Ectaco Jetbook Color review: The first color E Ink e-book reader could make you blue

For years, e-reading enthusiasts have awaited the first commercially available color e-book reader that promises to run for days or even weeks on a charge, just as black-and-white e-readers do. Now the Ectaco JetBook, priced at a whopping $500, has arrived. Our testers checked out its screen, and alas, the long wait hasn't been rewarded by a fine performer.

We had low expectations for the first-ever device in its class, but we were still struck by the JetBook's limited success in rendering color accurately on its 9.7-inch screen. Even worse were the device's numerous and frequently serious shortcomings in every other aspect of design and performance that we looked at.

The device's screen uses color E Ink, and so is a multihued cousin to the monochrome E Ink screens used on the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and most other better-performing e-book readers. But where the LCD screens used on laptops and tablets can draw on millions of hues to render color, color E Ink is limited to about 4,000.

That limitation probably helps explain the unsatisfying quality of color photos our testers displayed on the JetBook (see the photo below). Colors were muted in the extreme: for example, it was hard to tell whether royal blue was actually blue or some shade of green.

In the image above, the digital photo at left loses almost all of its color saturation when displayed on the Ectaco JetBook Color, right. It's so muted as to be difficult to ascertain what some of the original colors were.

Flesh tones were only vaguely realistic and especially prone to another inherent problem in the JetBook's color reproduction: posterization, the blotchiness that can make some colored areas of photos resemble those drawn with markers or paint—and not in a good way.

In dimmer light, the posterization was somewhat less evident, but the screen's feeble contrast made it challenging to see much (or any) detail in the shots. In brighter light, colors gained a little more vibrancy, yet they remained very unsaturated. And the screen's reflectivity, which was higher than that of the better e-book readers we've tested, forced repeated tilting of the JetBook in order to see much at all on the screen.

But does the JetBook's performance in rendering black text helps offset its shortcomings in color? Not quite. In our standard e-book reader tests of the readability of plain text, the Ectaco JetBook Color was only mediocre, on a par with the lower-rated e-book readers in our Ratings, (available to subscribers). The problem wasn't the text itself, which was nearly as crisp and clear as on the best models, but the background it was displayed against: It was too dark to provide a high level of contrast with the text, which hampered easy reading.

Perhaps the JetBook's controls are a strong point? If only. The JetBook's navigation is via a set of small, flimsy buttons that run along the bottom of the screen. The screen is touch-capable, but only with the included stylus, not with your finger. The response to tapping with the stylus was so slow that we frequently tapped multiple times while waiting for something to happen. And the device processes commands very slowly—so slowly, in fact, that it's among the few e-book readers we've seen that display a spinning-wheel icon as content is loading.

There's more that holds this product back. The JetBook Color is by far the heaviest e-book reader we've ever tested, weighing in at 23.4 ounces—more than 10 percent heavier than the Apple iPad 2. It just isn't a device you'd want to hold in your lap for very long.

Also, content is limited. Ostensibly an educational device, the JetBook comes preloaded with text-heavy and rudimentarily presented educational content, including science and math reference material and various Oxford dictionaries. The company offers no e-bookstore, though you can side-load JPG images and content in EPUB, MOBI, and Adobe DRM formats for e-books you acquire, including via library loans.

To be fair, as an educational device, the JetBook may be intended to lie on a desktop as a resource for homework. But even then, the basic presentation quality of the JetBook's educational content and the time and effort required to access it is likely to prompt most students to turn to computers (including tablets) and the Web for such information. And the Apple's introduction of e-textbooks for the iPad that incorporate multi-touch functionality point to a potential sophistication for e-textbooks that's far ahead of the JetBook Color's level.

Bottom line: We're happy to have tested the JetBook Color, to help us stay abreast of new e-book technology. But the results of our tests confirm that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was right in telling me last year that color e-ink "isn't yet ready for prime time." If you're looking for a device to read books in color, skip the JetBook and opt for a better tablet computer. It'll cost about the same and do much more, much better.

—Paul Reynolds