Ideally, all this would be additive to the Kindle Paperwhite experience, and it would just be a matter of whether you wanted to pay $80 extra for colour. But unfortunately, the Colorsoft is inferior when it comes to reading monochrome content.
Black-and-white Kindles feature sharp, dark text against a light background, even when the light is completely off. The Colorsoft offers less contrast, with a much darker page. With the light on, a standard Kindle presents a clean white page, while the Colorsoft has a distracting texture with a blue-green tinge. Graphic elements are obviously rendered in colour, but they’re not as smooth and creamy as they are on a black-and-white model.
Loading
To be clear, all content is absolutely readable on the Colorsoft, and it also carries most of the benefits of a regular reader, including a low-glare screen and weeks of battery life. But its comparative weakness here puts it in a strange place. It’s a step down from the less expensive Paperwhite when used for purely monochrome books, while for full-colour content like comics, you’d surely get a more true-to-life experience from the Kindle app on a phone or tablet you already own.
For most people, especially those who spend the majority of their e-reader time looking at regular books, I’d suggest this means you should wait and see if future versions of the device are more convincing. But for people who find themselves looking at a lot of black-and-white images that should be in colour, or who wish they could take their comics on the go with the same small device they use for novels, the Colorsoft is an option worth considering.
