Onyx today announced a new tablet with an E Ink display capable of showing colors: the 10.3-inch Boox Tab Ultra C. The E Ink tablet is the first in the Tab series to feature a Kaleido 3 E Ink screen, which is the latest version of E Ink’s color electronic paper display technology. It’s still limited to 4,096 colors but allows for a higher color resolution.
Don’t expect colors that are as vibrant as an iPad’s, though. The new color screen offers a sharp 300ppi resolution when you’re in black-and-white mode but drops to 150ppi when you view content in color. As a result, colors look more subtle and pastel-like, yet should still look more vivid than last year’s Onyx Boox Nova Air C’s screen. That color E Ink came equipped with a last-generation screen limited to a 100ppi color resolution, which, as my colleague Jon Porter noted in his review, made colors look washed out.
The Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C’s colors aren’t as vibrant as an iPad’s, but they should be sharper than the Onyx Boox Nova Air C.
Image: Onyx
Aside from color, the Kaleido 3 screen also comes with a front light and tech to reduce blue light. The Kaledo 3 screen is also advertised as more responsive, so playing videos shouldn’t be as slow of an experience as they can be on older color E ink screens. That’s a claim we’ve yet to test, though.
Beyond these changes, however, the Boox Tab Ultra C is a similar tablet to its monochrome counterpart, the Boox Tab Ultra, released late last year. Both tablets feature the same 16-megapixel rear camera with OCR functionality. It seems Onyx included the camera to help professionals — the tablet’s target market — scan documents as opposed to taking pet photos, however.
Under the hood, both the monochrome and color tablets are powered by a Qualcomm octa-core CPU. They also each feature four refresh modes you can enable for various tasks, like a slow mode for reading books and faster options for browsing the web and watching videos. Each tablet also runs on a modified version of Android 11 and shares a 6,300mAh battery, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of expandable storage. Plus, each comes with 10GB of free Onyx cloud storage, which new and existing customers can take advantage of.
The Boox Tab Ultra C is expected to start shipping on May 10th and will sell for $599.99 with the Pen2 Pro stylus and magnetic case included. You can, however, preorder it now from the official Boox Shop. As a part of its preorder sale, Onyx will also throw in a discounted keyboard case valued at $109.99 that you can get for $50 with the tablet.