What Is a Kaleido Color E-Paper Display?
E Ink displays have been around for decades, but displays with color are only just starting to arrive. These come in different types, with Kaleido getting the most traction so far. You can find it on very capable e-ink Android tablets like the Boox Tab Ultra C.
Color e-paper differs both from LCDs and conventional black and white e-ink. Here’s how Kaleido works and what you can expect if you purchase a color e-paper device.
What Is E-Ink?
Nowadays, we are surrounded by screens. Most are backlit and radiate light into a room like light bulbs. This light shines directly into your eyes, causing a kind of eyestrain you don’t get from reading paper.
Electronic ink, or e-ink, is one of thevarious display technologies that emulate paper. Rather than using light to illuminate pixels, an e-ink display consists of negatively-charged black particles and positively-charged white particles. An electric field shifts these particles around to form images and text.
While e-ink has appeared on objects ranging from signage to phones toe-ink-covered concept cars, people are most accustomed to seeing the display type on e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle.
The most common e-ink technology is branded as E Ink and comes from the E Ink Corporation.
How Color E-Ink Differs from Black & White
Most e-ink devices have emphasized plain text, and people have purchased e-readers primarily to need digital books. Only much later did we begin to seee-ink note-taking devices like reMarkablebegin to take off, as well as deliberately minimalist phones like the Light Phone 2. Both of these devices used black and white e-ink.
Color e-paper enables different functions. Full-color e-readers let readers enjoy magazines, digital books, and web browsing. Artists can also use e-ink tablets to create full-color drawings. Note-takers also benefit from highlighting and organizing text in multiple colors.
As for the technical differences, like black and white displays, color e-ink isn’t backlit and utilizes physical particles moved by electric fields. How color enters the picture differs based on the type of color e-paper.
Kaleido is one of two types developed by the E Ink Corporation. The other is known as Gallery. Both have pros and cons, but Kaleido has appeared on more devices.
How Kaleido Works
Kaleido combines a traditional black-and-white e-ink panel with a color filter array. This adds the additional colors of red, green, and blue. These can be mixed or with black and white to create a total of 4,096 colors.
Kaleido works in conjunction with an E Ink Carta display, the latter capable in 2023 of displaying 16 shades of gray at 300 points per inch. After adding color using Kaleido, PPI (pixels per inch) drops to 150.
Kaleido devices switch seamlessly between color and monochromatic modes. If you are looking at an e-book’s cover or a colorful PDF page, it will display at 150 PPI. If you turn the page and everything is black and white, the device will switch back to 300 PPI. All of this happens automatically, without you needing to press any buttons or alter settings.
While Kaleido enables the enjoyment of more media types, the drop in PPI isn’t the only downside. Kaleido screens have been dimmer than their black and white counterparts, reducing contrast and requiring more lighting.
The Different Versions of Kaleido
There have been several iterations of Kaleido over just a few years, with each release making the technology more viable.
Below is the timeline of Kaleido up to the present:
How Kaleido Differs From Other Color Displays
The first color e-paper from E Ink was the E Ink Triton 1. This could display the same number of colors as Kaleido, but the colors were less vibrant. Perhaps more importantly, the refresh rate was much lower, and ghosting was more of an issue.
Ghosting is a phenomenon wherein what’s displayed on-screen changes, but signs of the previous image or words remain visible. E-readers must force a complete screen refresh after a certain number of page turns to physically reset all the particles and remove ghosting. The issue can be distracting when reading an e-book, but it can completely ruin colorful content like photos.
This is where alternatives might offer a better experience, such as Gallery.
Gallery is a modern alternative to Kaleido. Produced by the E Ink Corporation, Gallery uses different color particles instead of a color filter atop a monochrome screen. The four colors are cyan, magenta, yellow, and white. The technology supports far more colors than Kaleido and maintains 300 PPI.
As a result, Gallery delivers better quality images, but this comes at a much slower refresh rate. So despite all of Gallery’s advantages, the refresh rate makes it an unpleasant option for Android tablets, where apps may refresh the screen continuously.
Gallery is better suited for digital signage and electronic photo frames, which don’t change what they display often. By contrast, Kaleido’s high refresh rate makes it a feasible option for tablets and PCs.
The Future of E-Paper Is Colorful
Kaleido has improved quickly in just a few years, and the technology is rapidly becoming more competitive against LCD screens. With more people spending much of their working and leisure time staring at a screen, a display that reduces eye strain would be a big step, and this is just one of the potential health benefits of embracing this type of display.
E-ink can make reading, writing, and drawing more comfortable. Learn more about this technology’s potential health benefits.
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