Review: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite really shines

Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite is a significant upgrade to Amazon’s flagship Kindle e-reader. By including a light, a high-resolution display, and dramatically updated software, the $119 Kindle Paperwhite catches up to the competition in some ways and exceeds it in others. It’s the first e-reader with both a relatively high-resolution display and a built-in light; and in the Paperwhite, those two features make a compelling combination.

Leave a light on

Amazon

The big news about the Kindle Paperwhite is suggested by its name: It has a built-in light that, when adjusted to maximum brightness, makes the Kindle’s display look closer to white than to the tinted, newspaper gray typical of E Ink’s electrophoretic ink screens (including this one, when the light is off). The Paperwhite is also the first “traditional” Kindle to come with its own light; on previous models, you had to clip on a separate reading light or use a case with a light built into it if you wanted to read in the dark.

The Paperwhite uses four embedded LEDs to light its surface. The LEDs channel their light into a clear sheet of material that acts as a light guide, diffusing the light across the entire display. The approach is similar to the one Barnes & Noble uses with its Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, but Amazon’s software implementation adjusts the hue of the lighting so that the page appears whiter as you advance the light level toward the high end of its 24 levels of brightness.

The Paperwhite’s light is brighter and more evenly distributed than the one on the Nook with Glowlight, and the LEDs are not as obvious as those on the Nook. I did notice some shadowing along the bottom of the display, which Amazon said was “by design at the bottom of the screen in the margin of the page where text is not present.”

It didn’t take me long to discover that I preferred to read text on the Paperwhite with its light switched on. Even in daylight, the Paperwhite's light brightens the background, making text look bolder and improving contrast noticeably. On the other hand, even in a darkened room, I wasn't tempted to crank the brightness up all the way. Most of the time, I left it at roughly half brightness—a setting of 12 or 13 on the device’s 24-point scale. The only time when I didn’t feel the need to use the light at all was when I sat in a chair with a reading lamp shining directly onto the Paperwhite’s screen.

I haven’t been using the Paperwhite long enough to vet Amazon’s battery life claims. Amazon’s estimated battery life of 8 weeks of use (30 minutes per day) with the light on at all times is based on a brightness level of 10, slightly below the level I found most comfortable to use.

A high-resolution display

The Kindle Paperwhite’s E Ink display is a big upgrade from the one on past Kindles. It’s a 768-by-1024-pixel, 6-inch display with a resolution of 212 pixels per inch, meaning that this display has 62 percent more pixels than either last year’s Kindle or the current Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight. Amazon isn’t the first company to market with this high-resolution display; iRiver used it in its Story HD e-reader last year.

The higher-resolution display, coupled with the Paperwhite’s careful attention to font rendering, yields text that’s easy on the eyes. Fonts looked smoother than on last year’s Kindle Touch, and this Kindle offers seven of them—four more than were available on its predecessor. That helps make the Paperwhite much more competitive, since the Nook Simple Touch has six fonts, and both the Kobo Touch eReader and the Sony Reader have seven.

Like previous Kindles, the Kindle Paperwhite has eight font-size options, including one of the largest I’ve seen on any e-reader. You can adjust line spacing and margins, too, with three options apiece.

The Kindle Paperwhite substantially improves on the touchscreen technology that the Kindle Touch used. The Touch relied on infrared sensor technology, which required an annoyingly deep recess between its outer edges and its display. The Paperwhite dispenses with that arrangement, in favor of capacitive-touch technology (which has become commonplace on smartphones and tablets, but had not previously appeared on an e-reader).

I found the Paperwhite’s screen highly responsive to my touch, and I noticed that its new matte display surface made it feel more like paper than did the surfaces of other readers I’ve used.

In the end, though, it’s all about the light. When the Paperwhite’s light is turned off, the other improvements in the display are harder to notice. Amazon says that the Paperwhite has 25 percent better contrast, but the company doesn’t specify what it did to achieve that improvement. Text does look blacker, but some of the difference is probably due to the light and to contrast with the Paperwhite’s black bezel. (Unfortunately, the device’s bezel and soft-touch back are surprisingly prone to attracting fingerprints, too.)

So while the upgraded screen resolution, new fonts, and faster page turns undoubtedly contribute to this Kindle's superiority over its predecessors, the Paperwhite’s light makes the whole product shine.