E Ink's Kaleido 4 brings richer color and video to future e-readers

Kaleido is E Ink's main color e-paper technology. The current version, Kaleido 3, is inside e-readers and tablets from Kobo, PocketBook and Boox, The Verge reports. Amazon's Kindle Colorsoft uses a customized version.

Here's how it works. An ordinary e-paper panel has only black and white pigments. Kaleido lays a color filter over that panel, a bit like a stained-glass window on top of a newspaper.

That approach has a clear upside and a few downsides, according to The Verge:

• Speed: the screen refreshes fast, so turning pages feels quick.
• Color quality: colors show at a lower resolution than text and tend to look washed out.
• Text: the filter makes plain black and white text look darker than on a regular e-reader.

So color e-readers have always asked you to trade a little text clarity for color.

E Ink is the company behind the paper-like screens in most e-readers. It's based on technology from MIT's Media Lab and is listed on Taiwan's Taipei Exchange, according to its announcement.

Its screens go well beyond books. E Ink lists e-readers and e-notes, electronic shelf labels in stores, digital signs and connected gadgets among its uses. The big selling point is low power: an e-paper screen only uses energy when the image changes.

E Ink lists four main upgrades over the previous generation:

• Color: double the color gamut volume, to more than 40K colors.
• Brightness: white reflectance up 15%, so the page looks whiter.
• Contrast: up 50%.
• Motion: video playback at up to 18 frames per second, thanks to new algorithms.

E Ink says these changes also reduce how grainy the screen looks. The 50% contrast jump could matter most, because it targets the muddy text that has always been Kaleido's weak spot. The Verge makes the same point: brighter whites and stronger contrast should help plain text look cleaner.

Even doubled, the palette is far from a phone's. The Verge notes that modern LCD and OLED screens show millions of colors, and Kaleido 4 still shows color at a lower resolution than text.

Yes, slowly. E Ink says Kaleido 4 can play video at up to 18 frames per second.

Engadget puts that in perspective. It sounds tiny next to the 120Hz OLED screen in your phone. But e-paper is usually so slow that 18 fps is a real change.

The speed comes from a new oxide TFT backplane. That's the grid of tiny switches behind the screen that tells each dot what to do. E Ink says it supports higher driving voltages and faster refreshes.

Amazon made a similar change in the original Kindle Colorsoft, both The Verge and Engadget note.

The speed shows up in everyday use too. On the first Kaleido 4 device, E Ink and its partner say page turning and scrolling are 27% faster. That's the part you'd feel every time you flip a page or scroll a PDF, long before you ever try a video.

In real life If you read comics or cookbooks on a color e-reader, Kaleido 4 should make the pictures look less faded. If you mostly read novels, the bigger win is text that looks closer to black on white.

E Ink also makes Gallery 3, a different color technology. Instead of a filter, it moves actual colored pigments around to form images. The reMarkable Paper Pro uses it.

Gallery 3 produces richer images and text, Engadget says. The catch is speed: it refreshes slowly, which The Verge says can feel frustrating to use.

That's why Kaleido stays the popular choice. It's like choosing between a fast sketch and a slow oil painting. Most people want the page to turn now.

Hanvon Technology, a leader in China's e-reader market, is first. Its M10C II smart e-paper notebook is the world's first product with Kaleido 4, E Ink says. It's available only in China.

What the M10C II offers, according to E Ink's announcement:

• Speed: page turning and scrolling 27% faster, using the new backplane plus Hanvon's "Enhanced Pressure Floating" technology and T2000 timing controller.
• Light: a redesigned front light for more natural color.
• Pen: a wireless, battery-free pen with 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity.
• Glass: micro-etched tempered glass that cuts glare and parallax and feels more like paper when you write.
• Software: OCR, voice and AI office apps, cloud library syncing, ripple reduction, better scaling for third-party apps and better font rendering.

"Color ePaper needs to deliver more than simply 'color,'" said Johnson Lee, Chairman and CEO of E Ink. He said the two companies want to expand color e-paper into "professional reading, learning and mobile office scenarios."

Wang Jie, Vice President of Hanvon Technology, called the launch "not simply a screen upgrade." He said Hanvon tuned the display, fast refresh, handwriting, recording and AI features together. The goal, in his words, is to take color e-paper "beyond reading devices" and into work like R&D tools, document review and meeting notes.

Nobody has said. Amazon and Kobo haven't announced any Kaleido 4 devices, The Verge reports.

The big picture: E Ink is pitching Kaleido 4 for more than books. Its announcement says e-paper is moving from e-books into classrooms and offices, where people read color PDFs, slide decks, data charts, school illustrations and engineering drawings. For that, E Ink says, color e-paper has to balance color, brightness, contrast and clarity.

What's next: don't expect a rush. The eBook Reader notes that it usually takes device makers a year or two to move to a new screen generation, and some keep selling the old one.

It also points out that Amazon doesn't name E Ink screen generations in its Kindle specs. So even if a future Kindle uses Kaleido 4, the box might not say so. Amazon's announcement for the new Kindle Colorsoft promised "a completely redesigned display" with higher contrast, but The eBook Reader thinks it's most likely not a Kaleido 4 screen. Our coverage of Amazon's redesigned Kindle lineup has the latest Colorsoft details.

Engadget adds that the real test is a side-by-side comparison with older Kaleido screens, which reviewers haven't done yet. The eBook Reader saw early comparison photos from China and said the difference looked hard to spot, though the photos themselves weren't very good.

• No rush to upgrade: no Kaleido 4 e-reader is sold outside China yet.
• Better text on color screens: 50% more contrast could close the gap with black and white e-readers.
• Richer pictures: comics, magazines and charts should look less faded.
• Wait for reviews: spec sheets are promising, but side-by-side tests will tell how big the change really is.