Pocketbook Color -- My First Reactions

[Neil]

Well, I now have a PB Color and have used it for two days, thought I would share my reaction here. And, maybe get some help with a question or two from the PB Color "old-timers."

First, I purchased it from Newegg. I was a little concerned with various complaints by Googling Newegg. But it seemed to me that if they really had it in stock most of the complaints were about how Newegg may not police their third-party sellers/shippers as does Amazon. In this case Newegg would be the shipper. Anyway, I rolled the dice and 'lo the PB Color arrived within five days of the order.

I immediately loaded up a few comics as they were the main reason I purchased the device. I wanted an ereader that does color so as to be able to read the comics in bright sunlight. At first, I was far, far less than impressed by the color. It did seem to be very low in saturation and was not at all like a printed page of color would look. However, the human eye is adaptable and after an hour or so I found the color to be more than acceptable. And, wow, it certainly beats black and white on a regular ereader. IMHO anyway.

My main problems with it so far have been how it handles collections and (probably) my own fat-headedness in understanding how the heck the Pocketbook Cloud is supposed to work.

As mentioned here it seems that you cannot choose more than one book at a time to add to a collection. That is just stupid. What I finally did was to side load the comics I wanted to carry into folders within their own COMICS folder. Then I can use the library function of viewing by folder and see the comic groupings I like. OK this was when I noticed the weird effects of syncing to the PB Cloud.

What would happen is when I read a comic it would then sync to the cloud. But it would sync so that on the cloud it was no longer with a cover graphic. Worse, once it had sync'd to the Cloud the listing of that comic in my PBC's folder view would then carry a cloud icon and rather than quickly loading from the actual copy of the comic in the folder it would download that comic from the cloud!

After some thought I realized there was actually not a reason in the world I could think of for me to use the Pocketbook Cloud. I have no other PB devices and would never use the PB app on my iPhone or my iPad instead of the far, far, far, far better Comic Zeal program So I turned off Cloud sync and even logged out of the Cloud. Now it all works as I had hoped but I cannot help wondering if I maybe should have not done it this way?

Anyway, there were a few other surprises. One was the many books included in non-English languages. First I was erasing them one by one but then I usb-mounted the divide and saw there were simply folders of various languages so I deleted all but the English folder. Very quick that way!

Then there are the "adjustments" in the settings view. What they do is anyone's guess. The contrast one is about the only one I am sure what it does. And it simply has very invisible to regular look and no real way to vary from, say, good to better. None of the adjustments are mentioned at all in the manual.

What the manual does talk about a LOT is the Frontlight and the Smartlight. This would be cool except as far as I can tell there is no Smartlight on the unit! The Frontlight is the brightness. The Smartlight according to the manual controls the color temperature. But, no, there is not a Smartlight I can find. The manual shows two swipe adjustments. But on my unit BOTH the swipe adjustments work for only simple brightness and not at all as the manual shows. Frustrating but, on the other hand, I really was not expecting anything but the frontlight anyway.

So, overall, this is what I expected. A revolutionary first-iteration of technology that will no doubt look pretty darn primitive in a year or so. But, for now, I am having un and do not regret purchasing.

[Nightflyer]

Thanks for sharing. Lot’s of info. Looking forward to impressions after some days and weeks and see if still having fun and not regret purchasing.

Another recent reviewer started out with “not really happy” with negative comments and nothing good, and totally made me lose interest in the Pocketbook Color. But now I’m interested again.

Almost like 2 different perspectives.

[DickeFix]

I have now tested and used the PocketBook Color extensively for a week and must say I am quite amazed both by the screen technology and the excellent operative system. It is true that at low light conditions without frontlight on, the background of the E Ink Kaleido color screen is not as white as on the E Ink Carta B&W screen. This degradation is inherent in any reflective screen with RGB color. On a B&W screen each pixel can reflect the full white spectrum whereas only a fraction of the light is reflected by each subpixel on a RGB screen. Since the eye responsivity is logarithmic, the difference reduces rapidly with external lightning and in sunlight or good reading light the background appears white.

This said, both the whiteness and the viewing angle of the Kaleido screen are superior compared with previous reflective color screens, e.g. my old Mirasol screen. The Mirasol screen had better color saturation and fidelity if angled correctly but overall the experience of the Kaleido screen is far superior for reading. In sunlight or under a reading lamp with frontlight turned off, the image quality is in fact surprisingly good and the background of the Kaleido screen appears white with nice colors, ideally suited for comics. With good external lightning, the rastered soft colors of the Kaleido screen give the feeling of an old comics magazine.

With built-in frontlight on, the contrast suffers and color fidelity degrades. Already the lowest level of frontlight is sometimes too strong and I think the color reproduction during frontlight can be improved with frontlight LED phosphors with better Color Rendering Index and lower color temperature (2700 K). I prefer to read without frontlight and don´t really see the benefit compared to a LCD tablet to read with strong frontlight.

The 6¨ screen is small but still large enough to read comic magazines in landscape mode with the "fit width" option and custom margins, giving two pages per album page. It works smoothly with large enough text to be readable. I have this week reread six Tintin albums this way and it is great to be able to take them with me in the jacket pocket and read a little whenever there is time. For ordinary B&W books, the rastered RGB-screen degrades the contrast and sharpness significantly compared with the E Ink Carta and Pearl screens but again, in good external lighting conditions it is not a big issue.

The low power consumption and reasonable price of E Ink Kaleido paves the way for color e-books in the wait for new promising color e-paper technologies, e.g. ClearInk. According to Good e-Reader an improved version of Kaleido screen is under development. But second generation will not be released soon since E INK has confirmed to Good e-Reader that they will not be making a revision to color e-paper or Kaleido at all in 2021.

Finally, I find the user interface of the PocketBook Color mature, solid and intuitive with a generous selection of functions and e-book formats. You can adjust contrast, gamma, light, color saturation, margins, font and font size. The text to speech function works very well and you can download voices in many different languages. The music player has built-in equalizer, pitch and speed control. There is also a good web browser included, application to take notes and several games. You can also make colored notes directly in the book or magazine, regardless of format. The processor is a little bit slow but it keeps the power consumption low.

All in all, the PocketBook Color is much better than I expected, knowing the difficulties to make a reflective color screen. It is an excellent travel companion if you want to read both comics and books. If you only want to read ordinary books there are better alternatives with the e-ink Carta screen, e.g. Pocketbook touch HD3.

[Neil]

I have been reading my comics in landscape as well. But I am having one slight problem that might involve the margins. Basically a page appears with the four panels at the top of the page. A little bit of the panels below do show. When I hit the Forward key the next four-panel block does appear but the blank comic margin below is cut off. So when next I press the four panels move up a little bit and a second press is required so as to turn the page. NOT a big problem but a little annoying. I have played with the margins but not really solved anything. Wonder if you have any tips on this as it sounds as if you did solve it. Thanks!

[DickeFix]

Yes, I had the same problem but fixed it by turning off the automatic margin trimming and instead manually cut away most of the lower margin.

[Neil]

I'll give that a shot, thank you! Are you using the Pocketbook Cloud at all? I had the weirdest thing with that. I side loaded about 100 comics in different folders in the library. So I just need to go to the library and choose a certain title's folder and there the comics are. But what happened was that every time I read a comic which has been side loaded it uploaded that comic to the PBCloud. Worse the next time I wanted to read that comic it then showed on the Pocketbook itself a Cloud icon and would download the file from the PBCloud instead of simply opening the still-present side-loaded file. Anyway, I turned off the cloud as I have no other PB devices and their IOS app is soooooooo bad it's not an issue.Do you use the cloud? Might I be missing something having turned it off? What fun! LOL

[DickeFix]

Thank you for sharing your strange experience with Pocketbook Cloud. I stay away from cloud services as a principle since I care about integrity and Intellectual Property Rights for both myself and the companies I collaborate with. Your story made me even more determined to not test Pocketbook Cloud.

The only firmware bug I have found is that the Pocketbook sometimes resets the selection of apps that you put on the frontpage after a restart. By long-pressing on a app icon on the frontpage you can exchange it for another app but after a restart it is back to the default apps.

Apart from that I am really satisfied with the Pocketbook Color. It is an amazing product. With good external lightning, it is a pleasure to read both comics and ordinary books. Once you have got used to color e-paper, the B&W e-paper feels hopelessly outdated, despite its higher contrast.

[the_rhino]

I know this is a slightly older thread now, but does the Pocketbook Color have an inverted mode for reading at night (black background/white text)? I have a Kindle Paperwhite with KOReader on it and I've grown quite accustomed to that feature.

[Neil]

Nope, no built-in inverted theme at all. I agree that would be great to have and that is how I use my other devices. I have eye floaters that can be annoying but they pretty much vanish when using white on black. I believe I read in the developer section here that it is possible to develop a hack or maybe an app to do this but it was talk about what could be possible and NOT anything like active development.

[the_rhino]

Originally Posted by Neil

Nope, no built-in inverted theme at all. I agree that would be great to have and that is how I use my other devices. I have eye floaters that can be annoying but they pretty much vanish when using white on black. I believe I read in the developer section here that it is possible to develop a hack or maybe an app to do this but it was talk about what could be possible and NOT anything like active development.

Thanks for the info. I might wait to pick one up then and stick with my Kindle for now.

[Neil]

Originally Posted by the_rhino

Thanks for the info. I might wait to pick one up then and stick with my Kindle for now.

Just to add -- I surely would NOT recommend the PB Color over ANY current Kindle for reading. The screen on the Color in B&W mode is nowhere near the whiteness or readability of anything from the Paperwhite through the Voyage up to the Oasis 2. I think the PB Color is highly fun for reading material that depend on color. It is a hoot to read comics on it, for example. But in my mind the PB Color is not in the same class as any current Kindle for reading a regular book.

[Neil]

Hi Julie --

I bought the Color PB mainly to read comic books in outdoor sunlight where tablets can get washed out while e-ink remains readable or even improves in readability in strong sunlight. That said, I think I would classify the PB Color as a work in progress and very unsophisticated in results. I do personally enjoy it as my review details. On the other hand, I would never recommend this product to a person who is looking simply for a way to read books with color pictures. Especially if, as most people, a good majority of the reading will be done indoors. And I think you also were concerned about eyestrain? From your message I would think you would be far better off with one of the Kindle Fire HD8 tablets. Or, if you could afford it, any Apple iPad. I think, for now, the PB Color is great fun for a person who owns other devices and enjoys working with new technology -- the geek factor. But for your needs: No, I do not think the PB Color would make you or your brother happy.

[rkomar]

What's wrong with using it indoors? I turn the front light on and it looks pretty good to me. There seem to be a few people who view the front light as cheating somehow, that the screen needs to be perfect using ambient light only, but I disagree with that. The front light is there for a purpose, to make the screen look good. Why not use it?

I agree that anyone that expects the equivalent of an LCD screen will be very disappointed in this technology, but it works fine for me viewing comics. It's certainly better than the comic books I grew up reading many decades ago.

[kkysnoopy]

I also owned a pocketbook Color and I thought it can install the same pbi Chinese voices but apparently all newer pocket book devices are now using ivona tts engine, ivona don’t have any Chinese tts and they don’t intend to have them in any near future, which I have sent email to pocketbook support. Therefore I cannot use the tts to read aloud but before I get this pocketbook Color to read them , I’m using my iPad to read text aloud but the iPad is heavy and reading them for hours makes my eyes watery and tired. Without the text to speech I cannot continue reading but I am desperate enough so I use the iPad pocketbook tts to read them aloud and I read the pocketbook Color . It’s stupid because I’m using 2 devices to do the same thing but reading too long with my iPad really makes my eyes watery and tired.

[Neil]

What iPad are you using? Have you ever looked at the Mini series? My wife has a Mini 4 and I have the Mini 5 and they are very light to hold and actually my favorite device for ereading. You can find very nice and pretty cheap used ones these days on the sites that specialize in those.