[compurandom]

I was forced to replace my forma (32G) and the only 32G option was the Libra Color. I've been using it for a week, so here's my review...

I find the color on the libra surprisingly good. It's been a pleasure to have it.
I wouldn't say it's photo quality good enough to hang on the wall, but it really looks good. For reference, one of my news feeds is APOD, and I was just reading the articles on my B&W forma, but on the Libra color, the pictures are not as good as on my computer, but they are enjoyable enough that I don't skip them anymore.

Lot of people have complained about contrast issues on the color. I use my device in many different lighting settings and I've noticed the contrast difference strongly.

In direct bright sunlight, it looks great. Contrast is fine -- but in this situation too good of a contrast can be blindingly bright.

In partial sunlight, I find the screen too dark, and in situations where I previously would have run with no light I find myself wanting to turn up the brightness, and with outside lighting, sometimes I can't quite get it bright enough.

Inside, even with the brightness turned up, I find the contrast to be not nearly as good as the B&W devices, but it's still comfortable to read, just the contrast difference is noticeable and turning up the brightness just makes it brighter without fixing the contrast. Some B&W pictures that looked good before are dark and muddy on the Libra Color. (But since I use the device for reading, this is disappointing but not a big deal.)

In the past, I've had a few documents (pdf, epub) that annoyingly set background colors. Some of those were completely unreadable on the B&W device and I had to go in and edit the document and remove the background color if I could or just read them on a computer when I couldn't. I've gone back to some of these documents for testing purposes. and I find the background color still annoying, but it is at least readable and doesn't make me want to abandon reading the document on the device.

So in summary, I definitely find the contrast of the color device to be noticeably worse than the B&W devices, but not bad enough to return it or abandon reading documents with it. Increasing brightness only helps up to a point. The color itself while not as good as a typical LCD monitor is still very good.

Overall, I'd say the tradeoff of poorer B&W contrast vs. color that gives contrast that didn't exist before in color documents is a worthy trade off and increases the range of documents I feel comfortable reading on the device without making any unreadable.