Kaleido Plus, or Kaleido 2, has been on the market for a couple of years, and many e-notes and e-readers still employ this technology. The latest generation E INK Kaleido 3 is now available, and a few products are utilizing this new colour filter array; The Bigme InkNote Color+ and the new Readmoo Mooink Plus 2C. There will be another new product announced later this year. What are the differences between Kaleido Plus and Kaleido 3?
The 3rd generation colour e-paper, E Ink Kaleido 3, is now available for e-readers and digital note-taking devices. It offers richer colours, increasing its colour saturation by 30% compared to the previous generation, E Ink Kaleido Plus, in addition to 16 levels of grayscale and 4,096 colours. Kaleido 3 also supports E Ink ComfortGaze, a new front light technology that reduces the amount of blue light, with a reduced Blue Light Ratio (BLR) and Blue Light Toxicity Factor (BLTF) by up to 60% and 24%, respectively. BLR is the ratio of toxic blue to total blue light output, and BLTF is the brightness to hazardous blue ratio. Additionally, the responsiveness of the ink means that Kaleido 3 can play animations and videos.
The last few generations of colour e-paper could only display 4,096 colours at 100 PPI. Kaleido 3 managed to increase the colour accuracy to 150 PPI. This was accomplished by putting the Color Filter Array closer to the ink layer. The company did further updates to the print pattern; in the past, they used glass and switched to plastic. Black and White PPI using Kaleido 3 can display 300 PPI and the background is grey, instead of Kaleido Plus which mixed colours to create grey. The PPI on K2 e-readers and e-notes was most often 200 PPI on large-screen devices.
Kaleido and Kaleido Plus were only compatible with E INK Carta HD display panels; this limited the number of digital note-taking devices that employed the technology. With the Advent of Kaleido 3, E INK prioritized supporting their latest generation screens. It is now compatible with E INK Carta 1200, which the newest generation Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Paperwhite Signature edition employ. The main benefit is a 30% performance increase across the board. Page turn speed has also been increased. It is also compatible with Carta 1250, primarily designed for digital note-taking devices. It includes all of the benefits of 1200, except it reduces the latency in drawing with a stylus, so pen-to-screen is quicker. E INK also disclosed to Good e-Reader that K3 is compatible with On-Cell Touch, only found on the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color. E Ink’s new technology incorporates touch directly into the e-paper – making the display clearer for the end-user and the cost of materials lower for device manufacturers. It will be the new standard in the future, and capacitive displays will be a thing of the past. This new technology dramatically increases the performance of black-and-white displays by 30% and the contrast ratio, providing readers with more precise and defined text. When used with E Ink Kaleido Plus or E INK Kaleido 3, the colour contrast ratio and colour saturation increase by 40% and 15%, respectively, providing an enhanced display for colour ebooks and digital textbooks.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
