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Colour e-ink is real, it works, and it looks nothing like the marketing photographs. Manage that expectation first and the technology is genuinely good. Go in expecting an iPad and you will be disappointed within a minute.
If you want colour e-ink
What Kaleido 3 actually looks like
Think coloured newsprint, or a comic printed on recycled paper. The colours are correct but muted — roughly 4,096 of them, at half the resolution of the black-and-white layer underneath.
There is also a cost you should know about before buying: the colour filter sits over the e-ink, so black-and-white text on a colour device is slightly less crisp and slightly greyer than on an equivalent mono screen. For plain novels, a mono device still reads better.
When colour earns its keep
- Comics and manga — the obvious one, and it works well
- Textbooks and technical books — charts and diagrams stop being guesswork
- Colour-coded highlighting — genuinely useful for study
- Magazines and cookbooks — photographs become worth looking at
And when it does not: plain fiction. If you read novels and nothing else, buy mono, get a crisper page, and keep the money.
Kobo Libra Colour
The most complete colour e-reader
Kaleido 3, physical page buttons, IPX8 waterproofing and native OverDrive borrowing. No other colour device combines all four.
Kobo Clara Colour
Cheapest way in
Same colour technology in a 6-inch body. You lose the buttons and the larger screen but keep library borrowing and waterproofing.
Kindle Colorsoft
Amazon arrived late and arrived polished. The Colorsoft is well built and well integrated, and it is locked to Amazon and priced accordingly. Its early units had a widely reported yellow-band issue at the screen edge which Amazon addressed; worth checking reviews of current stock before buying.
The rest of the colour market
Tolino Shine Color is Germany’s option and barely covered in English. BOOX has the widest colour range of anyone — Go Color 7, Palma 2 Pro, Note Air5 C, Tab X C — with Android flexibility and rougher software.
Compare against mono devices in our best e-readers guide, or take the one-minute quiz.