A color e-reader is a delight. Your digital bookshelf on a device like the Kindle Colorsoft becomes almost as colorful as the ones you have at home, and browsing through a sea of new titles on the shop side becomes much more engaging than a sea of black-and-white. It’s a great purchase if you read any books that might have illustrations on the pages, or if you like color highlights.
Amazon finally came out with color Kindles starting last year, but with the close-to-$300 price tag, we weren’t as impressed as we should have been. But right now, during Black Friday, you can get the colorful Kindle Colorsoft for almost as cheap as the black-and-white Kindle Paperwhite. While there are a ton of Kindle deals you can shop right now, this is easily the biggest one not to miss.
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Photograph: Nena Farrell
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Photograph: Nena Farrell
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Courtesy of Amazon
Amazon
Kindle Colorsoft and Colorsoft Signature Edition
There are two versions of the Colorsoft: The base model that came out this summer, and the Signature model that came out last year. Both are on sale right now. Both also did well in our tests (though the Signature is the one that had issues with yellow bars appearing on the bottom of the devices last year) and are mostly similar, but have a few key differences. The Signature Edition has an auto-adjusting warm light, while the basic Colorsoft has a warm light you can manually adjust. You’ll get twice as much storage on the Signature, too, with 32 GB over 16 GB, and the Signature can be wirelessly charged.
Other than those three features, though, both have the same 7-inch screen and resolution of 300 pixels-per-inch (or ppi) for black-and-white content and 150 ppi for color. They’re both waterproof, too. My only complaint is that the Dark Mode no longer turns menu pages dark, and doesn’t work on downloaded content like AZW3 documents (which are a special ebook style formatted specifically for Kindles).
Overall, it’s a great e-reader, just pricey, especially since you aren’t getting things like page-turner buttons or the ability to double as a digital notebook like you can with Kobo’s colorful e-readers. If you’re a Kindle enthusiast, though, this is truly the best time to buy.
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