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Color PDFs and comics almost always assume good, full gamut color reproduction. e-ink can't do that. It can only do a few pastel colors well.

The typical books usage is much more in-line with the capabilities of the display. Highlighting is substantially improved with even a little color, as are interstitial art and cover icons.

The E-Ink Spectra 6 displays [1] released last year has full color gamut, thus beating any other display technology in an outdoors scenario. The problem is that they take something like 12 seconds to refresh and I haven't seen any consumer devices using them.

In the near future I think spectra displays will be excellent for readers when they manage to get the refresh a bit more speedy, while ironically the B&W displays with color filters will be the E-Ink technology suited for tablets and phones in general.

[1] https://youtu.be/U7V2EFAcbtU

Will it be good enough for, say, graphs? A lot of scientific papers and news articles have illegible figures when reproduced in black and white, because you can't tell the lines apart.

Depends on the graph and newspaper. The best case scenario is a desaturated version of old print newspapers. Their DPI was near this screen's DPI (200 vs 150) and it'll suffer from the same problem of losing low contrast details. You won't be reading rendering papers, but it'll probably help a basic line graph.

Any color at all would be invaluable for diagrams, schematics, graphs/plots and other reference material where different subsystems, pipes/cables, datasets, etc are distinguished by color.

I suspect the iPad will remain the best option for stuff like RPG books. It's relatively cheap, the screen is large, it's fast and responsive, etc. It's not pleasant for reading in a dark room, but otherwise it's close to the ideal.

> The main benefit of a color eReader is for (some) PDFs, comics, etc., all of which benefit hugely from a larger screen than the Libra's 7" display. I hoped Kobo's first color reader would be at least 8", and preferably 10.3"

Same. I'm visually impaired, which means I use large print for my reflowable content. I'd love to read comics or PDFs of print magazines, but for that I'll need a display that's larger than what those are normally printed on!

Afaict there are no decent vendors offering genuinely large color e-readers— just some GPL violators' whose devices run Android.

If I can't get a super-magazine-sized e-ink display for fixed-layout content, the next best thing would be a very large one that I can put in landscape mode and fit to width, scrolling only vertically. That wouldn't be too bad, especially if refresh speed is okay-ish. For that, though, I'd still prefer something larger than my Clara 2E (which I love).

Their 10' model is already over 350EUR in price, adding a colour screen to it, it would make it too expensive to have mass appeal. I suspect the next models, which will probably be a Sage 2 and an Elipsa 3 will be what you want, after they whet the appetite of regular readers. Hopefully they'll have a next iteration of the colour screens also. :D

There are other makers that have larger color e-ink displays, such as Boox.