Amazon Announces Kindle Colorsoft

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

So native PDF support is gone?

PDF oddly appears in both lists!

[pdurrant]

I've added a link to a first look on Youtube to the first post:

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Mansoul

https://www.techradar.com/tablets/er...lorsoft-review

This article suggests its new colour tech.

I have no idea what filtering colors with nitride LEDs even means.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

So native PDF support is gone?

Originally Posted by pdurrant

PDF oddly appears in both lists!

Missed that. I guess that has to do with what happens when a PDF is "sent to" a Scribe.

I've never "sent" anything to a kindle via amazon. What has traditionally happened when a personal PDF document has been "sent" to a kindle? (Where "sent" includes "email".)

I know from reading that PDFs "sent" to Scribes get converted to some proprietary amazon format.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I have no idea what filtering colors with nitride LEDs even means.

The wavelength of light emitted by nitride LEDs can be finely tuned. It's possible that the new LEDs emit light at wavelengths to match the dyes in the colour filter layer, which might be more efficient than generic white LEDs.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I have no idea what filtering colors with nitride LEDs even means.

Looking at another video, it's referred to the light, not the color itself.

[Dazrin]

From PCMag:

As is fairly typical for E Ink, the color is pretty muted. The screen is lit by nitride LEDs that Amazon claims improve the visual color performance of the panel. But even at the most vibrant setting, the colors of Ms. Marvel and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics look about as saturated as newsprint. The colors are definitely there and discernible, but nowhere close to a glossy magazine or an LCD. That said, the color seems to be on par with other ereaders we've tested, like the ReMarkable Paper Pro and the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C, and comics look much better than they do when shown in grayscale.

The Colorsoft's screen is very fast. It feels maybe a hair slower than the new Paperwhite when showing monochrome material like text. Color is a little slower than that, but even then, the screen changes rapidly. It flashes on every color page turn to fully reset, something that doesn't happen with text alone.

So, conflicting reports on the color / vibrancy with some saying it's better than standard Kaleido quality and other saying it's about the same. Maybe this has faster page turning though? Way too early to tell I think.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The wavelength of light emitted by nitride LEDs can be finely tuned. It's possible that the new LEDs emit light at wavelengths to match the dyes in the colour filter layer, which might be more efficient than generic white LEDs.

Thanks, that makes sense.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But remember, the Kobo Clara Colour uses the crappy Kaleido 3 overlay.

This is the first time Kobo will be far behind the Kindle. The color Kindle is going to be much better then the color Kobo Libra.

Jon, perhaps a remedial reading course in order? To quote from the Colorsoft's detail listing:

Amazon's 7” Colorsoft display technology with built-in light, 300 ppi B&W, 150 ppi color, optimized font technology, 16-level gray scale.

The 300 ppi B&W and 150 ppi tells you this is a Kaleido 3 display. The Gallery 3 displays are simply 300 ppi regardless of colour use.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by BionicGecko

I think the sentence "The Kindle has a 6" screen" in the announcement refers to the basic Kindle, whose official name is simply "Kindle". The Colorsoft screen does look to be around 7" on the picture.

And the amazon tradition of confusing model nomenclature lives on.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Amazon is saying that the Colorsoft battery will last 56 hours with reading 1 hour a day with the light at 13.

Battery Life: A single charge lasts up to 8 weeks, based on half an hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at 13. Battery life may vary depending on use. Audible audiobook streaming over Bluetooth will reduce battery life.

Ummm... 8 weeks is 56 days. Reading half an hour per day is the specified reading time which you quoted. So 56 x 0.5 is 28 not 56.

Your local school system is likely to offer remedial reading and math classes...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

So native PDF support is gone?

PDF appears in both the native and conversion groups.

[DNSB]

I was reading the TechRadar article and was getting very confused since the author seems to have little knowledge of any ereaders other than Amazon's products. And then there were items that read as sheer bunkum. Anyone able to translate the first sentence of the following paragraph into a comprehensible form?

The 4000-color capabilities come by way of a filter co-developed with E Ink that uses Nitride LEDs to assign pixel-level colors. This is in contrast to the color E Ink Gallery 3 display on the new Remarkable Pro, which uses colored particles to generate on-screen colors.

It's a physical technology where tiny black and white balls are energized to turn to the black or white side to generate an image.

It turns out that the oxide backplane and Nitride LEDs were also crucial to maintaining the contrast. "The [color] filter pulls down the contrast ratio a little bit," Kieth told me, "and we were able to use the backplane and the LEDS to boost the contrast back up. If we hadn't done that, it would dramatically make the reading experience worse."

This one, to me, translates as the Nitride LEDs allow us a brighter frontlight to compensate for the Kaleido 3 screen's colour filter.

Keith told me the Nitride LEDs are more color-friendly than the white LEDs used on previous Kindles. "Then we use these coatings to focus the light through individual pixels instead of mixing colors together. The Nitride LEDS are key to that but it's also with these coatings that they put through the display stack that enables the focus to happen." Put another way, Keith explained, it's focusing the light through individual pixels of color instead of just a spray that mixes color together.

Sorry but that paragraph reads as "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". They are focusing coloured LEDs through each individual pixel on an eInk screen? On displays which are notorious for being opaque and so need a front light, Amazon is shining light through the display? As it is, I'm trying to visualize a light guide that is able to deliver red, green and blue light to the individual colour filters.

[Frogm4n]

I'm guessing that they can control the wavelengths (as pdurrant mentioned) and that the new/updated layers have been tuned for the refractive index of those wavelengths. The lightguide gel layer might be better tuned to better focus the light up and down instead of just kinda going up and down.

[binaryhermit]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Sorry but that paragraph reads as "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". They are focusing coloured LEDs through each individual pixel on an eInk screen? On displays which are notorious for being opaque and so need a front light, Amazon is shining light through the display? As it is, I'm trying to visualize a light guide that is able to deliver red, green and blue light to the individual colour filters.

Selectively depending on what's on the screen, presumably.