[DickeFix]

I have now tested and used the PocketBook Color extensively for a week and must say I am quite amazed both by the screen technology and the excellent operative system. It is true that at low light conditions without frontlight on, the background of the E Ink Kaleido color screen is not as white as on the E Ink Carta B&W screen. This degradation is inherent in any reflective screen with RGB color. On a B&W screen each pixel can reflect the full white spectrum whereas only a fraction of the light is reflected by each subpixel on a RGB screen. Since the eye responsivity is logarithmic, the difference reduces rapidly with external lightning and in sunlight or good reading light the background appears white.

This said, both the whiteness and the viewing angle of the Kaleido screen are superior compared with previous reflective color screens, e.g. my old Mirasol screen. The Mirasol screen had better color saturation and fidelity if angled correctly but overall the experience of the Kaleido screen is far superior for reading. In sunlight or under a reading lamp with frontlight turned off, the image quality is in fact surprisingly good and the background of the Kaleido screen appears white with nice colors, ideally suited for comics. With good external lightning, the rastered soft colors of the Kaleido screen give the feeling of an old comics magazine.

With built-in frontlight on, the contrast suffers and color fidelity degrades. Already the lowest level of frontlight is sometimes too strong and I think the color reproduction during frontlight can be improved with frontlight LED phosphors with better Color Rendering Index and lower color temperature (2700 K). I prefer to read without frontlight and don´t really see the benefit compared to a LCD tablet to read with strong frontlight.

The 6¨ screen is small but still large enough to read comic magazines in landscape mode with the "fit width" option and custom margins, giving two pages per album page. It works smoothly with large enough text to be readable. I have this week reread six Tintin albums this way and it is great to be able to take them with me in the jacket pocket and read a little whenever there is time. For ordinary B&W books, the rastered RGB-screen degrades the contrast and sharpness significantly compared with the E Ink Carta and Pearl screens but again, in good external lighting conditions it is not a big issue.

The low power consumption and reasonable price of E Ink Kaleido paves the way for color e-books in the wait for new promising color e-paper technologies, e.g. ClearInk. According to Good e-Reader an improved version of Kaleido screen is under development. But second generation will not be released soon since E INK has confirmed to Good e-Reader that they will not be making a revision to color e-paper or Kaleido at all in 2021.

Finally, I find the user interface of the PocketBook Color mature, solid and intuitive with a generous selection of functions and e-book formats. You can adjust contrast, gamma, light, color saturation, margins, font and font size. The text to speech function works very well and you can download voices in many different languages. The music player has built-in equalizer, pitch and speed control. There is also a good web browser included, application to take notes and several games. You can also make colored notes directly in the book or magazine, regardless of format. The processor is a little bit slow but it keeps the power consumption low.

All in all, the PocketBook Color is much better than I expected, knowing the difficulties to make a reflective color screen. It is an excellent travel companion if you want to read both comics and books. If you only want to read ordinary books there are better alternatives with the e-ink Carta screen, e.g. Pocketbook touch HD3.