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Comment by BoingBoomTschak | Hacker News Reader

Still nothing for people who don't care about the color gimmick? I mean my Aura One is still going strong, but I fear it'll never be replaced by something better (or even as good).

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Once I saw that Kobo was going all in on the color e-readers I decided I'm going to sit this whole trend out and bought another Aura One. Between it and the one I currently own they should carry me for a long, long time.

The Aura One is essentially perfect. The only gripes I have are the USB port and non-removable battery. It is a bit slow with the stock OS but with KOreader it runs amazingly well.

I'm in the exact same situation, still rocking an Aura One with KOReader and can't find anything with that form factor in black/white that satisfies me.

There's something to be said with a device that has a single purpose and supports custom firmware: other than the micro-USB port and the slightly shorter battery charge I don't think I will be changing it soon.

I also have a kobo aura one and was just recently researching potential upgrades and was shocked even looking outside of strictly kobo that I couldn't find anything that was a clear upgrade or equivalent on various features against it. For a product almost ten years old it's so weird.

I Started with an Aura One, it was my very first eink device. When it died about a year ago, I bought a Kindle Scribe thinking I was getting an Aura, but with a larger screen.

B/W only, thin in the hand, simple interface, PDF transfer via USB.

Its a luxury, but not a gimmick IMHO. My last real use case for my color laser is printing out papers with lots of graphs/diagrams that use color. The kindle scribe color looks cool but needs to at least halve in price before I start really considering it. I might even give textbooks a go on it, I prefer paper, but they are often so heavy, it might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

I think most go this route for comics, graphic novels and some read magazines on it. Niche, but not a gimmick.

Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.

Color ink remains a niche in books.

Perhaps revisiting what "gimmick" means would help you. Plenty of people use their e-ink readers to look at magazines, comics, news. Plenty of people have a highlighting system. Arguing that color is a "gimmick" is silly considering there are practical applications of color, as we can see around us in the real world. Some of you are seriously living in the weirdest of bubbles.

Biology spent a ton of time adapting and evolving for the ability to see color but sure, it's a gimmick. I guess you should consider syntax highlighting a gimmick in code editors as well? Charts/graphs in textbooks use color as a gimmick, any book that include illustrations/images in color are gimmicks

Pal, I’m not the one who used the word. I am observing that books are predominantly black ink in white paper, despite color ink being around before the printing press.

It comes with a massive loss of contrast so it's a bit of a gimmick, yeah.

That doesn't mean it's a gimmick. Again, I implore you to actually look up what "gimmick" means. Just because there's a tradeoff doesn't mean that it's a gimmick. In fact, the very issue that you're talking about is something that is improving from Kaleido 3 to Kaleido 4. So even people that use this argument have something to take note of in this release.

When we went from black & white photography to color photography we also introduced a lot of tradeoffs. Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?

> Would you have considered color photography a gimmick ?

It sucked or was massively inconvenient for the first 50+ years.

I own color eInk tablet(s) and BW readers so I'm very well aware what the usability and tradeoffs are.

Right now - on smaller devices focused on books like 6-8" Kobo/Kindle devices this is primarily a gimmick used for book covers and perhaps some text highlights at best. That's what makes it a gimmick, especially since it comes with such a massive loss of contrast that you need to drive the backlight at 90-100% during the day to get readable experience out of it.

And I'm happy that Kaleido 4 improves this (it's one of the things I'm most excited with for my 10" Boox where color screen is much more useful), but even with 50% improvement the contrast is still significantly worse than on the BW readers, making the experience of reading normal books a significant downgrade in exchange for some color front covers.

Your comparisons to TV are just inane, the tradeoffs aren't even remotely similar. Noone is clamoring for rainbow letters on their Kindle.

So you're purposefully ignoring comics, news, magazines to make your point? Just because you don't read them doesn't make it a gimmick.

> that you need to drive the backlight at 90-100% during the day

Well, okay that's objectively false and anybody that has used one or owns one can tell you this.

For pure reading of text it provides minimal benefit (color highlighting and cover art, mostly) while costing contrast ratio and dollars. Especially since some devices (e.g. Kobo Libra) are now offered only with a color display, I can see why someone would call it a gimmick. I personally view the reflectivity of eink as the entire point and thus have no interest in it.

That said, of course if you want to view color content on an EPD then it is quite necessary and not a gimmick at all.

Even when your book is mostly B/W text, sometimes it may contain color content (Like illustration, or graph). This is 1 of pet peeve i have with monochrome eink.

If they used the TV mainly to read black and white text they probably would have considered it a gimmick yes

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