Amazon has just announced that the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition ships on October 30 and is now available for pre-order for $279.99. This e-reader is an E INK Kaleido 3 colour e-paper display with a black-and-white resolution of 300 PPI and 150 PPI for colour content and can display 4,000 colours. Amazon Kindle VP Kevin Keith said “Amazon chose the color filter because the other technology suffers from too much flashing, ghosting, and latency.” People say the brightness and colour accuracy are better than the new Kobo e-readers. It also has 32GB of storage.
The all-new Kindle Colorsoft brings colour to Kindle without compromise. It has everything customers love about Kindle: high contrast, fast page turns, an auto-adjusting front light, and weeks of battery life. It adds colour that’s vibrant yet easy on the eyes. Now, you can search for colour covers in your Library or Kindle Store, view photos and images of books in colour, or highlight text that you can easily search for later.
Everything about Kindle Colorsoft has been meticulously engineered to deliver rich, paper-like colours. It uses a custom-designed oxide backing layer for fast performance and increased contrast in colour and black-and-white content. Its custom Colorsoft display includes a new light guide with nitride LEDs that, combined with our custom algorithms, enhances colour and increases brightness—all without losing detail. You can zoom in on images without worrying about pixelation and choose between standard or vibrant colour styles.
Amazon chose to move forward on a color Kindle now because it saw the opportunity to build a better colour filter with E Ink and rebuild the display stack to support it. In other words, Amazon decided to forgo Gallery 3 and do things differently. “Everything we do is customized. None of it is off the shelf. It’s all customized by our display engineers and every level of the stack is created by our team,” said Keith. Kindle Colorsoft comes with wireless charging, up to eight weeks of battery life, and is waterproof, so you can take it into the bath or to the beach without worry.
The dimensions are 7” x 5” x 0.3” (127.6 x 176.7x 7.8 mm) and weighs 7.7oz (219g). Supported ebook formats are; Kindle Format 8 (AZW3), Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, DOCX, DOC, HTML, EPUB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion; Audible audio format (AAX).)
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.