With Amazon releasing a new 16GB version of the Kindle Colorsoft last week, along with a kids bundle, and with them finally bringing the Colorsoft to several additional international markets, color Kindles are here to stay.
If the initial release of the Colorsoft was an experiment to gauge the market for color Kindles, things are clearly moving forward now with a second Colorsoft model and international expansion.
I can’t help but wonder if this is the first step to all Kindles and all ereaders in general having color E Ink screens in the not-to-distant future. Some people (myself included) don’t want to hear that, but I could see it happening because something just like this has happened before.
Other companies, including Onyx and Pocketbook, have released several color E Ink devices over the past few years. Kobo already appears to be fully onboard with color E Ink after one year; they don’t even sell a black and white version of the Libra anymore, and they don’t appear to have any plans to release one in the future. It’ll be very interesting to see what kind of device Kobo releases next; if it’s color only like the Libra than we know where things are headed.
Color E Ink screens have some notable drawbacks compared to regular black and white screens, mainly the screen is slightly darker and less clear because of the added color filter layer. But color E Ink has improved a lot over the past few years, and it could improve even more in 5 years. It might reach a point where enough people are willing to accept the drawbacks in order to have color.
This Happened Before
I can’t help but think back to when frontlights first started becoming a thing. Back in the early days of frontlights, there was a lot of resistance to them initially for some of the same reasons that people don’t like color E Ink.
Some people didn’t like frontlights at first because they made the E Ink screen look worse compared to non-frontlit ereaders. The main complaints with the first frontlit devices were they had less contrast, the light layer added a fuzzier appearance, and the screen looked darker with the frontlight off.
Early frontlights had a lot of problems, like uneven lighting, weird color tones, shadow cones, and bright spots. The first Kindle Paperwhite had so many complaints about the frontlight that Amazon put a disclaimer on the product page acknowledging the issue. At the time, I said the fate of the Paperwhite was up in the air because of the new frontlight, and it could turn out to be a huge success or a huge flop. Well, 13 years later we all know how that worked out. It could end up being the same story with color E Ink.
Now it’s nearly impossible to buy an ereader without a frontlight. They all have them, except for a few larger eNotes like the Boox Go 10.3. And the one thing most people complain about is the fact that it doesn’t have a frontlight.
I still barely use a frontlight. I don’t have much use for color either. I have tablets for that.
As a person with low light vision issues I depend on the front light on my PWSE. And I find that the color of the ColorSoft screen gives me eye strain.
100% my experience, I love the Kindle Colorsoft, but it strains my eyes, so I use my Paperwhite 95% of the time.
I hope not. My vision is such that I can no longer read paper books as the print is normally way to small. The screens on tablets causes me eye strain. I love my Kindle PaperWhite SE screen. I can adjust the lights to suit my needs, and of course I can adjust to font size. I went to Best Buy to experience the ColorSoft and the screen tires my eyes way too quickly.
I have a Kobo Libra Colour, and it is more than a little darker inside, and is much darker in bright sunlight, than my Clara 2E. If the Kobo Libra Colour had a B&W screen, it would be great ereader.
Of course we’re going in the all color direction. It’s the same thing that happened with TVs, photography… Black and white screens were here because the technology wasn’t able to show colors. Now that it can, the logical thing is that color screens are very quickly gonna replace the old black and white ones.
I also don’t like the color screens right now. But at the same time I believe in couple of years there will be better technology which won’t need the special layer on top and the screen will have full resolution and won’t be darker. And everyone is gonna love it then.
Also now that color e-ink is turning into mainstream, there will be much more pressure on E-ink to improve the color technology so I think we will see the improvements pretty soon.
Until then I will stick to my BW ereaders, but when we get there I will buy ereader for sure 🙂
That’s my view (and hope) as well. The technology should be way more advanced in five to ten years.
Still, I hope there will still be a choice for customers in the future. Probably not, because to stay with your TV analogy, to my knowledge you can’t buy a black/white TV right now. But then, I don’t think BW had any advantages over color TV, so there wasn’t any demand for BW TV anymore (probably, it was before I was born). In the ebook world, both exist and there are some advantages for BW, so maybe we’ll still have the choice ten years from now.
I really hope not. I’m one of those who never, ever uses the frontlight (and would love a reader with no frontlight and no light layer). But it’s almost impossible, I hear, to read on a colour eink screen with the frontlight off.
It is not impossible to read on a color eating screen with the front light off. If you have a strong light or sunlight. I do it if I’m reading outside. During the day inside I have my front light on between 15 and 20%. At night I have it between 3 and 9%
I disagree with all points.
Frontlight made e-readers a little bit blurry, as well as flush screens. Colour screens have significantly worse visibility and a really big (bad) impact on legibility.
While the frontlight is recommended to have and very handy, then colour screens give some features, like colored book covers, which you will see for a few seconds or a minute per book, while you read the book text for many hours. Oh yeah, and you may have some images in the books in an average one in 20-100 pages, woohoo, it should be colored, the other couple hundred or even thousands of pages of text legibility is less relevant. Then why not to stare the book cover for long hours in lovely 150 ppi, with washed out colors, instead of reading?
BW screens rulez. But I understand, if something is good and it goes mainstream it has to be ruined and destroyed forever.
I suspect it will depend on use-case/market segment/size. Larger eReaders will more likely be used to read comics, eTextbooks, etc that contain (colour) illustrations. Smaller eReaders will be used predominately to read (black and white) text. As well as better contrast, a B&W screen will tend to present clearer text due to the lack of colour subpixels.
Thus, colour screens are likely to predominate in larger eReaders, but B&W to hold its own in smaller.
I would suggest that colour versus B&W TVs are a red herring — as ability to read large amounts of text clearly was not part of television’s use case.
I more interesting comparison would be OLED monitors, where until recently subpixel designs, and lack of text clarity, was an impediment to widespread adoption.
If they make the screens as good as the BW, I can see that happening. And if that happens I would also look forward to a proper eink smartphone – like a color Boox Palma with gsm and at least 5 years of software support
I expect that E ink Gallery will resurface with improved screen change overs. These don’t have a color filter, resulting in brighter screens. Got to be huge pressure to get rid of color filters. To my knowledge, no device has emerged with Gallery technology sine the Remarkable.
Maybe a new tech similar to Gallery will emerge.
My bet…color is here to stay. Don’t worry about the demise of black and white screens. Color screens will improve And there will probably be a decent amount of choice in black and white until they do.
I look forward to screens evolving so black and color ink will both be 300 PPI.
Glad I stocked up on some extra Kobo Libra 2’s in case this would happen. On second thought I could probably sell them for $1000 in the next couple of years because it’ll be such a rare commodity. A collectors item so to speak. But then again I love it so much. I probably wouldn’t even sell it for that price, $5000 maybe.
I really like my Libra, but I doubt that a kobo device (or any ereader) would be worth that much money.
I want a color Kobo Mini! Though I would certainly take an updated BW Mini.