Kindle Colorsoft Will Make Your Books Worse
Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is the company’s most expensive e-reader (except for the Kindle Scribe, which is more of an e-note reader than an e-reader), but that doesn’t automatically make it the best Kindle money can buy. Assuming you have the money, and you want the best reading experience Amazon offers, if you only read novels or even black-and-white comics like manga, you might be better off saving up and buying a Kindle Paperwhite . Paying more won’t improve your reading experience, and it might even make it worse.
What is a color e-book?
The Kindle Colorsoft is essentially a Kindle Paperwhite, but with one key difference. It has the same backlight options, weighs about the same, looks exactly like the Paperwhite, and has the same size screen. The key factor is the presence of a color filter in the Colorsoft display, which allows up to 4,096 colors of content to be displayed through it.
It can still display black and white content, but when you’re reading something like a comic book on it , it cuts the resolution in half from 300 ppi to 150 ppi, and then cleverly arranges the pixels so that they shine through just the right places to create the colors you need.
But it’s not just that: Amazon also has a number of proprietary materials that allow for better color accuracy and fewer artifacts than competing devices , but that’s the point. It’s pretty clever, although the basic concept isn’t unique to Kindle Colorsoft. It works not just with comics, but with things like book covers and color highlights.
Sounds tempting. Even if you don’t use it all the time, it’s a nice bonus, right? Color can be used when needed, albeit at the expense of resolution, but black and white images can be displayed at the same resolution as the Kindle Paperwhite. Unfortunately, the reality is not so clear-cut.
Rainbow effect
While the Kindle’s software can recognize when content is black and white and when it’s color, the hardware can’t. Even in something like a novel, the physical color filter is still present. And while the individual dots of color are too small to distinguish, your eyes can still perceive the color layer as a whole.
Enter the rainbow effect. At best, it will create a subtle shimmer on your screen, giving it a grainy texture that can reduce contrast. At worst, it will show off the full spectrum of colors on content that should be monochrome.
Take this page from Dune , which shows a fairly subtle rainbow effect.
And this page is from Berserk , which shows a more aggressive rainbow design.
It’s inevitable. Whatever you read on your device will show up to some degree. The question is how you react to it.
Can you fix the rainbow effect?
Since the rainbow effect is a hardware issue, there’s no way to completely eliminate it. Competitors have some small solutions, the most notable being Kobo’s “Reduce Rainbow Effect” toggle, which blurs the image slightly to even it out so the color filter isn’t as noticeable. Unfortunately, Amazon hasn’t included such a solution on its device.
That said, the Kindle Colorsoft comes with two color modes: Standard and Vivid. These won’t affect black and white content, but it’s worth noting that the way the color filter works in Colorsoft can sometimes introduce artifacts into color content, too. If you notice this, changing the color mode may help. The Kindle is less prone to artifacts than I’ve seen on other devices, but its Vivid mode doesn’t use the full 4,096-color range, instead compressing it to increase saturation. Most Colorsoft users I’ve spoken to prefer switching to Vivid and leaving it on all the time, but the lower color range can lead to pixelation, so if you notice this, it’s worth trying Standard mode again. It’s not exactly the same as the rainbow effect, of course, but it’s a similar enough issue that it points out that even color device users aren’t immune to problems on this device.
Is the rainbow effect worth dealing with?
How much the rainbow effect bothers you depends on what you’re reading and how flawless you want the pages to be. My husband, who reads all his black-and-white books on a color e-reader, isn’t too bothered. He even likes the shimmer, saying it’s similar to the grain of real paper.
But I personally hate it. It’s bright and distracting, and if you spend most of your time reading regular books on your Kindle, buying Colorsoft means you’re paying extra just to deal with it. I suppose it might be worth it if you want to see book covers in color as you scroll through your library, or if you highlight text a lot. It looks nice, but only for the few seconds that the covers or highlighted text are on the screen. But for most of your reading time, you won’t be using the color, and you’ll see the rainbow effect.
It only gets worse if you’re reading black and white illustrations, like manga. You can just make out the words to follow a book, but in manga, the quality of the art drops off significantly. Lines can look blurry, and facial expressions can take on a completely different hue under all that shimmer. And worst of all, you can get those unintentional color blobs like in Berserk . Not worth it, in my opinion.
Kindle Colorsoft is designed for color readers only.
It may seem obvious, but Kindle Colorsoft is only for people who regularly read color content, like comics—and even then, I don’t recommend it .
It’s not like the ’90s, when the Game Boy Color could run some games in color, but also in black and white like the original Game Boy. The Colorsoft Kindle isn’t just a regular Kindle with an optional color display that wealthy readers can count on as an added bonus, but something to ignore. In fact, using it is a completely different experience.