The Kindle Colorsoft Will Make Your Books Look Worse

Amazon's Kindle Colorsoft is now the company's most expensive e-reader (with the exception of the Kindle Scribe, although that's more of an e-note than an e-reader), but that doesn't automatically make it the best Kindle money can buy. Let's say you have the cash to burn and want the best reading experience Amazon offers: If you only read novels, or even black-and-white comics like manga, you might actually be better off saving your money and getting the Kindle Paperwhite instead. Shelling out extra won't give you an upgraded experience—it could actively make your books worse.

What is a color e-reader?

At its core, the Kindle Colorsoft is essentially a Kindle Paperwhite, but with one key difference. It's got the same lighting options, weighs just about the same, looks exactly like a Paperwhite, and has the same size screen. The defining factor is that the Colorsoft has a color filter in its display, which allows content that passes through it to produce up to 4,096 colors.

It can still display black-and-white content, but when you read something like a comic book on it, it cuts the resolution in half from 300 ppi to 150 ppi, then cleverly arranges the pixels so they shine through the exact right spots to produce the needed colors.

There's a bit more to it than that—Amazon also has some proprietary materials in play that allows it to achieve better color accuracy and fewer artifacts than competing devices—but that's the gist. It's pretty clever, even if the core concept isn't unique to the Kindle Colorsoft. It doesn't just work on comics, either, but also on things like book covers or color-collated highlighting.

Sounds pretty cool. Even if you don't use it all the time, it's a nice bonus, right? You can get color when you need it, at the cost of some resolution, but you can also display black-and-white works at the same resolution as the Kindle Paperwhite. Unfortunately, the reality's not so cut and dry.

The rainbow effect

While the Kindle's software can recognize when it's showing you black-and-white content and when it's displaying color, the hardware can't. Even in something like a novel, the physical color filter is still there. And while its individual color dots are too small to make out, your eyes can still notice the color layer as whole.

Enter the rainbow effect. At its best, it'll put a light shimmer on your screen, giving it a somewhat grainy texture that can lower the contrast. At its worst, it'll show full on spectrums of color on content that should be monochrome.

Take this page from Dune, which shows a fairly mild rainbow effect.

And this page from Berserk, which shows a more aggressive rainbow pattern.

It's unavoidable. No matter what you read on the device, it'll show up to some degree. The question is how you'll react to it.

Can you fix the rainbow effect?

Because the rainbow effect is a hardware issue, there's no way to get rid of it completely. The competition has slight fixes for it, with the most notable being Kobo's “reduce rainbow effect” toggle, which slightly blurs the image to try to line it up in a way that the color filter isn't as noticeable. Amazon, unfortunately, has not opted to include such a solution on its device.

That said, the Kindle Colorsoft does ship with two color modes, standard and vivid. These won't affect black-and-white content, but it's worth noting that the way the color filter works in the Colorsoft can sometimes cause artifacting in color content as well. If you notice this, changing color modes could help you out. The Kindle is less prone to artifacting than I've seen on other devices, but its Vivid mode doesn't use the full range of 4,096 colors, instead compressing it to boost saturation. Most of the fellow Colorsoft users I've spoken with prefer to swap over to Vivid and leave it on for everything, but the lower range of colors can cause pixelation, so if you notice that, it's worth trying out Standard mode again. Sure, this isn't exactly the same as the rainbow effect, but it's a similar enough issue, and points out that even color users aren't free from problems on this device.

Is dealing with the rainbow effect worth it?

How much the rainbow effect will bother you depends on what you read and how pristine you like your pages to look. To my husband, who reads all of his black-and-white books on a color e-reader, it doesn't bother him much. He actually kind of likes the shimmering, saying it kind of looks like the grain you might get on real paper.

But to me, I can't stand it. It's bright and distracting, and if you spend most of your time on your Kindle reading traditional books, buying a Colorsoft will mean you'll be paying extra just to have to deal with that. I suppose that might be worth it if you want to see your book covers in color when scrolling through your library, or if you highlight a lot. It does look nice, for the few seconds covers or highlights are on your screen. But for most of your time actually reading, you're not going to be using the color, and you will be seeing the rainbow effect.

The news only gets worse if you read black-and-white illustrated works, like manga. To follow along with a book, all you have to do is make out the words— but with manga, the artwork will be actively worsened. Lines might look fuzzier, or facial expressions might give off an entirely different vibe underneath all the shimmering. But worst of all, you might get those unintended splotches of color, like I got in Berserk. To me, that's not worth it.

The Kindle Colorsoft is only for people who read color content

It might sound obvious, but the Kindle Colorsoft is only for people who read color content regularly, like comic books—and even then, I don't recommend it.

This isn't like the ‘90s, when the Game Boy Color could play certain games in color, but could also play black-and-white games the same as an original Game Boy. The Kindle Colorsoft is not just a regular Kindle with optional color that readers with deep pockets can count on as an occasional added bonus, but as something they can otherwise ignore. Instead, using it is an entirely different experience.