It’s a colorful world now with e-paper devices, opening up a sea of color e-reader and digital notebook options like never before. Who wouldn’t want a little color splashed on the paperlike screen, giving a feeling of a real page?
These color e-readers can do everything a regular e-reader can, but they let you see your book covers and illustrations in their full glory and add colorful highlights to the pages of your latest read. Some even let you write colored notes on the pages or in the digital notebook built within it. It makes for a really fun experience, especially if you’re a book-annotator type of person (I aspire to be such a person, but I usually lose steam halfway through a good book) or love graphic novels.
I’ve tried several color e-readers and e-paper devices in my testing, and as I compare overall features and value, I’ve found myself impressed again and again with the value of Kobo’s color e-readers. Whether that’s the larger Kobo Libra Colour, our favorite all-around e-reader that can double as a digital notebook, or the affordable Kobo Clara Colour, you can’t go wrong with Kobo’s colorful devices.
How Do Color E-Readers Work?
Photograph: Nena Farrell
From a simple glance, most color e-readers look pretty similar. You’ll usually see a 150 pixels-per-inch resolution for color and 300 for black-and-white, which are specs we see for both Kobo’s and Kindle’s color devices.
Kobo’s two color e-readers, the Kobo Libra Colour and the Kobo Clara Colour, use E Ink Kaleido 3 technology to power their colorful screens. This technology has 16 levels of grayscale and 4,096 colors, allowing it to represent hues from your favorite books with ease. You’ll see higher resolution for the black-and-white technology, since that’s still the main base that color e-readers use; the lower-resolution colors are essentially a top-layer effect. So even though the color is lower resolution, you shouldn’t notice a lower resolution overall.
The colors are a little more muted than what you’d see on a smartphone or tablet, though Kobo’s devices felt a little brighter and more saturated than the Kindle Colorsoft—or the Aura Ink digital frame, which also uses e-ink technology. Kobo’s devices also use ComfortLight PRO to reduce the amount of blue light you’ll see on the display.
The Best Color E-Readers
Kobo’s devices are my favorite color e-readers, thanks not only to the technology that powers them, but also the prices. Compared with the Kindle Colorsoft, which ranges from $250 to $280 depending on which model you choose (including the kids version, but at least that comes with a cover), you’re saving money by choosing a Kobo color device, with the Clara Colour costing $160 and the Libra Colour starting at $230, and you’ll get the same if not more capabilities.
The Clara Colour, for example, will cost you the same as a Kindle Paperwhite, but comes with the color screen you usually have to pay a lot more for. It is smaller, though, with just a 6-inch screen instead of the 7-inch you’d get on the Colorsoft or Paperwhite, but it’s a comfortable size to read with or carry in a bag or large-pocketed coat.
Meanwhile, the Libra Colour is cheaper than the Colorsoft but comes with page-turner buttons, something we wanted to see on the Kindle Colorsoft. It can also be upgraded into a digital notebook, which will run it up to $300 for the added stylus, but it will still be cheaper than the $400 Kindle Scribe. All in all, it’s an impressive money saver for similar if not extra features.
