When Amazon announced three new Kindle Scribes, including a flagship color model, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, at its fall product launch event in late September, it said the two models with front lights would ship later this year in time for the holiday season. Good to its word, Amazon says the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and Kindle Scribe with Front Light ($500) are available today. The entry-level Kindle Scribe without Front Light ($430) is still listed as «coming soon» and is slated to arrive in early 2026.
I just received review samples of the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the new monochrome Kindle Scribe with Front Light, and I’ll be testing them in the coming days.
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As I’ve said previously, they aren’t cheap. The Kindle Scribe with Front Light starts at $500 with 32GB of storage (the 2024 Kindle Scribe has a front light and starts at $400). To get color, you’ll have to shell out $630 for the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (bumping the storage from 32GB to 64GB costs an extra $50). Not coincidentally, that’s almost exactly what reMarkable’s color Paper Pro E Ink tablet costs.
The new Scribes have a few key upgrades that may allow you to pardon the price bumps. For starters, they have a larger 11-inch screen (compared to 10.2 inches) while being housed in a chassis similar to the previous model. The size gains come from smaller bezels, and the screens have newly redesigned «display stacks,» including a new mini-LED lighting system.
Additionally, the new Scribes are slightly slimmer, measuring only 5.4mm thick, and lighter, weighing 400 grams (compared to 430 grams for the previous model). They’re powered by a new custom MediaTek processor that Amazon says delivers a 40% performance boost. Note that none of the new Scribes are waterproof like the Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Colorsoft.
Amazon had an issue with faint yellow tinging on the bottom and sides of the smaller Kindle Colorsoft display when it launched its color E Ink model last year (the issue was more apparent with the front light on). It paused shipping the Kindle Colorsoft for some weeks while it came up with a fix and replaced the units of users who reported the problem; Amazon said the issue affected a «small number» of Kindle Colorsofts.
Amazon appears to have fixed the Kindle Colorsoft’s yellow-banding issue — or at least made it barely noticeable. Some E Ink e-reader aficionados have suggested that the way the Colorsoft’s display was designed made it susceptible to the issue, while the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft’s new more advanced display design should eliminate the problem.
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Needless to say, the first thing I checked for after I unboxed my Kindle Scribe Colorsoft was for any yellow tinging. I didn’t notice any, even with the color style set at «vivid» and the front light fully cranked up, as you can see in the image at the top. I tend to keep the light’s warmth setting at a cooler 7 or 8, which is toward the whiter/bluer end of the color temperature spectrum.
I’ll have a full review in the coming days, but in the meantime, you can check out my hands-on first take of all three new Kindle Scribe models.
Amazon describes the Scribe upgrades this way:
- A new front light system with miniaturized LEDs that fit tightly against the display to create a narrower bezel and uniform lighting.
- A new texture-molded glass to improve the friction when the pen glides across the screen.
- A rearchitected display stack to shrink the parallax to virtually nothing, so it feels like writing directly on the page.
- A new MediaTek quad-core chip, more memory and new custom Oxide display technology to make everything feel snappier.
