[cellaris]

Talking about colour e-readers seems to spark passions. There is no thread in which they are mentioned that does not end up in such confrontational discussions.

Honestly, I can't understand how in a thread about 10" e-readers, colour e-readers can be omitted or dismissed, not least because there are not too many options to choose from and the vast majority of the devices available have a resolution of 227 dpi. Not even with all the technical and theoretical hype can one hide the fact that a colour e-reader is a very good (but also very expensive) option in this 10" segment. And I think there are already more than enough reviews available (many of which compare with other monochrome devices) to give us an idea of what their screens look like in reality.

I think there is an important subjective component in any evaluation. There are users in this forum who, having in their hands a Kindle Scribe (300 dpi) and a Kobo Elipsa 2E (227 dpi), have preferred the Kobo Elipsa 2E and have argued that it looks better. "Theoretically" I may disagree (how is an e-reader with lower resolution going to look better?) but I have no objection to their personal assessment, which is ultimately the one that matters. It is this subjective component that I find missing in the assessment of colour e-readers. There is too much theoretical assessment and not enough practical perspective. Theoretically you can argue indisputably that an image with 300 ppi looks better than one with 150 ppi, but you cannot understand how the contribution of the different colours to that image gives you a more satisfactory overall result (for example, the image of a book cover or the cartoon of a comic book). And it's the same with a text. You cannot understand how you can like a colour text better, with only 150 ppi, if you do not visualise the additional information provided by the different colours that appear in that text (for example, in a Wikipedia article or in a dictionary query, where several colours are combined to give you a more complete final result even with half the resolution). That practical experience, with its strong subjective component, is what I miss in assessments that focus on purely theoretical aspects. No matter how much someone tells me (with all the weight of theory) that black and white images look better because they have a higher resolution, I will still prefer to see the covers of a book in colour. And no matter how much someone insists (with all the reason in the world) that the colour of an e-reader is rubbish compared to that of a tablet, I will still prefer to read a comic book on a colour e-reader rather than a monochrome one because I think (subjectively) it looks better.