The contrast improvement is welcome for sure, but it remains to be seen what difference 15% white reflectivity makes.
Previous Kaleido products are fundamentally flawed. I'd hoped they would bin it for something better rather than make incremental improvements. Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.
Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.
Not sure if you are being facetious, but how would eink displays with the same color vibrancy and refresh rates of conventional displays help "disconnect from tech"?
https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-33-3-6017
See section 5 on Kindle display measurements by optical coherence tomography. The Kaleido display is similar but with a matrix color filter layer. Those images weren't published.
Is that because they're lighter-weight plastic? That would appear to be one of the primary differences between a Kindle (until recently) and an iPad...
What do you mean - the color part? That is for information density.
Do you mean the e-ink part? That is for natural-light readability w/o requiring backlight, and for power-efficiency w/o requiring a heavy battery/frequent charging.
In theory they should be amazing. Full color, looks like paper, basically an interactive magazine!
In practice the color isn't great, the screens are slow to refresh in an annoying way, and the resolution is a noticeably worse than an iPad. I also find that apps not explicitly made for e-ink are generally garbage when used on an e-ink device.
So far I have personally been incredibly disappointed with e-ink devices outside of e-readers. I want them to be good but the experience is just so much worse than an iPad.
I justified one to myself to read papers that have colored plots. Eink performance is still so marginal that the experience is too frustrating to rely on, and I would rather use a tablet.
Maybe if you wanted to read comics that only ever had mediocre artwork?
for anyone who already has a colored reader - is it better than ipad? i enjoy reading on my ipad and i can read for 2-3 hours on it daily without feeling any strain on my eyes.
I have a color eInk Android tablet and I greatly prefer my Kobo Clara BW for general readability. I ended up disabling color in the accessibility settings.
The contrast is terrible compared to b/w eInk. The front light is necessary under anything but bright sunlight. But the front light washes out the colors, so much so that it’s a readability problem. So I only take it out of black and white mode when I’m using it outdoors.
It sounds like this new version of color eInk might be better. But I think it really would have to be an enormous difference for me to prefer it over B&W eInk.
I have a Kobo Clara Color. I like the product but colors are mostly a gimmick. Useful for the occasional chart and for books cover and that’s pretty much it.
Don’t expect iPad quality color, they’re very washed out.
I think a dedicated e-reader is a great choice (I only read books, not comics or other graphics heavy documents) but for that grayscale would be more than enough and color is an extra.
I would recommend you to go to a store and have a look live at a color eink screen to get a feel for what they offer.
I agree it's probably an unnecessary expense for 99% of people, but I actually find it very useful reading articles, news and academic work. Also, I really like the washed out newspaper look the colours have even though this makes them ill equipped for graphic novels.
My kids have Clara's and they love them for graphic novels. They had b/w kobo's before but would never go back (unless they stopped reading graphic novels).
Personally no. I've been reading a lot on LCD screens (PDAs if you know what those were), way back before eInk existed.
First, eInk used to be glossy, and not backlit which sucked, since you needed a light source to illuminate it well enough, but not so much that it shone on the screen and caused weird reflections.
After they added backlight, it became much better, but I'm not sure how it's better than an LCD (I dont think it is).
The only thing that sucks both about the iPad and most ereaders is the lack of physical buttons to flip pages, which makes 1 handed operation clumsy at best.
I have a b/w page-sized Kobo, but I can tell you one nice thing vs the iPad is the weight. I don’t think the color (at lower resolution) is worth it for me.
Only you can answer that, “better” is a personal choice. A dedicated e-ink reader does less than an iPad (some see that as a bonus, others as a disadvantage). E-ink colours aren’t as vibrant and devices are slower, but the battery life, weight, cost, and reduced eye strain can more than make up for it.
If possible, I recommend grabbing one at a store nearby and playing with it a bit. You’ll soon understand if the weight, speed, and colours are enough for you.
Still nothing for people who don't care about the color gimmick? I mean my Aura One is still going strong, but I fear it'll never be replaced by something better (or even as good).
Once I saw that Kobo was going all in on the color e-readers I decided I'm going to sit this whole trend out and bought another Aura One. Between it and the one I currently own they should carry me for a long, long time.
The Aura One is essentially perfect. The only gripes I have are the USB port and non-removable battery. It is a bit slow with the stock OS but with KOreader it runs amazingly well.
I'm in the exact same situation, still rocking an Aura One with KOReader and can't find anything with that form factor in black/white that satisfies me.
There's something to be said with a device that has a single purpose and supports custom firmware: other than the micro-USB port and the slightly shorter battery charge I don't think I will be changing it soon.
I also have a kobo aura one and was just recently researching potential upgrades and was shocked even looking outside of strictly kobo that I couldn't find anything that was a clear upgrade or equivalent on various features against it. For a product almost ten years old it's so weird.
For pure reading of text it provides minimal benefit (color highlighting and cover art, mostly) while costing contrast ratio and dollars. Especially since some devices (e.g. Kobo Libra) are now offered only with a color display, I can see why someone would call it a gimmick. I personally view the reflectivity of eink as the entire point and thus have no interest in it.
That said, of course if you want to view color content on an EPD then it is quite necessary and not a gimmick at all.
Perhaps revisiting what "gimmick" means would help you. Plenty of people use their e-ink readers to look at magazines, comics, news. Plenty of people have a highlighting system. Arguing that color is a "gimmick" is silly considering there are practical applications of color, as we can see around us in the real world. Some of you are seriously living in the weirdest of bubbles.
Biology spent a ton of time adapting and evolving for the ability to see color but sure, it's a gimmick. I guess you should consider syntax highlighting a gimmick in code editors as well? Charts/graphs in textbooks use color as a gimmick, any book that include illustrations/images in color are gimmicks
That doesn't mean it's a gimmick. Again, I implore you to actually look up what "gimmick" means. Just because there's a tradeoff doesn't mean that it's a gimmick. In fact, the very issue that you're talking about is something that is improving from Kaleido 3 to Kaleido 4. So even people that use this argument have something to take note of in this release.
When we went from black & white photography to color photography we also introduced a lot of tradeoffs. Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?
Amazon just refreshed their colorsoft kindles with Kaleido 3 so this is an interesting development. I wonder if Amazon had a heads up, I would have buyer's remorse right now if I bought a new colorsoft kindle recently knowing that there's a better version of the screen just around the corner.
I feel like amazon tends to wait a couple of years before using whatever the latest e-ink screen is and claim to do a lot of customization and calibration as compared to their competitors.
They don't have a great trackrecord here with QA or any of that for all the waiting. The first colorsoft noticeably has an issue with yellow banding on the bottom edge. It's a well documented issue and if waiting was supposed to help with issues like that, it clearly did not.
True, although I do think people have generally thought the colorsoft was a bit better viewing experience than the Kobo color options. The QA seems to always be a bit off with amazon and I would always recommend waiting a bit before buying from them.
This is their colour filtered black and white product. Quite muted colours in the past and it only really works well with a front light, which kind of ruins the point IMO.
I'm much more interested in their Spectra and Gallery displays which use color pigments. You can even buy e-ink gallery style displays for a totally unreasonable price!
I wonder how white balance is handled across these products.
I recently bought the InkJoy frame which is similar to what's sold at your link and the white balance is _awful_ and grey.
I naively expect these to reflect light like paper photos and be nearly identical in that regard when mounted beside each other on a wall, but I've been disappointed with the results so far.
Colour depth is not _as_ big a deal to me as the image simply looking natural among printed photos.
You can buy a 13" color e-ink display for ~$250, or a 7" e-ink display for ~$60. These can be placed in a frame for a couple bucks more [2].
Two things that I did not anticipate:
1: Refresh time is a lot longer for color displays (~20s) as compared to black and white displays (~0.5s).
2: Stock images tend to use cartoons. There is a reason for that. These displays require dithering which seems to work a lot better with a limited color palette, flat areas, and bold edges.
I would also try going the other way, and build transreflective color LCDs - those don't have latency or refresh issues, like these weird hybrids.
They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.
It’s requiring all my willpower not to take out a second mortgage and build a gallery wall filled with these. That image transition is gross but I guess it takes a lot more steps to move all those pigment layers around.
I was unable to load the page or cache. I have the Boox Tab X C. Does anyone know how the device being discussed compares?
Mirror (eink.com isn't working for me): https://web.archive.org/web/20261015180401/https://www.eink....
Your mirror doesn't seem to work either
[delayed]
The contrast improvement is welcome for sure, but it remains to be seen what difference 15% white reflectivity makes.
Previous Kaleido products are fundamentally flawed. I'd hoped they would bin it for something better rather than make incremental improvements. Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.
50% contrast improvement is significant, but it’s from a base of only around 1:10, so will still be fairly low in absolute terms.
Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.
Not sure if you are being facetious, but how would eink displays with the same color vibrancy and refresh rates of conventional displays help "disconnect from tech"?
If you don't want colour then any discussion about the shortcomings of this tech are moot, as you will use a display with much higher contrast.
https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-33-3-6017 See section 5 on Kindle display measurements by optical coherence tomography. The Kaleido display is similar but with a matrix color filter layer. Those images weren't published.
I've always wanted a color E-Ink tablet, but I could never figure out exactly why. Doctor, what's wrong with me?
I find e-ink screens infinitely more pleasant to look at than *LED
I know that’s the point, but I also know some people care more than others. I happen to be one of those who cares a lot.
E-ink tablets are also much more pleasant to hold for prolonged reading sessions!
Is that because they're lighter-weight plastic? That would appear to be one of the primary differences between a Kindle (until recently) and an iPad...
What do you mean - the color part? That is for information density.
Do you mean the e-ink part? That is for natural-light readability w/o requiring backlight, and for power-efficiency w/o requiring a heavy battery/frequent charging.
Me too. But it’s better than wanting a megayacht or some other more ridiculous affliction, isn’t it?
In theory they should be amazing. Full color, looks like paper, basically an interactive magazine!
In practice the color isn't great, the screens are slow to refresh in an annoying way, and the resolution is a noticeably worse than an iPad. I also find that apps not explicitly made for e-ink are generally garbage when used on an e-ink device.
So far I have personally been incredibly disappointed with e-ink devices outside of e-readers. I want them to be good but the experience is just so much worse than an iPad.
I justified one to myself to read papers that have colored plots. Eink performance is still so marginal that the experience is too frustrating to rely on, and I would rather use a tablet.
Maybe if you wanted to read comics that only ever had mediocre artwork?
I have one but wish I'd bought a monochrome one. I barely use the colors, but the whites aren't as white as on a monochrome one.
Hopefully this means a new Kobo Libra before too long.
I wish there was a DIY company targeting hobbiests that sold large poster-size eInk panels with tinkering in mind, like TRMNL or InkPlate.
TRMNL made one of these, 31.5” spectra 6. will start selling in a few weeks. fully hackable
I would love this as well. I dream of a clean dashboard for things like a shared calendar in my home.
This is a genuine question not snark — are these the people with the patents holding up the entire industry?
Too bad this didn't make it into the new Kindle Colorsoft. Oh well
for anyone who already has a colored reader - is it better than ipad? i enjoy reading on my ipad and i can read for 2-3 hours on it daily without feeling any strain on my eyes.
I have a color eInk Android tablet and I greatly prefer my Kobo Clara BW for general readability. I ended up disabling color in the accessibility settings.
The contrast is terrible compared to b/w eInk. The front light is necessary under anything but bright sunlight. But the front light washes out the colors, so much so that it’s a readability problem. So I only take it out of black and white mode when I’m using it outdoors.
It sounds like this new version of color eInk might be better. But I think it really would have to be an enormous difference for me to prefer it over B&W eInk.
I have a Kobo Clara Color. I like the product but colors are mostly a gimmick. Useful for the occasional chart and for books cover and that’s pretty much it.
Don’t expect iPad quality color, they’re very washed out.
I think a dedicated e-reader is a great choice (I only read books, not comics or other graphics heavy documents) but for that grayscale would be more than enough and color is an extra.
I would recommend you to go to a store and have a look live at a color eink screen to get a feel for what they offer.
I agree it's probably an unnecessary expense for 99% of people, but I actually find it very useful reading articles, news and academic work. Also, I really like the washed out newspaper look the colours have even though this makes them ill equipped for graphic novels.
My kids have Clara's and they love them for graphic novels. They had b/w kobo's before but would never go back (unless they stopped reading graphic novels).
Personally no. I've been reading a lot on LCD screens (PDAs if you know what those were), way back before eInk existed.
First, eInk used to be glossy, and not backlit which sucked, since you needed a light source to illuminate it well enough, but not so much that it shone on the screen and caused weird reflections.
After they added backlight, it became much better, but I'm not sure how it's better than an LCD (I dont think it is).
The only thing that sucks both about the iPad and most ereaders is the lack of physical buttons to flip pages, which makes 1 handed operation clumsy at best.
Kindle's color tablets look a bit better than Kobo's, by my estimation. But neither is anywhere near iPad-level color saturation or contrast.
I think Amazon does some special stuff with the backplane or something. Seems like it's not 100% marketing gimmicks if it actually looks better.
I have a b/w page-sized Kobo, but I can tell you one nice thing vs the iPad is the weight. I don’t think the color (at lower resolution) is worth it for me.
Colors are as vibrant as late 90s cheap laptops.
Why is iPad even mentioned here? This is better than iPad in the same way as a printed book is better than an oled TV.
They're two different things for different uses, one blasts light and colour in your eyes, other has a paperly look.
> is it better than ipad?
Only you can answer that, “better” is a personal choice. A dedicated e-ink reader does less than an iPad (some see that as a bonus, others as a disadvantage). E-ink colours aren’t as vibrant and devices are slower, but the battery life, weight, cost, and reduced eye strain can more than make up for it.
If possible, I recommend grabbing one at a store nearby and playing with it a bit. You’ll soon understand if the weight, speed, and colours are enough for you.
Still nothing for people who don't care about the color gimmick? I mean my Aura One is still going strong, but I fear it'll never be replaced by something better (or even as good).
Once I saw that Kobo was going all in on the color e-readers I decided I'm going to sit this whole trend out and bought another Aura One. Between it and the one I currently own they should carry me for a long, long time.
The Aura One is essentially perfect. The only gripes I have are the USB port and non-removable battery. It is a bit slow with the stock OS but with KOreader it runs amazingly well.
I'm in the exact same situation, still rocking an Aura One with KOReader and can't find anything with that form factor in black/white that satisfies me.
There's something to be said with a device that has a single purpose and supports custom firmware: other than the micro-USB port and the slightly shorter battery charge I don't think I will be changing it soon.
I also have a kobo aura one and was just recently researching potential upgrades and was shocked even looking outside of strictly kobo that I couldn't find anything that was a clear upgrade or equivalent on various features against it. For a product almost ten years old it's so weird.
Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.
For pure reading of text it provides minimal benefit (color highlighting and cover art, mostly) while costing contrast ratio and dollars. Especially since some devices (e.g. Kobo Libra) are now offered only with a color display, I can see why someone would call it a gimmick. I personally view the reflectivity of eink as the entire point and thus have no interest in it.
That said, of course if you want to view color content on an EPD then it is quite necessary and not a gimmick at all.
Color ink remains a niche in books.
Perhaps revisiting what "gimmick" means would help you. Plenty of people use their e-ink readers to look at magazines, comics, news. Plenty of people have a highlighting system. Arguing that color is a "gimmick" is silly considering there are practical applications of color, as we can see around us in the real world. Some of you are seriously living in the weirdest of bubbles.
Biology spent a ton of time adapting and evolving for the ability to see color but sure, it's a gimmick. I guess you should consider syntax highlighting a gimmick in code editors as well? Charts/graphs in textbooks use color as a gimmick, any book that include illustrations/images in color are gimmicks
It comes with a massive loss of contrast so it's a bit of a gimmick, yeah.
That doesn't mean it's a gimmick. Again, I implore you to actually look up what "gimmick" means. Just because there's a tradeoff doesn't mean that it's a gimmick. In fact, the very issue that you're talking about is something that is improving from Kaleido 3 to Kaleido 4. So even people that use this argument have something to take note of in this release.
When we went from black & white photography to color photography we also introduced a lot of tradeoffs. Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?
Amazon just refreshed their colorsoft kindles with Kaleido 3 so this is an interesting development. I wonder if Amazon had a heads up, I would have buyer's remorse right now if I bought a new colorsoft kindle recently knowing that there's a better version of the screen just around the corner.
I feel like amazon tends to wait a couple of years before using whatever the latest e-ink screen is and claim to do a lot of customization and calibration as compared to their competitors.
They don't have a great trackrecord here with QA or any of that for all the waiting. The first colorsoft noticeably has an issue with yellow banding on the bottom edge. It's a well documented issue and if waiting was supposed to help with issues like that, it clearly did not.
True, although I do think people have generally thought the colorsoft was a bit better viewing experience than the Kobo color options. The QA seems to always be a bit off with amazon and I would always recommend waiting a bit before buying from them.
This is their colour filtered black and white product. Quite muted colours in the past and it only really works well with a front light, which kind of ruins the point IMO.
I'm much more interested in their Spectra and Gallery displays which use color pigments. You can even buy e-ink gallery style displays for a totally unreasonable price!
https://inkposter.com/products/inkposter-tela-28-5?variant=4...
Actually to be fair that is not a totally crazy price.
I wonder how white balance is handled across these products.
I recently bought the InkJoy frame which is similar to what's sold at your link and the white balance is _awful_ and grey.
I naively expect these to reflect light like paper photos and be nearly identical in that regard when mounted beside each other on a wall, but I've been disappointed with the results so far.
Colour depth is not _as_ big a deal to me as the image simply looking natural among printed photos.
You can buy a 13" color e-ink display for ~$250, or a 7" e-ink display for ~$60. These can be placed in a frame for a couple bucks more [2].
Two things that I did not anticipate:
1: Refresh time is a lot longer for color displays (~20s) as compared to black and white displays (~0.5s).
2: Stock images tend to use cartoons. There is a reason for that. These displays require dithering which seems to work a lot better with a limited color palette, flat areas, and bold edges.
[1] https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-e.htm
[2] https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-photopainter.htm
I would also try going the other way, and build transreflective color LCDs - those don't have latency or refresh issues, like these weird hybrids.
They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.
It’s requiring all my willpower not to take out a second mortgage and build a gallery wall filled with these. That image transition is gross but I guess it takes a lot more steps to move all those pigment layers around.