Color ePaper Grows Up: E Ink Launches Kaleido 4 - Sixteen:Nine

The e-paper industry is undergoing a pivotal transition from black-and-white to color. On October 15, at the 2026 Second E-Paper Ecosystem and Industry Integration Innovation Development Forum, E Ink Holdings and Hanwang Technology jointly unveiled the next-generation color e-paper technology E Ink Kaleido 4, alongside the world's first end product powered by it—the Hanwang M10C Gen 2 color e-paper office tablet. The move marks a substantive breakthrough in core metrics such as color performance, refresh speed, and dynamic display, as e-paper devices extend their target use cases from simple digital reading toward professional office work and information-intensive tasks. E Ink Holdings Chairman Li Zhenghao said at the launch that color e-paper continues to evolve toward richer, more natural color rendering, with E Ink Kaleido 4 delivering improvements in color performance, brightness, contrast, and dynamic display capability while preserving a paper-like reading experience.

The next generation of color e-paper is arriving with a substantial performance leap, as E Ink Holdings unveiled its Kaleido 4 platform with claims of doubled color range, brighter whites, and a refresh rate fast enough to handle video. The Taiwanese display maker announced the technology on October 15, naming Hanvon Technology's M10C II smart notebook as the first commercial device built around the new panel. The upgrade targets long-standing complaints about color e-readers, where text often appears softer and images more washed out than on monochrome screens. E Ink says Kaleido 4 doubles the color gamut volume of its predecessor to more than 40,000 colors, while white reflectance climbs 15 percent and contrast improves by 50 percent. Perhaps most notably for a display category historically constrained by sluggish refreshes, the new panel can play video at up to 18 frames per second.

E-readers offer amazing convenience (thousands of books in a single, lightweight device), and recent models have added color screens. Now, E Ink has announced that an updated color version with major improvements is on its way. Here are the details. Apple's iPhone Duo Debut Drives 300% Spike In Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 SearchesFrom Kaleido 3 To Kaleido 4: What's ChangingIf you've used a color e-reader from Boox, Kobo or PocketBook, you'll have seen an earlier E Ink model, called Kaleido 3. The Amazon Colorsoft, recently updated to its second-gen model, also uses Kaleido 3, but in a customized version designed to improve performance. The new release is Kaleido 4 and aims to address color reproduction and contrast issues, not to mention the speed of page refreshes. "Compared to the previous generation, E Ink Kaleido 4 doubles its color gamut volume to more than 40K, increases white reflectance by 15%, and improves contrast by 50%," the maker of the screen announced. "Additionally, with the introduction of new algorithms, E Ink Kaleido 4 is capable of video playback at up to 18 frames per second (FPS).