Kobo is running a rare sale for their latest generation e-readers in the United Kingdom. The Kobo BW and Kobo Clara Colour are both available for a £20 discount on the main Kobo website. You can also find the same deals on Amazon, if you don’t want to buy directly from Kobo.
What are the major selling points behind the Clara BW? Aside from the Carta 1300 screen, it has a sunken bezel and no glass. This ensures no glare when reading outside in direct sunlight—Ditto with overhead bright lights. I have always liked this type of e-reader design since fonts and text on the screen look better at 300 PPI when reading. Text pops better; glass tends to defuse text. Suffice it to say that the Clara BW is one of the best e-readers around. Read our full review to learn all about this e-reader.
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 20% 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 eMMC storage, soldered onto the circuit board. They said this type of storage is much quicker, so clicking on a book to read, page-turn speed or pulling up an audiobook will be much faster. Read our full review on this e-reader to learn more.
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.