Kindle Scribe Colorsoft review: is colour worth the premium?

Colour is the whole reason this model exists, so let me be straight about it. E Ink colour is reflective, not backlit, so it looks like good newspaper colour rather than a glossy screen. Even in the "Vivid" setting the colours are gentle, and at low brightness the screen looks a little darker and grainier than the crisp monochrome Scribe. I keep the front light at around 40% or higher when I read in colour, and it looks its best in a well-lit room.

That sounds like a takedown, and it isn't, because in the right content colour earns its place. Comic and manga pages look great, cookbooks finally show the food, and seeing book covers in colour on the home screen is a small daily pleasure that matters more to me than I expected. Just go in knowing colour on E Ink is about usefulness and calm, not saturation.

After a few months, my colour reading falls into clear buckets. Comics, manga and webtoons are the strongest case, with the big 11-inch screen showing a full page comfortably. Cookbooks and illustrated non-fiction are the next best, where colour photos and diagrams genuinely help. Children's and picture books are lovely to share. For plain novels, honestly, I reach for the mono Scribe or my Paperwhite, because black text is sharper and the battery lasts longer.

One niggle worth knowing: you still cannot highlight or annotate inside comics and manga, which feels like a missed trick on a device that is both a reader and a notebook.

The writing hardware is the same lovely Premium Pen as the mono Scribe, and here colour adds something real: when you write or highlight in colour, the ink appears in its final colour instantly, with no refresh flash. If you have tried colour writing on a reMarkable, where the stroke fills in a beat later with a flash, you will feel the difference at once. I colour-code my notes and annotate PDFs in a few shades, and it feels natural.

The rest of the note experience matches the Scribe, for better and worse. There are ten pen colours, five highlighter colours and a nice new Shader tool for soft, watercolour-like fills. But it is still the Scribe's simple notebook app, with the same fussy Active Canvas for writing inside books, no layers and basic templates. If serious note-taking is your goal, this does not change the reMarkable's advantage.

This is the clearest cost of colour. The Colorsoft's battery is weaker than other Kindles, and colour content pulls it down faster. Light reading still stretches to a couple of weeks, but with daily writing and colour I charge it far more often than my mono Scribe, and charging is not especially fast. It is not a dealbreaker, but if the month-long Kindle battery is part of why you want an e-reader, know that colour costs you some of it.

They are the same as the mono Scribe, so I will keep this short. The handwriting search that indexes my notes is the one I actually use and it is genuinely handy, if occasionally hit-or-miss. Note summaries, "Story So Far", "Ask this Book" and sending notes to Alexa are all present and all fine rather than essential. None of them are a reason to choose the Colorsoft over the mono Scribe.

If you remember headlines about a yellow strip on a Kindle Colorsoft, that was the small colour Kindle e-reader from 2024, not this Scribe Colorsoft. Some early units showed a yellow band along the bottom of the screen, Amazon acknowledged it, paused shipping and issued a fix and replacements. I looked for it specifically on my Scribe Colorsoft and did not see it, and the major reviews of this model do not report it. I would still inspect a new unit in its return window, as you should with any screen, but this is not the 2024 situation.

The Colorsoft costs a clear premium over the mono Scribe with a front light, and the Premium Pen is included in both. That premium is the whole decision, because the two devices are otherwise the same 11-inch body, pen and software. My honest rule: pay for colour only if you will actually read or mark up in colour. If your reading is mostly black text and your notes are mostly black ink, the mono Scribe looks sharper, lasts longer and saves you money. If comics, cookbooks, illustrated books or multi-colour highlighting are a real part of your week, the Colorsoft is worth it.

The Premium Pen is included, so your first buy is a folio to protect the screen and prop it up. The Colorsoft comes in Graphite and a softer Fig shade; it is purely cosmetic, so pick whichever you like. Keep spare nibs, and choose 32 GB or 64 GB up front if you keep big comic or PDF libraries, since storage is not expandable.