Want a color eReader? The Boox Nova 3 Color is one of only two 7.8-inch color eBook readers available in the US and Europe. It uses E Ink's Kaleido Plus reflective color technology. But are comic books, magazines, and more on ePaper worth $420? And is better than the $330 PocketBook Inkpad Color?

Who Should Buy a Color E Ink Tablet?

The Nova 3 Color caters to bibliophiles who want their eBooks, web browsing, and hand-written notes in color, without an eyestrain-causing backlight.

But it comes with one big gotcha: the Nova 3 Color can only attain High color, at 4,096 colors with limited color saturation. In other words, the colors look washed out. Even so, it's suitable for the education market and as a comic book reader. But for those who want a reading experience similar to that of paper, the color levels fall short of the target.

And with new color eReader tech coming out in a matter of months, buyers may want to wait a little longer. But for those who want a color eBook reading tablet now, it's a better device than its competitor, the Inkpad Color.

Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color Specifications

• Dimensions: 7.76 x 5.39 x 0.3 inches (197.3 x 137 x 7.7mm)
• Weight: 9.35 oz (265 grams)
• Operating system: Android 10 with custom skin
• CPU: Octa-core Qualcomm CPU, Snapdragon 636
• GPU: Adreno 509
• RAM: 3GB
• Battery: 3,150mAh lithium-ion
• Storage: 32GB eMMC drive
• Touchscreen: Dual-layer combining capacitive with Wacom touch-layer with 4,096 degrees of pressure sensitivity
• Display: 7.8-inch Kaleido Plus CFA layer with Carta HD panel with 1404 x 1872 (300DPI for black and white); 468 x 624 (100DPI for color); AG matte glass screen
• Frontlight: non-PWM front light with "cold" white LEDs
• Wireless: Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac); Bluetooth 5.0
• Ports: USB Type-C (USB-C) with Power Delivery (PD) charging and OTG
• Speaker: Yes
• Microphone: Yes

What Do These Specs Mean? They Mean It's the Best Color eBook Reader

The Onyx Nova 3 Color has just one competitor in North America and Europe in the 7.8-inch eReader market: the PocketBook Inkpad Color.

Compared to the Pocketbook Inkpad Color, the Onyx Nova 3 is substantially better. Onyx's processor is considerably faster, its overall hardware is superior, it includes stylus support for handwriting notes, and it uses Android 10 instead of a locked-down Linux derivative that prevents users from installing apps.

Both eReaders, unfortunately, dispense with the warm, amber-tinted LED front light system.

What's Kaleido Plus? How Does It Look on the Nova 3 Color?

Kaleido Plus brings to mind the age-old adage "perfect is the enemy of good". It's not perfect but it's good enough. While its colors are recognizable, they're also bleached-out with the intensity of Jet-Puffed Fruity Marshmallows.

A sad truth behind Kaleido is that it doesn't match paper in visual quality. It's not even comparable to backlit display technologies. Your phone's OLED or LCD panel offers far greater color depth and superior screen clarity. But comparing Kaleido to a phone or a magazine misses the point.

Kaleido does one thing: it brings color to reflective (or non-emissive) display technology.

How to Read eBooks, Comics, and Manga on the Nova 3 Color

Getting started reading on a Nova 3 Color is easy. The easiest method is installing a cloud storage app, like Dropbox or OneDrive. But if you prefer manually transferring files from a Windows computer to your eReader, here's a quick intro on how to get started:

• Plug your eReader into the computer
• Drag and drop files or folders onto the Nova 3 Color's storage

How Do Comics and Color Content Look?

Reading on a Nova 3 Color doesn't capture the fidelity of pulped paper or a backlit tablet. On one hand, you can distinguish different hues from one another; on the other hand, there's a significant loss in color quality, there's a screen-door effect, and there's a problem with ghosting.

That's because Kaleido Plus doesn't reproduce the color spectrum of paper or tablets and smartphones, also known as True color (24-bit color). The Nova 3 Color gets High color, which comprises 4,096 colors. While it sounds weak, Onyx's limited color range isn't distracting nor does it detract from the reading experience. The issue is low color saturation. In other words, colors aren't as intense as on a backlit smartphone screen.

But that's an acceptable tradeoff if you're concerned about eye strain.

Reading Text on the Nova 3 Color

All eBooks, with and without color, look slightly worse on the Nova 3 Color compared to black-and-white eReaders. The reason is that the color layer sits on top of the usual E Ink panel, diminishing its clarity. The image-quality loss looks worst when viewing whites. Small text looks blurrier and harder to read.

When compared side-by-side to a regular Carta panel, the quality difference jumps out at you. Aside from a degradation in whites, all images are overlaid with an ultra-fine mesh, almost unnoticeable under most ambient lighting conditions. What you're seeing is the CFA layer, which essentially overlays a red-green-blue grid over a Carta HD E Ink panel.

Overall, the color capabilities work, comics and other text look good, although with some loss of clarity.

Taking Colored Notes on the Boox Nova 3 Color

Sketching and Writing Notes

Sketching and taking notes works fine on the Nova 3 Color, but that's due to its excellent Wacom pressure-sensitive touch layer. The included passive stylus feels about as light as a pencil, weighing in at just 10 grams.

I wouldn't advise using the Nova 3 Color for serious drawing. First, its colors will not look the same when exported to a computer. Second, while it does include a lot of great tools for sketching, it doesn't match the capabilities of an iPad Pro.

It's good enough for creating images by hand, but you'll probably need to transfer those images to another computer if you want to refine them for publication.

Taking Notes Inside of an eBook

When annotating eBooks, the notes are backed up as a separate file inside of the directory where you store the book. Notes can be opened inside of a Windows computer as a text file, although there doesn't exist any native app on Android capable of seamlessly reading the notes.

Unfortunately, the implementation of color suffers from a few serious bugs. First, if you use any color other than black, there's a fairly large amount of input delay. Second, the color layer suffers from high levels of ghosting, also known as image retention.

In other words, the screen oftentimes carries forward artifacts of previously rendered text and graphics. Third, highlighting any text will overlay the highlight on top of the text, thus making the text unreadable. Fourth, every time you change from highlighting to note-taking, it requires changing the pen color. This leads to a lot of back-and-forth, which could have been solved by allowing the user to set a different color for each pen tip.

How to Annotate and Highlight eBooks

Annotating books only works inside of the default Neo Reader app. Taking notes works like this: you simply open the notes layer inside of the Neo Reader app. If you change the color of the tip, it'll highlight instead of annotate.

Unfortunately, there's a great deal of input delay for colored input. But while it's irritating, it doesn't damage the Nova 3 Color's functionality.

Gaming on an Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color

Thanks to its fast refresh speeds, slower-paced games are playable on the Nova 3 Color. However, the refresh speed won't impress anyone. Slow animations may get fully rendered but fast animations look like teleportation. In other words, Angry Birds might play fine but racing games will be unbearable.

Repairability, Firmware Updates, and Warranty Policy

Repairability

Like most tablets and eReaders, the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color isn't repairable by the user. eReaders require fewer charge-discharge cycles compared to smartphones, so in theory, their batteries won't degrade as fast.

Warranty Policy

Onyx warranties their products for a year after purchase through Michigan-based iCareRepair. I've confirmed that Onyx indeed uses iCareRepair for warranties with a two-day turnaround time, contingent on the availability of parts.

Firmware Updates

My Onyx Boox Nova Pro, which I purchased in 2018, continues to receive firmware updates, more than three years after it released. However, it never received the update to Android 10 and remains on Android 9. It's likely that Onyx will provide three (or more) years of software support for their products. But when it comes to version updates, they don't seem to provide such support.

The Boox Nova 3 Color isn't perfect.

The Nova 3 Color suffers from quite a few problems, thanks to the newness of CFA technology. But on top of issues with CFA, there are a handful of bugs that suggested a rushed design.

No Expandable Storage

Unfortunately, the Nova 3 Color doesn't offer expandable storage, unless you're using an OTG USB-C flash drive. On the 21GB of storage that's available, you can fit approximately 1,500 standard-size comic books on it. Or if you have a lot of trade paperbacks, you can fit in the ballpark of 50 to 200, depending on their size.

In comparison, the PocketBook Inkpad Color, while packing in only 16GB of internal storage, also includes expandable Micro-SD card storage, allowing users to massively increase storage capacity for not much more money.

No Amber Lights

A feature that became standard among high-end eReaders is variable color temperature front lights. Unlike the backlight in your smartphone, a variable color temperature front light (which illuminates the device from the front, rather than the back) in theory shouldn't cause as much eyestrain as white light.

While the scientific consensus isn't out yet on whether blue light can disrupt sleep, most users (including myself) report that amber LED front lights cause less eyestrain than white lights.

Unfortunately, no Kaleido Plus eReader offers an amber front light. For those who are disturbed by blue or white lights, I'd suggest buying a blue-light-blocking screen protector.

Ghosting and Bugs

I've noticed a few bugs. The most noticeable issue is image ghosting, or when text or images remain slightly visible, following a page turn. The ghosting persists even using slower refresh modes. This bug didn't exist on black-and-white editions of Onyx's eReaders.

Additionally, there are numerous minor bugs. For example, the native internet browser doesn't seem to work at all.  You can download a third-party browser, like Firefox.

You'll find none of these issues with the Inkpad Color. The Inkpad's software seems more refined, although it lacks the variable refresh modes of the Nova 3 Color.

Same Issues as With the 2020 Nova 3

Like the black-and-white Nova 3, the Nova 3 Color uses an unlicensed version of Android 10, because Google doesn't allow E Ink devices to use the Play Store. That means anyone with an Onyx eReader needs to independently validate their device with Google.

Two More Color eReader Technologies Coming in 2021 and 2022

TCL's NxtPaper and E Ink's Gallery 4100 may release soon. If you need a color E Ink reading tablet right now, the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color is a worthy purchase. But new technologies always make the older tech cheaper. Waiting could be a good strategy.

TCL's NxtPaper vs Kaleido Plus

The biggest threat to the Nova 3 Color is the upcoming TCL NxtPaper 8.8-inch tablet. It uses a transflective LCD panel which offers the same color saturation but with 60Hz refresh rates, which means full video, although with much weaker battery life.

E Ink ACeP (E Ink Gallery 4100) vs Kaleido Plus

Kaleido Plus will soon get competition from within, in the form of E Ink's Gallery 4100 panel, also known as Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP). Gallery 4100 offers greater color saturation, although with slower refresh speeds for full-color images. The differences lie in Gallery 4100's use of a four-color pigment system, which means it doesn't require a CFA layer. While the details remain scant, E Ink's engineering team commented that:

E Ink Kaleido™ is a black and white ink film with a printed CFA to show color. ACeP v2, or E Ink Gallery™ 4100, is a four particle system that displays color at every capsule, and therefore a CFA is not required.

In other words, it's an entirely different technology from Kaleido. While Kaleido uses a three-color CFA layer with low pixel density, Gallery 4100 employs a system capable of displaying four pigments at each pixel. The denser pixel structure results in a dramatic improvement in image fidelity, color saturation, and resolution.

On the downside, juggling four pigments, as opposed to two, means slower refreshes. Essentially, rendering a greater range of colors requires more sophisticated software and hardware. Interestingly, E Ink's engineers discovered a way to speed up black-and-white refreshes on Gallery 4100 panels.

For note-taking, the Nova 3 Color should offer superior performance compared to Gallery 4100. But for color saturation, Gallery 4100 rules the roost.

Should You Buy an Onyx Boox 3 Color?

The Boox Nova 3 Color combines great hardware (for an eReader) with backlight-free color technology. Unfortunately, it comes just as two other reflective color panels near release: TCL's NxtPaper transflective LCD panel and E Ink's potentially game-changing Gallery 4100 technology. Both panels may make their way into Onyx products.

In my opinion, despite its bugs, the Boox 3 Color offers something unique to eReader enthusiasts. It's a high-end 7.8-inch color eReader. If you need color right now, it's worth its $420 price tag. For those who can wait, we haven't yet seen what E Ink's Gallery 4100 or TCL's NxtPaper can do. I'd advise waiting until the new technologies come out before buying.