Amazon’s 16GB Kindle Colorsoft is less than a month old, but it’s already on sale for $219.99 ($30 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. Meanwhile, the new Colorsoft Kids — which includes a 12-month subscription to Amazon Kids Plus, a two-year extended warranty, and a cover-style case — has been discounted to $239.99 ($30 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. Both ad-free e-readers feature a seven-inch color E Ink display, IPX8 waterproofing, and a battery that can last up to eight weeks on a single charge.
The 16GB Colorsoft is Amazon’s newest color e-reader, and it has many of the same features found on last year’s Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition. It offers the same page turn speeds and works well when reading both monochrome and color books; however, like with the step-up model, the resolution drops from 300ppi to 150ppi when reading books in color, which was noticeable but not a dealbreaker in our testing. Viewing PDFs in color on the Signature Edition via the Send to Kindle service worked well enough, too, but transferring them from a computer via USB-C stripped their color.
Overall, Amazon’s entry-level Colorsoft is the best color e-reader in its price range. If you love reading graphic novels or books with a lot of illustrations, you’ll get a much richer experience compared to reading the same titles on a monochrome Kindle (it also won’t irritate your eyes as much as staring at a phone or tablet screen). That being said, you do lose some features when stepping down from the Signature Edition, including support for wireless charging and an auto-adjusting front light. The Signature Edition also has twice the storage (32GB) and supposedly an extra four weeks of battery life, though we haven’t used the entry-level model long enough to confirm the latter.