Kobo goes colour, Sharp meets Leica, and Sony revives Mega Bass

Instruction Set, 2024/4/15

Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for the week of Monday, April 15th.

Feels like it’s been a while since we’ve had a week with a bunch of fun gadget news, but this is a good one. Here we go.

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Colour e-readers may well be on the brink of going mainstream, as Rakuten-owned Kobo announced its first models to use E Ink’s Kaleido 3 technology. The 7” Libra Colour and 6” Clara Colour will ship at the end of this month.

I haven’t yet seen a Kaleido 3 screen in person, but I do have a PocketBook InkPad Color reader with the previous-generation Kaleido Plus display. The main downside with that screen is that while it can show monochrome content at 300 ppi, the resolution drops to 100 ppi for colour. Kaleido 3 is supposedly 30% more vibrant and can display colour images at 150 ppi while maintaining the same 300 ppi as a black-and-white e-reader.

I’m not sure this technology makes sense at anything under ten inches. If you’re mostly going to be reading books, you’ll be better off with a better dedicated e-reader, because the only time you’ll ever see colour will be when you’re looking at book covers. But I can’t lie to you and say that I wouldn’t buy a colour version of the Kindle Scribe.

Kobo often introduces features before Amazon, so it wouldn’t at all be surprising to see Kaleido tech come to the Kindle in the next year or so. I just don’t see much of a use case for regular books.

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4TB SD cards are now a thing, or at least they will be next year. Western Digital just announced the SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, which is an event targeted at videographers and content creators.