Amazon's Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition hands-on: Color e-ink looks pretty good

Implementing Colorsoft requires much more than just replacing a new display, Amazon executives said at a launch event Tuesday in New York City. “Honestly, the technology just wasn’t ready,” says Kevin Keith, who runs Kindle products for Amazon. “And we now believe the technology is ready.” (Kobo, Remarkable and others may 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, right down to a redesigned oxide backplane that makes it easier for the E Ink panel's tiny ink particles to move quickly. The e-ink world has been working on similar technology for some time, and Amazon believes it is the key to good color reproduction. The Colorsoft has new LED pixels and a new way to shine light through them individually to enhance the colors. It's also brighter than ever to make the whole thing look more lively. Some of these technologies also helped the new Paperwhite turn pages faster and easier, but they were designed to make Colorsoft work.

All of this display technology, Keith says, allowed Amazon to introduce color without adding page switching latency, reducing the device's resolution, or sacrificing contrast on the display. “All the things you think of with the Kindle – high resolution, long battery life, fast page turning, good fluidity – we weren't willing to give up on that,” says Keith. The goal was to offer a color screen that still looked as good in black and white as the Paperwhite, and he believes Amazon has nailed it.

During a quick demo at Amazon's launch event, I was impressed with the Colorsoft's display. It's not an iPad screen, but it's sharp enough and bright enough to highlight comics without being so saturated that it looks fake. The most obvious downside is that with a color image on the page, the device does a full refresh by blinking every time you turn the page. Keith says this only happens when there's a large enough image on the screen, but I've had it happen even with some fairly small images. But these pictures 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 Color.

The best thing about it is that the pages turn quickly and books open quickly – I didn't really notice whether this device is significantly slower than the new Paperwhite. Even with a normal book, the 300ppi screen looks about as good as the other Kindles. You can zoom in on most images by pinching and pinching, and in my demos the image zooms smoothly but becomes pixelated until it refreshes a moment later. However, we still need to test a lot more, and I'm worried that all the screen blinking might be distracting when navigating through a long graphic novel.

The biggest advantage of a color screen so far is simply that it makes the entire user interface a little nicer. This allows you to better browse your home screen and library as you can now see your book covers in full color. It's also a big win for the lock screen, which now presents a much more vibrant standby screen while resting on your bedside table. (Keith seems to think that a lot of aesthetically minded BookTok folks will love the color screen.) The only truly color-specific feature is that you can add highlights in multiple colors now, and search for them 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 a neat new trick. But don't be shocked if you see Colorsoft technology eventually making its way to other parts of the Kindle range. Amazon waited so many years to introduce the technology and wanted to get it right before offering it to shoppers. Now it feels like it did everything right. That means it could be anywhere at some point.