Turns out that a colour-screened Kindle isn't all it's cracked up to be. If you're adamant that you need comics on an inferior screen and aren't too annoyed at being forced to purchase all your ebooks directly from Amazon (and also have money to spare), the Colorsoft almost as good as the Kindle Paperwhite. But if you're an avid reader, this one just isn't essential.
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There isn’t really such a thing as a bad Kindle. We could point fingers at the clumsy-to-use-in-2025 Kindle 4, which lacked a touchscreen or keyboard, but it was still an excellent device for its time. That said, the Kindle Colorsoft has proved to be a non-essential purchase for anyone without a pressing need to a) give Amazon more of their money or b) read PDFs in colour on a 7in screen.
The headline feature here, as the device’s title suggests, is the new colour-capable E-ink screen. Unfortunately, this is all that’s really impressive since adding colour is neither useful on its own nor enough to justify the substantial price Amazon asks for this one. The latest 12th-Gen Paperwhite beats the Colorsoft to death in any competition for the post of ‘Better Reading Hardware’.
The Color and the shape
Unless you’re looking directly at the 7in 1,264 × 1,680 display, and even then, only when there are coloured elements on-screen, the Colorsoft doesn’t look any different from its monochrome brethren. The same flat display, bezels, and curved back are evidence. Tuck it into an official case, and you’ll struggle to tell it apart even from older Paperwhite models.
That’s hardly an indictment of the Colorsoft, though. Amazon’s Kindle hardware, at least in the main line, has nailed the paperback-sized portable form factor, and there’s little room for innovation without getting… strange.
Still, the coloured display is an attention-getter. The lock screen, whether it’s the default illustrations or the cover of your latest page-turner, looks fantastic… for a Kindle. The same goes for the cover thumbnails and any reading material that might include coloured content. Comics immediately leap to mind, and it’s refreshing to see these as anything other than shades of grey.
But you’ll halve pixel density when switching to more than monochrome, down to 150ppi from 300ppi with plain ol’ black as your medium. The colours are also less vivid than you’d get from an LCD or OLED screen. To be expected, sure, but if you’ve read real comics or are used to a tablet, the Colorsoft represents a step back.
The upside is that the Coloursoft remains bright enough throughout to make out detail. The Kindle’s lighting system helps there, as does the environmental brightness adjustment. In theory, at least. We found that it was spotty compared to something like the Kindle Oasis, another bonkers expensive reader that might be the best Amazon has ever produced.
‘Soft in the head
The Kindle Colorsoft’s hardware is fantastic, even if the colour screen is an unnecessary addition for most users. More power means smoother screen refreshes, a larger battery offsets the display’s greed, and the Signature Edition we had for review features 32GB of storage. That’s enough for books and PDFs, but if you have a comic book collection… five times more storage might not be enough. But the hardware isn’t anything like a problem. Amazon’s Kindle operating system has taken a user-hostile turn. Assisted by the hardware, in part, but the software really doesn’t like you any more.
Specifically, it doesn’t like users choosing how their interface looks. You will scroll through all of your books, and like it. Any modern Kindle either has or will join the Colorsoft’s design changes because it’ll somehow lead to Amazon selling you more books. There’s some UX dark pattern magic going on here — that’s the only reason Amazon would possibly make its interface worse.
We’re only slightly guessing, but another change to the Colorsoft bears that guess out. Amazon has made a hardware-level change that makes it more difficult to side-load books (we assume you’ve purchased these somewhere else). Even then, the Colorsoft won’t pull through cover detail or any of those other lovely aesthetic bits. Combine this with an inability to simply page through 1600 books to find something to read, and you’ve got a hostile interface.
In addition, PDFs loaded manually will only display in black and white unless you add them to the Colorsoft via Amazon’s Send to Kindle feature. That’s less of a dick move than it is a matter of correct conversion but the other changes make it feel like this is intentional.
Long story short, the interface changes are to Amazon’s benefit and not yours. The hardware’s still good, but the online retail giant is constructing larger walls for its garden. Whether you want to exist inside of them is up to you but we hear that Kobo is making some excellent tech these days. Plus, the brand was first to do the whole ‘waterproofing and colour screens’ thing.
Amazon Kindle Colorsoft verdict
As we mentioned, there’s no such thing as a crappy Kindle, at least in terms of hardware. There have been plenty of ambivalent ones, with features that aren’t required for it to fulfill its role. The same goes for the Colorsoft, which adds coloured images at a significant premium. It’s kinda cool, sure, but it’s not worth the trouble of tracking down and paying more than the R5,500 the latest Paperwhite Signature Edition asks. Sure, there are comics, but a ‘mere’ 32GB of storage, a janky interface compared to the average tablet app, and washed-out colours mean you could expect better Marvel/DC performance from an Android tablet that costs less than half of the Colorsoft’s price tag.
