So my Kindle Colorsoft showed up on Wednesday and I've spent more time reading Reddit threads about it than actually reading books on it, which feels about right for 2024.
Quick background if you missed the announcement back in July: this is Amazon's first color e-reader, $279.99, using the new E Ink Kaleido panel, and it shipped out starting October 30th to everyone who preordered. I've been buying every new Kindle since basically the start of this blog — I did a whole post on the original Paperwhite back in 2012 that I'm mildly embarrassed by now — so a color one felt like something I had to try, even at that price, which is genuinely a lot for an e-reader.
The device itself is nice. The color layer sits under the E Ink layer so covers and highlighted graphic novels actually look like something instead of gray mush, and the screen refresh on page turns is fast enough that I stopped noticing it within about ten minutes. Text is still crisp, battery seems fine so far, the little dial on the side for navigating is a genuinely good idea I don't know why nobody did sooner.
Except. Go look at r/kindle right now and count how many posts are just a photo of the bottom third of the screen with some variation of "is this normal." Because a bunch of people, and I mean a lot of people, are getting units with a yellowish tint or a kind of smudgy discoloration running along the bottom edge of the display, right around where the light guide sits. Mine has a very faint version of it, only visible if I crank the frontlight up past maybe 60% in a dark room and stare at a blank white page like an idiot, which I did, twice, last night instead of sleeping.
I don't think this is one of those internet pile-on things where three people complain and suddenly it's a "crisis." The pattern people are describing is specific and consistent enough, worse at higher brightness, worse near the bottom bezel, some units totally clean, some units bad enough to be genuinely distracting when reading at night, that it smells like an actual manufacturing tolerance issue with the new light guide, not people imagining things on cheap monitors. Nobody official has said anything about a fix or a recall as of this morning. No idea if that changes in the next week.
Here's my actual opinion, since I said I'd try to have one instead of just reporting both sides forever: I think this is what happens when a company ships a genuinely new display technology on a hard deadline instead of a when-its-ready one. E Ink's Kaleido stuff has been in a handful of niche readers from smaller brands for a couple years and none of them sold in Kindle-type volumes, so nobody had really stress-tested the manufacturing at this scale before. Amazon wanted a color Kindle out before the holidays, understandably, and I'd bet money the yield on "perfectly even light guides" wasn't where it needed to be and they shipped anyway. That's a guess. But it's the kind of guess that's usually right with consumer electronics timing.
Unrelated tangent because it's my blog and I get to do this: the little page-turn buttons are back on the Signature Edition and I forgot how much I missed physical buttons on an e-reader until I had them again. My thumb has apparently been resentful of touchscreen-only page turns this whole time and never told me.
Anyway. If you preordered one, look at the bottom of your screen tonight with the light up high before you decide whether you love it. Mine's going in a case and getting used regardless, tint or no tint, because it's still the best-looking e-reader screen I've had in thirteen years of buying these things. I'll update this post or write a follow-up if Amazon says anything official, but for now it's just a lot of people on forums comparing screenshots and one guy on my blog staring at a blank page at 11pm on a Thursday. That guy's me.
If yours is bad enough that it's bothering you, get the return going now rather than waiting, the holiday return window gets messy fast once December hits and support queues back up.