My parents realized that my reading addiction was going nowhere when I finished the entire Harry Potter series in under a week when I was hardly a teenager. They also realized that continuing to feed into my addiction by buying books for me meant that they’d need to get a separate room, and probably another income stream, just to keep up. Fortunately, all of this meant that convincing them to get me my first eReader wasn’t all that difficult.

Fast forward to today, while life has unfortunately gotten in the way of the kind of marathon reading sessions my younger self took for granted, my love for eReaders has only deepened. While I started with an old Kindle that did the job well enough, my standards have risen considerably since then. I’ve also tested a bunch of color eReaders along the way, and somewhere in there, I’ve formed an opinion that puts me at odds with most of the internet: they’re actually great.

Yes, the colors are muted and washed out

And that’s exactly why I love them

Color eReaders have been around for a good bit now, and the biggest complaint people have with them is that they’re still stuck in the past. Now, the technology behind almost every mainstream color eReader today is Kaleido 3. This is the latest generation of E Ink, which offers richer colors and comes with 16 levels of grayscale and 4096 colors. Compared to the previous generation, Kaleido 3 has increased color saturation by 30 percent. It features a black and white resolution of 300 ppi, and a color resolution of 150 ppi (whereas its predecessor had 100 ppi). Despite all of this, Kaleido 3 still produces colors that look soft, muted, and very much unlike what you’d see on a phone or tablet. This is exactly the part most reviewers can’t get over.

However, I really like the muted and washed out look color eReaders have. I absolutely love how book covers look on these screens. The muted palette gives them a kind of vintage paperback charm, like you’re looking at a slightly faded copy that’s been loved a few times over. Given that my nature of work involves me sitting in front of a screen and typing all day long, the soft and calm color palette of a Kaleido 3 display is exactly what my eyes need at the end of the day. The last thing I want after twelve hours of glowing rectangles is another glowing rectangle.

That said, I’ve found that color eReaders struggle with darker and heavily saturated covers. The deep blacks come out as a muddy dark grey-green, and the “watercolor” look I like so much doesn’t really do those covers justice.

Color makes highlighting genuinely useful

And it transforms note-taking entirely

My favorite part about highlighting and annotating books has always been getting to use different highlighters and different colors to signify different things. Well, at least on paper. When I got my first Kindle eReader, which was obviously black and white, I lost a lot of the fun of highlighting since it all kind of looked the same. Even on an iPad, which I’ve used extensively for note-taking, you get to use different highlighting colors. And while I preferred the highlighting experience of an eReader a lot more since keeping track of what I’d actually highlighted was so much easier, I wasn’t a fan of losing all the colors. This is one of my favorite parts of color eReaders. You get that back, and your highlights obviously look a lot better too. It just makes the whole experience a lot more fun.

And then comes note-taking. I’ve ditched paper and my iPad + Apple Pencil combo for the Boox Note Air5 C (previously the Note Air4 C), and I can’t imagine I could’ve done that on a non-color eReader. Color-coding my notes, using different pen colors for headings versus body text, different highlighters for different subjects, adding labeled diagrams, and so on, are all ways I actually think on paper. Stripping that out and going monochrome would simply not work for me. Having used both monochrome and color e-ink devices for note-taking, the latter is what convinced me to go all in on this format.

No, color eReaders aren’t as vibrant as a tablet

And they aren’t supposed to be

While we now have eReaders that run Android and come pre-installed with the Google Play Store, and in theory let you download any app you’d want including YouTube and Netflix, these devices were never really meant for that sort of use. Even leaving aside the fact that color eReaders have muted and washed out colors like touched on above, these devices still have refresh rates that aren’t built for video, scrolling feeds, or anything fast-moving. You can technically watch YouTube or Netflix on an Android eReader. Should you, though? Probably not. The hardware is honest about what it is, even when the software pretends otherwise. I’ve used a Boox tablet as a second monitor before, and I wouldn’t do it again. That says everything you need to know.

All that said, I don’t really understand why people complain about color eReaders not being as vibrant as tablets. They aren’t designed to compete with tablets. They’re designed to be lightweight, glare-free, easy on the eyes, and capable of going weeks without a charge. The fact that they also happen to show color now is a bonus. Treating it as the headline feature is how you end up disappointed by a device that’s actually doing exactly what it was built to do.

Color eReaders for the win, always

So, while you’ll find hundreds of people hating on color eReaders, you’ll also always find me defending them. They’re not perfect, and they’re not trying to be. And for the way I read, write, and think, they’re easily the best devices I’ve ever owned.