Amazon finally has a color Kindle, and it looks pretty good

Making the Colorsoft happen, Amazon executives said at a launch event on Tuesday in New York City, required a lot more than just swapping in a new display. “Frankly, the technology just wasn’t ready” before now, says Kevin Keith, who runs Kindle products for Amazon. “And we now think the tech is ready.” (Kobo, Remarkable, and others might disagree that it wasn’t ready before.)

The Colorsoft is based on E Ink’s Kaleido technology but uses an entirely new display stack for Kindles, all the way back to a newly designed oxide backplane that makes it easier for E Ink panel’s tiny bits of ink to move around quickly. The E Ink world has been working on similar tech for a while, and Amazon thinks it’s the key to making color work well. The Colorsoft has new LED pixels, and a new way of shining light through them individually to enhance colors. It’s also brighter than ever, to help the whole thing feel more vivid. Some of this tech also helped the new Paperwhite turn pages faster and easier, but it was designed to make Colorsoft work.

All that display tech, Keith says, allowed Amazon to introduce color without adding page-turn latency, lowering the device’s resolution, or hurting contrast on the display. “All the things you think about with Kindle — high resolution, long battery life, fast page turns, good fluidity — we weren’t willing to sacrifice those,” Keith says. The goal was to offer a color screen that still looked just as good as the Paperwhite in black and white, and he’s convinced Amazon got there.

In a brief demo at Amazon’s launch event, I was impressed with the Colorsoft’s display. It’s no iPad screen, but it’s sharp enough and bright enough to make comics pop without being so saturated it looks wrong. The most obvious drawback is that when there’s a color image on the page, the device does a full flashing refresh every time you turn the page; Keith says that only happens when there’s a sufficiently large image on the screen, but it happened to me even with some pretty tiny images. But those images look good! Again, not iPad-level good, but certainly sharper and brighter than some color E Ink screens we’ve seen on devices like the Kobo Clara Colour.

Best of all, pages turn fast and books open quickly — if this thing is meaningfully slower than the new Paperwhite, I didn’t really notice. On a regular book, the 300ppi screen looks about as good as the other Kindles, too. You can pinch to zoom on most images, and in my demos the image will zoom smoothly but pixelate until it refreshes a moment later. We’ll have to do a lot more testing, though, and I worry all the screen flashing might get annoying as you navigate through a long graphic novel.

The biggest upside of a color screen so far is just that it makes the whole interface a little nicer. It makes your homescreen and library better to browse, now that you can see your book covers in full color. It’s also a big win on the lockscreen, which now presents a much more vibrant standby screen while it’s on your bedside table. (Keith seems to think a lot of aesthetically minded BookTok folks are going to love the color screen.) The only really color-specific feature is that you can now add highlights in multiple colors and then look them up later by color in the Kindle app on your phone.

For more traditional readers, the Colorsoft is really just a more expensive Kindle Paperwhite with one neat new trick. But don’t be shocked to see the Colorsoft tech eventually come to other parts of the Kindle lineup. Amazon waited so many years to add the tech, wanting to get it right before it offered it to buyers. Now it feels it got it right. Which means eventually it might be everywhere.