorsoft offers less contrast, with a much darker page. With the light on, a standard Kindle presents a clean white page, while the Colorsoft has a distracting texture with a blue-green tinge. Graphic elements are obviously rendered in colour, but they’re not as smooth and creamy as they are on a black-and-white model.

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To be clear, all content is absolutely readable on the Colorsoft, and it also carries most of the benefits of a regular reader, including a low-glare screen and weeks of battery life. But its comparative weakness here puts it in a strange place. It’s a step down from the less expensive Paperwhite when used for purely monochrome books, while for full-colour content like comics, you’d surely get a more true-to-life experience from the Kindle app on a phone or tablet you already own.

For most people, especially those who spend the majority of their e-reader time looking at regular books, I’d suggest this means you should wait and see if future versions of the device are more convincing. But for people who find themselves looking at a lot of black-and-white images that should be in colour, or who wish they could take their comics on the go with the same small device they use for novels, the Colorsoft is an option worth considering.

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