Now that Kobo has jumped on the color E Ink bandwagon with the release of the Kobo Libra Colour, people are asking how the new color models compare to the regular models with black and white E Ink screens, so I put together a comparison video showing just that.
I also talk about some of the differences between the Libra Colour and Libra 2, like Kobo switching to a dual-core processor on the new model, and how they added support for dual-band WiFi, and how they increased the size of the battery.
The Libra Colour also adds stylus support, giving you the option to write directly on ebooks and create notebooks. Kobo says it works with the Kobo Stylus 2, but I found out it also works with the older version, and other MPP styli should work too.
The Design
For the most part, the Libra Colour and Libra 2 share the same design and most of the same features outside of the screen difference.
They did refine the design some on the Libra Colour. It’s a bit thinner and lighter than the Libra 2, and the handle side is more rounded now and feels more comfortable to hold.
One key difference, the newer Kobos are repairable so you can buy replacement parts if they break.
The Screens
The main difference between the two devices is the screen. The Kobo Libra 2 has a regular black and white E Ink Carta 1200 screen, and I consider it the best screen on modern ereaders because it has really good contrast and an even frontlight. It’s a 7-inch screen with 300 ppi.
The Kobo Libra Colour has color E Ink screen, called Kaleido 3, and it’s also 7-inches with 300 ppi, except color content is reduced to 150 ppi. Kaledio screens are really just regular black and white screens with a passive color filter over the top so color resolution can’t match black and white resolution.
Because of the added filter layer, color E Ink screens look darker than regular BW screens, so you tend to need the frontlight set higher to achieve a similar look. You can also see the grid of the color layer if you look closely; it kind of adds a subtle texture to the white parts of the screen.
Text is easily readable on both screens, but the background color does have a darker appearance on the Libra Colour so the text doesn’t quite pop as much as on the Libra 2, and of course colors aren’t as bright and vibrant as LCD screens—color E Ink has more of a printed newspaper look.
Each screen type has drawbacks so it just comes down to what’s most important to you, better contrast and a clearer screen, or good contrast with color and a bit of added visual noise with the filter layer.
It’s zoom feature is astonishingly snappy. It being Linux based as in Pocketbook, I don’t know why the former is so slow. Bad programming?
Yeah, Pocketbooks have always felt slower to me than other brands, but they’re getting better. The first gen InkPad Color was really slow.
I noticed one stylus feature not present in my Elipsa (first version): the option to adjust not just the pen/highlight colour but also the pen size.
My Elipsa (obviously) doesn’t have the option to change the colour, but surprisingly it doesn’t have the option to change the pen size either while annotating a book, although there are several pen sizes (and types, and shades) when annotating inside a notebook. I wonder if the Elipsa 2E or any other stylus-supporting readers have the pen size option?
Of course, I can understand why there might be less support since saving fancy styles to a dedicated notebook format is very different from saving them on top of an existing ebook format. Now that they’ve figured it out though, and given their track record of releasing new feature updates to older devices, I’m hoping to see the pen size option come to my device too!
Speaking of the Libra models, I’m actually attracted to the Libra Colour more because of the stylus than because of the colour. screen. A Libra BW with stylus support would be awesome. Regarding colour screens, this video was helpful and so were a bunch of others I’ve come across online, but of course due to the limitations of photography nothing can beat actually seeing a colour ereader in person 😛 I suspect I’d find the lack of contrast negligible, but I can’t say for sure.
I forgot other Kobos don’t have the option to change the line size when writing on ebooks; I bet the next update adds that to the other models as well. It’s a shame Kobo doesn’t sell these in retail stores because it really does help to see color E Ink in person.
They look good enough for prime-time to me. A trade off of great contrast vs. some color. It looks like color readers, in some form, are here to stay. If Kobo brings out a similar unit 8 to 10 inches in size, I will get one.
Great video; you cover a lot in a short period of time and manage not to seem rushed.
I was wondering if you have compared the color calibration between the Kaleido 3 models you may have on-hand from other brands? There was some drama over on the Kobo subreddit when someone posted about the Pocketbook Inkpad Color 3 looking more vibrant than the Libra Colour and got banned.
There have also been people posting about individual Colour units of the same model having different saturation (similar to the variation in frontlighting we are used to on B&W devices like you mentioned in the video). Some users are even messing around with the ifixit guide: “How to Calibrate a Kobo eReader Display”.
It all made me wonder about how other models compare and why there is so much variation between devices using Kaleido 3 screens.
I have a couple old models laying around with previous gen Kaleido screens, but not any with Kaleido 3 screens so I can’t compare them. People were saying the same thing about the original InkPad Color and Onyx’s color models in the past, so there is some variance depending on how they set things up software-wise.