Amazon’s first color Kindle just shipped and readers are already complaining

Amazon’s first ever color ereader has only just gone on sale and users who have received their first orders are already dissatisfied. Some return the Kindle Colorsoft or exchange it for a new one.

As first reported by The Verge, a yellow band is marring the bottom of the Kindle Colorsoft display for some users, leading to a rather dismal 2.6-star rating (at the time of writing) on the Amazon listing page in the USA

In fact, the discoloration is not uniform for all users. According to the Reddit thread on this issue, some users are also seeing the discoloration along a vertical edge and along the bottom edge. Others are not as bothered by the yellowing, but have returned their device because of “a corner littered with dead pixels”.

Colorsoft has a yellow tint to the bottom of the r/kindle screen

However, not everyone seems to be miffed about their purchase – other Kindle Colorsoft customers seem very happy with their new e-reader, and the user reviews on Amazon are mixed.

kindle from r/kindle/comments/1ggrajr/my_color_soft_arrived_what_is_everyone_talking

It’s still unclear whether the discoloration is due to a software or hardware issue, but according to a post on the original Reddit thread, Amazon says it is aware of the issue and is working on a fix. That could indicate that it’s just a software issue, but if the lighting on the screen is uneven then it’s probably more due to faulty hardware and a firmware update won’t help.

We haven’t received a review sample of the Kindle Colorsoft here at TechRadar yet, so we haven’t experienced this ourselves, and the brief time we spent with the device during its media launch in October revealed no such issue.

However, The Verge says that the “discoloration is more apparent in photos than in real life” and that their reviewer wouldn’t have noticed the problem if users didn’t complain about it so often.

Part of me is now a little happy that I won’t get to see the Kindle Colorsoft in real life until 2025, when it will appear in Australia (where I live). By then, Amazon should have fixed the problem and I’ll probably receive what could end up being the best Kindle ereader ever (we’ll see). However, for the early adopters, it’s a real shame that a popular device that costs around $300 comes with a bug.