- Users have complained about discoloration on the Kindle Colorsoft screen
- Amazon said it was investigating the issue.
- Shipping has now been temporarily canceled until a solution is found.
Amazon's first color e-reader has just gone on sale and users who have received their first orders are already unhappy, with some returning the Kindle Colorsoft or exchanging it for a new one.
As first reported by The Verge, a yellow stripe is marring the bottom of the Kindle Colorsoft screen for some users, leading to a rather dismal 2.6-star rating (at the time of writing) on the page. Amazon listing in the US
In fact, discoloration is not uniform for all users. According to the Reddit thread about this issue, some users are also seeing discoloration along the vertical edge and at the bottom. Others aren't too bothered by the yellowing, but have returned their device because of “a corner speckled with dead pixels.”
Colorsoft has a yellow tint at the bottom of the screen from r/kindle
However, not everyone seems to be upset about their purchase: other Kindle Colorsoft customers seem very happy with their new e-reader, and 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 in the original Reddit thread, Amazon says it's aware of the issue and is working to fix it. That could indicate it's just a software issue, but if the screen lighting is inconsistent, it's more likely due to faulty hardware and a firmware update may not help.
UPDATE (November 5): Amazon says it will take a week or two to find a solution to this issue, and until then, shipping of the color e-reader has been temporarily canceled. Devices already ordered will now ship only the week of November 9 or 18 in the US and after November 26 in the UK.
We haven't yet received a review sample of the Kindle Colorsoft here at TechRadar, so we haven't experienced this ourselves, and the little time we spent with the device at its media launch in October showed no such problem.
The Verge, however, says that “the discoloration is more obvious in images than in real life” and its reviewer wouldn't have noticed the problem if users hadn't complained so much.
Part of me is now a little happy that I won't be able to see the Kindle Colorsoft in person until 2025, as that's when it will be released in Australia (where I live). By then, Amazon would have fixed the problem and I'll probably receive what might actually end up being the best Kindle e-reader ever made (we'll see). However, for early adopters, it's a real shame that a popular device that costs around $300 ships with a defect.