PocketBook Color review: is color E Ink finally ready?

Pocket edition Color review: is color E Ink last ready?

E Ink Kaleido is the best screen tech til now for coloring e-readers

By Oct 8, 2020, 8:00am EDT

I've been looking at color e-proofreader prototypes as long as I've been a tech journalist. Back in the aboriginal days of The Verge, we'd oftentimes cover display engineering like Qualcomm's Mirasol operating room various E Ink prototypes and come away thinking that while it wasn't quite ready, IT was just a topic of time. That's how engineering is meant to process, right? We see it in unfinished form at a trade show and it turns up in mainstream products a few years later.

Uncalled-for to say, that has non turned out to be the case. Amazon and Kobo still don't sell colorize e-readers, and if anything the prospect seems even further off than information technology did a decade ago, now that IT's possible to sell adequate LCD tablets for well under $100. They don't have the stamp battery life or the outdoor legibility of E Ink, simply information technology's clear that that's a recession concern.

E Ink is notwithstandin working on the theme, though, and this year the party shipped its best shot yet at color screen tech that's appropriate for e-readers: Kaleido. I've been testing one of the first e-readers to use this type of display, the young €199 ($234) PocketBook Color, and while it's non a idyllic device, it's good to give me hope in the future of color E Ink.

Purse is an e-reader manufacturer headquartered in Switzerland and mostly merchandising to different European markets. The caller has been around since 2007 and says it's the universe's third largest maker of insurance premium E Ink-based e-readers, presumably putting it behind Amazon and Rakuten's Kobo.

Screen digression, the Billfold Emblazon doesn't look much different to whatsoever other 6-inch e-reader. It's each plastic, but the design is fairly sleek with a matte articulate finish on the back and a soft-jot texture on the front. You'll find a power button, a Micro USB port (boo), and a microSD slot (yay) on the bottom edge. At that place's a bundled Micro USB-to-phone jack adapter soh you can hear to audiobooks, and the device also has Bluetooth support for wireless headphones.

In that location are household, menu, and page-turn buttons located below the screen, and they're all easily getatable; at 160g, the PocketBook Color is light sufficient to hold with your rif resting at the bottom. I actually opt this to the side-mounted page-turn buttons on previous Kindles I've owned, which ne'er quite mat up like they were at the right meridian — at least not for my thumbs.

The Pocket book Color runs a custom Linux-based OS that includes various apps. There's a web web browser, a notes app, and symmetric few games like chess and sudoku. Thomas Nelson Page-turn and menu performance is reasonable, if not quite as fast A my Kindle Oasis. Electric battery life sentence has been very good — I haven't charged the Wallet Color weeks.

All of this is discriminate sufficiency, but the PocketBook Color would be an entirely ordinary device if not for the concealment. So let's talk of the screen.

The key element of Kaleido screens is that E Ink has developed a thinner, higher choice color filter array than it misused in its experienced Triton technology, which required a glaze-based color permeate layer on top of the colored panel. E Ink says Kaleido displays can show adequate 4,096 colors and 16 levels of grayscale, which is the same as it claimed for Triton, merely the overall color reproduction is much improved.

The catch is that the color filter regalia seriously reduces the screen's overall resolving power, since IT sits in in advance of the monochrome E Ink microcapsules. The Notecase Vividness's 6-inch screen has a resolution of 1072 × 1448 when displaying black and gabardine content, which makes for a high pixel density of 300 ppi, but areas of the screen that show color see pixel density drop to 100. The filter is also in sight when reading monochrome capacity if you look closely, giving the screen a slenderly grainier look up to than modern conventional e-readers.

Kaleido screens obviously aren't departure to vie with tablets in light, counterpoint, or vibrancy. But I like using the PocketBook Coloring material in the same situations where I'd prefer to use up a Kindle over an iPad. The sort looks its best outdoors in the sun — I'd compare the color procreation to a newspaper that's faded over a few days. Non exactly stunning, and then, merely certainly readable and glare-dislodge. The resolution ISN't a big problem in practice, either, because the text remains crisp and images look fine at normal viewing distances.

The screen is less impressive inside, because you really need to use the first light to construe much of anything. Crank it up too high and you don't really feel suchlike you're look an e-reader any more than, but the colors are hard to make proscribed at too low a brightness. I found setting it to around 30-percent brightness ordinarily offered the scoop balance of color and comfort. But with glare and power phthisis fewer of a concern at rest home, I'd be more likely to reach for a regular tablet in the first position.

Overall, I think Kaleido is defective merely leastways live as an e-reader blind technology, and the PocketBook Color is past far the best color e-subscriber I've ever seen. Only its biggest job is that I just didn't know what to bash with it.

Pocket edition's store has an extremely limited selection of European nation-language contentedness. I'm non going to criticize the intersection too hard for that, since IT isn't even sold-out in Anglophone markets, but you should expect to have to load IT up with your own DRM-free content if you choose to import. The PocketBook Color supports several book formats including EPUB, CBR, CBZ, MOBI, and PDF, and you can sync files to the device either over Dropbox or through Billfold's own cloud service, which is simple and fast.

Simply even in a ma where the Notecase store was stacked with bestsellers, or where you had legal, DRM-free copies of everything you'd ever want to read, the PocketBook Color wouldn't beryllium the best room to lay down the most of a Kaleido screen. Basically, it's too small. Magazines and comic books await good, but they're just too hard to read on a 6-inch expose. Manga is a good fit, but tends to be overwhelmingly in black and white. Diarrhoeic books with the occasional color illustration or computer graphic work bad well, but that's not a very park or exciting use case, and monochrome e-readers have better overall screen quality.

There are modes for zooming, scaling, and viewing separate panels, only I didn't find them to be very convenient or effective. Patc the PocketBook Color's performance is generally fine, it isn't actually capable the task of manipulating a large PDF. I would be really interested in a version of this device with an 8- or 9-inch screen, because I consider it'd embody a more better fit for the type of pleased that works top-grade on the Kaleido display.

The one affair that does faithfully look keen on the PocketBook Color is book covers, and you jazz what they say about judgment books on those. If anything, though, that could be the thing that drives adoption of the engineering science. Information technology's definitely nice to consider your library and the book store in color — even E Ink itself sells Kaleido A enabling "a to a greater extent to the full realized ebook shopping experience." If anything's departure to get Amazon on board, you'd think it would be that.

Color E Ink isn't quite there yet. Straight-grained though the PocketBook Color is the best gimmick of its kind to date stamp, IT's hard to recommend over traditional e-readers unless you make out what you deficiency to record on it, considering information technology's almost twice the price of a Kindle Paperwhite. Make you deliver a 6-inch e-reader already and often use it for things that you wish you could read in color? This power be worth checking out. Are you waiting for a perfect comic-reading device? This isn't it.

I don't think Kaleido in its prevalent var. is the technology that's active to take color E Ink mainstream, only IT's getting there. Fifty-fifty though the color reproduction is never releas to vie with LCD tablets, a bigger shield with equal (or ideally higher) sharpness would glucinium smashing for reading things like comics and magazines outdoors, and the battery life story advantage remains important.

Kaleido color E Ink is good for the same reasons as monochrome E Ink. It still comes with a lot of craft-offs, though, and the PocketBook Color isn't the device that wish point off its true potential. But keep an center on this technology — for the prototypic prison term in a long while, it actually feels like people of colour e-readers could be practicable soon.