Earlier this year, I posted about a rumor that was going around about how a reliable market analyst in China predicted that Amazon would release color Kindles in 2025, and now that the Remarkable Paper Pro has been released with an E Ink Gallery 3 screen, that rumor has gained a lot of validity.
The original article was posted on March 1st, 2024, and it contained some other predictions about E Ink in 2024 as well, which have turned out to be true. Given that, there’s a pretty good chance the prediction about color Kindles is going to be accurate as well.
Here’s a quote from the article (translated from Chinese to English):
“Ming-Chi Kuo pointed out that Amazon is expected to introduce E Ink ACeP (Advanced Color ePaper) full-color electronic paper display technology in 2025 and launch Kindle color readers of approximately 6 inches and 10 inches.”
The article also said that new color models would be released by Kobo and Remarkable in 2024, and both of those things have happened. It was even specified that Remarkable would use E Ink’s ACeP screen, which is another name for the Gallery 3 screen that Remarkable is using, and the prediction stated the screen would be larger, upwards of 12″ (turns out, it’s 11.8″).
Ming-Chi Kuo also estimated the unit price of ACeP screens would be about 40% to 60% higher than black and white screens. Another accurate prediction. The new Remarkable Paper Pro is 45% more expensive than the Remarkable 2.
The only thing that doesn’t add up about all this is there are signs that Amazon is getting ready to release new Kindles soon, as in later this year. I have a strong feeling that a new Kindle Paperwhite is about to get announced, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon released a new Kindle Scribe too (especially now that the 64B version is sold out once again and is unavailable both at Amazon and Best Buy).
I wonder if maybe Amazon is trying to push the release date into late 2024 in order to capitalize on the busy holiday shopping season. Or maybe they’ll just release a new Paperwhite with a regular black and white screen now, and then release new color models in 2025. Given the fact color models will be more expensive, it makes sense to keep cheaper black and white models around too, especially since most regular ebooks don’t benefit from color very much anyway.
Either way, Amazon is likely going to release color Kindles in the near future. All the other ereader companies offer color models now, but they’re using E Ink’s Kaleido screens, which use a regular monochrome E Ink screen with a color filter layer over the top. It looks like Amazon has been holding out for E Ink’s Gallery (ACeP) screens with actual colored ink for better color quality.
I’m trying to make sense of it all, though.
My reasoning was that Amazon is not known for innovating, and this turns out to be true, as according to Voya from My Deep Guide it is Remarkable that has done all the work in making its own stack and solving issues with Gallery 3.
So if Amazon wants to produce a colour Kindle, can they simply use the technology that was custom made by Remarkable?
Or is this technology developed with multiple manufacturers?
Or has e ink also made its own improvements to Gallery 3?
It seems the speed issues have improved a lot, but they now talk about 20.000 colours, so I guess that in order to speed things up, a compromise had to be made in the number of colours department (they always talked about 50.000 before).
It also seems that white is now really white and no longer peach, as I saw on the videos of the Galy device for instance.
It seems that green is still not the colour that is best rendered on this device, though.
Anyway, if colours aren’t perfect, but you don’t get a lot of disadvantages from it, it will still be an improvement from a purely black and white screen.
This is different from Kaleido 3 where colours always had some negative side effects, such as a less crispy look.
The thing is Remarkable’s software has never been that good and it evolves at a snail’s pace, so I find it hard to believe that Remarkable’s software team are suddenly some kind of E Ink wizards. If they can pull it off, others can too, and I still think there must be some key disadvantages to these new screens that hasn’t been revealed yet.
Probably right on disadvantages. May work well as note taker; less well as an e reader, due to flashing screen, slow image forming.
However, I do expect to see this tech improved.
Is it purely software?
It looks to me more like they did something with the hardware.
They “built their own stack’ is what I heard on My Deep Guide.
I’m curious.
Amazon could gain a lock on a 300 dpi screen…again. I actually like my Amazon Scribe, but!, if I am going to spend the mega bucks on one of these devices, I will probably wait for a jumbo from Kobo. Customizable is King for me.
But who knows. Amazon may put out a very attractive unit, that with the promise of trade in pricing, may be hard to look past.
I could see a 7″ Kindle Scribe.
Would be a great replacement for the Oasis.
Could be in color.
For those that digest comics, graphic novels or lots of PDF’s on their devices, color will be a boon, but for those of us that read plain old eBooks, the color option is only going to matter in the case of the cover/back cover.
Granted, it would be nice to have color covers, but I don’t see myself being an early adopter, because of the increased prices and the infancy of the technology. (I have JUST bought my first folding phone, after five previous generations of the technology ;-P )
Lou Sevens here- I totally agree with Charles. I read mostly books and use my Kindle to take notes at work, therefore don’t need the color. The 2 Scribes I have were expensive- I traded one of my paperwhites in to get the discount etc.
However, if a color scribe had the page turn button like the Oasis that would influence my decision to purchase.
I tried the Paperwhite at best buy, and thought the screen was incredibly smooth to write on, but am happy with the scribe
As a severely sight-impaired person, I have used Hindles from the time the very fist model was introduced. Being able to magnify the text with automatic re-pagination has meant that I can still read despite my disability, and that’s marvellous. The only problem is that the Menu/ Library screen can’t be magnified, so when I finish a book I have to use a magnifying glass to read the book titles in the Downloads library in order to choose my nest book. This is very frustrating and appears to be a very obvious omission from the design. Unless, of course, there is a way roud it that I have missed. I currently use the Kindle Voyager. Has any one got any useful remarks please?
The Kindle Scribe and Kindle Oasis have the option to switch to a larger UI, but it’s not a big difference and might still be too small for some people, but the larger screen on the Scribe helps a lot. Kobo ereaders have a beta feature called Large Print Mode that increases the size of everything, and it works pretty well. I’ve always thought Kindles should have a similar feature for vision-impaired folks.