Kindle Colorsoft 2025 review: nice to have
How much do you judge ebooks by their covers?
Nearly five years ago, I opened my review of the PocketBook Color e-reader by noting that color E Ink had felt like it’d been just around the corner for my entire career as a tech journalist. That continued to be the case until recently; color e-readers only hit the mainstream last year when Kobo and then Amazon released their first attempts.
I am a Kindle guy, for better or worse, so I’d been waiting for a model that would work with my extensive library — or, to be real, my embarrassingly long backlog. But the first Kindle Colorsoft, as Amazon named it, had something of a rocky launch. Several users reported yellow discolouration at the bottom of the screen, and Amazon paused shipping for a while.
Now there’s a revised, cheaper model, which comes with cut-down specs, availability in more regions (including here in Japan) and a statement from Amazon that it made “a combination of software and display adjustments” to fix the yellow-band issue. I’ve seen scattered reports that this may also apply to newer units of the previous, more expensive edition, but I wanted to check out the cheaper version just to make sure I wouldn’t lose a panel lottery.
And you don’t lose much with this model — nor do you save much, at $250 versus $280. It has 16GB of storage, down from 32GB, which is still pretty ample for an e-reader; I only used up about 4GB by downloading most of my library. There’s no wireless charging, but even as a wireless charging maximalist I’m fine with leaving that off a device that I’m only likely to plug in once a month. You also lose auto-adjusting screen brightness, which frankly is something that I’ve never found to work well on any other Kindle.
Anyway, on (e-) paper, I figured this should be the most accessible color e-reader yet — lower price, solid specs, issues ironed out. I do think that’s proven to be true in my time with it, but I also don’t think most people should buy one.
Color screen aside, the Colorsoft hardware is entirely nondescript. Other than the slight I-see-what-they-did-there rainbow effect on the Amazon arrow logo, it looks exactly like a Paperwhite. It even fits the same official cases; I picked up a leather one in a fetching “jade” shade of green.
This is the obligatory sentence where I register my predictable yet valid displeasure that Amazon continues to abandon dedicated page-turn buttons throughout the Kindle line.
Okay, onto the screen. The Kindle Colorsoft uses E Ink’s Kaleido 3 technology; by comparison, that five-year-old PocketBook Color was one of the first to use the original Kaleido. Conventional monochrome E Ink displays work by charging particles in tiny capsules to turn them black or white, which is why they work so well outdoors; there’s no need for a backlight because the display itself physically reflects light, like paper. Kaleido applies a filter array to the same kind of panel, enabling up to 4,096 colours at a cost to resolution.
While monochrome content can still display at 300 ppi on the Colorsoft screen, just like a Paperwhite, colour imagery is limited to 150 ppi. In practice, this isn’t really a big deal; photos look like photos, for example. But the filter is still noticeable when reading black-and-white ebooks. It’s definitely improved over previous Kaleido generations, and text itself remains sharp, but there’s a slight graininess that’s particularly visible in bright light.
This macro photo maybe exaggerates the effect. It isn’t enough to stop the Colorsoft feeling like a good, high-resolution e-reader, but it is noticeable when compared directly to a 300-ppi monochrome screen. The Colorsoft’s panel also has less contrast, though that is mitigated in most normal reading environments by making use of the frontlight.
The Colorsoft’s colour reproduction is not competitive with phones or tablets in terms of vibrancy, but Amazon isn’t aiming for that. The results remind me of newspaper print. Viewing angles are perfect and it’s very comfortable to read, especially outdoors. In darker situations, you do need to rely on the backlight to make out much colour at all.
As far as I can tell, the yellow band issue is no longer an issue. It is maybe kinda-sorta visible if I turn the frontlight all the way up in a dark room, but that is not a thing I would ever do, and I wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking for it. Whatever Amazon has done to address this problem, I don’t think it should affect your buying decision at this point.
Another thing worth noting about the Colorsoft is its performance. This is easily the fastest Kindle I’ve ever used, with notably more responsive page-turn time than my Scribe. It does need to do a full refresh whenever colour images are on the screen, but when used as a conventional e-reader this is a blazingly fast device. Even pinching to zoom on full-screen colour images works well enough, with the Colorsoft bumping the resolution down until you lift your finger.
The biggest problem with the Colorsoft is the same as what I found with that PocketBook Color five years ago — I’m just not really sure what to do with it. Really, what is the use case for a colour e-reader at this size? It’s too small for comic books or coffee table tomes. Manga is a good fit, but it’s usually monochrome. While it’s nice to see your book covers shown in colour on your lock screen or in the library, it doesn’t make much difference to the actual reading experience.
The Paperwhite is cheaper and makes black-and-white ebooks look better. The Scribe is big enough for comics and magazines but doesn’t display them in colour. What would make much more sense as a pair of devices is a Paperwhite and a colour Scribe. Instead, true to form, I’ve found myself with the opposite.
I do like the way the Colorsoft screen looks. It’s refreshing to use a device that isn’t trying to overwhelm you with its contrast or colour gamut. Lately I’ve often been using folding phones like the Oppo Find N5 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold in lieu of regular e-readers, since my E Ink options are the tiny Boox Palma and the oversized Scribe, and I have to say I prefer the Colorsoft as a book-sized object.
But I had to laugh when I compared it to the matte glass model of the Xiaomi Pad 7 Pro, which I wrote about a few months ago. Okay, you’re obviously not getting months of battery life from an Android tablet with an LCD, but it just looks better in every way for colour content, even outdoors. The key advantage of E Ink is its lack of reflections; add that to a good quality IPS LCD and there’s really no comparison.
I’ve been invested in the Kindle ecosystem for a decade and a half, so it is nice to have one with a colour screen. But that’s really all it is: a nice-to-have. The Colorsoft is not a device that expands my reading possibilities. Its biggest upgrade, in fact, is the way it displays book covers on the lock screen. That’s when I’m not using it at all.