Rakuten Kobo has done something that they have never done before. Their latest generation, Kobo Clara, uses an E INK Kaleido 3 colour e-paper panel, allowing users to read colour content, such as comics, manga, magazines, and PDF files, or browse the web, and the screen can provide over 4096 different colours. Kobo is the first large company to employ this technology and market it in-store and online in dozens of other countries. It will be shipping out to customers at the end of April, and will retail for $149.99.
The 3rd generation colour e-paper, E Ink Kaleido 3, has been out for a year or so. It offers richer colours, increasing its colour saturation by 30% compared to the previous generation, E Ink Kaleido Plus, in addition to 16 grayscale levels and 4,096 colours. Kaleido 3 also uses 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 toxic blue to total blue light output ratio, and BLTF is the brightness to hazardous blue ratio.
The Rakuten Kobo Clara Colour features a six-inch Kaleido 3 colour e-paper screen with FastGLR and Dark Mode. The black and white resolution is 1448×1072 with 300 PPI, and the colour resolution is 150. The e-reader only comes in one colour: black. The screen is recessed and does not have a layer of glass. This will ensure the colour e-paper panel is closer to the top of the stack, providing better colour and font clarity. It has a ComfortLight PRO adjustable brightness and colour temperature for blue light reduction. Typically, Kaleido 3 screens have a darker grey background; Kobo told me they recommend trying the front-lite at around 10% to mitigate this.
Underneath the hood is a MediaTek processor MT8113T – dual-core ARM A53 @ 2.0 GHz, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. For the past dozen years, Kobo has always used SD cards for internal storage, but for the Clara Colour, they decided to use EMC storage, soldered onto the circuit board. They said this type of storage is much quicker, so loading books or listening to audiobooks will be faster.
It has WiFi 802.11 ac/b/g/n (i.e. dual-band, 2.4 and 5 GHz) to connect to the Kobo bookstore and Bluetooth 5.0 to use wireless headphones or earbuds to buy and listen to Kobo audiobooks. This e-reader should be immune to coffee or tea spills, thanks to the IPX8 rating – for up to 60 minutes in 2 meters of water. It has USB-C to transfer data and charge it. It is powered by a 1500 mAh battery, has 112 x 160 x 9.2 mm dimensions, and weighs 174g.
One of the nice things about the Kobo Clara Colour is being able to sideload many ebook formats. It officially supports 15 file formats supported natively (EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR). I like how CBR/CBZ are the preferred manga formats, so it’s possible to download them from the internet and load them in. You can craft the Clara Colour to your liking, with 13 different fonts and over 50 font styles. Sadly, you cannot sideload in audiobooks.
Kobo Clara Colour is made with recycled and ocean-bound plastics. This diverts CDs and DVDs from landfills and plastic bottles from the planet’s oceans. The retail packaging for this e-reader is also made with 100% FSC-certified recycled paper and is printed with soy ink. It is also designed to be repairable; you can open it up with a screwdriver now, and Kobo agreed with iFixit to replace the screen, circuit board and battery. This should increase the lifespan of the Clara Colour.
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.
