The two main products from the eInk crowd are Kaleido and Gallery. Kaleido has wider adoption than Gallery, despite the latter having brighter colours.
Kaleido
Kaleido actually uses a normal e-ink Carta display that is black and white. On top of the Carta display, a colour filter array is added that adds the primary colours. When the filter is in use, the resolution of the Kaleido screen halves (on Carta 1200, from 300ppi to 150ppi).
The Kaleido filter array makes the screen darker and a backlight is often added to counter this. The colours produced by the filter array are rather subdued. Nevertheless, it is colour and where colour is needed it makes a big difference – so choosing it depends on your use-case.
The initial version of Kaleido could only support resolutions of 100ppi at a size of six inches. The current Kaleido 3 does 150ppi up to 13.3\”. In other words, the technology will keep improving. Kaleido also has a fairly usable refresh rate, which makes it popular for e-ink tablets.
Gallery
Gallery is a more modern product than Kaleido. Whilst Kaleido uses a colour filter array, Gallery uses coloured particles in stead of black and white.
Four different pigments of colour are used: white, yellow, magenta and cyan. These colours are combined to form all other colours. As a result, the resolution is not affect as with Kaleido and the colours are much more vibrant.
The downside is that the technology is still fairly new and the refresh rates are an issue. reMarkable released the reMarkable Paper Pro in September of 2024. Several people have no issue with the refresh rate, but it is advisable to watch a couple of videos in order to understand how the devices renders colour and then decide whether the refresh rate will be an issue for you, or not.
Gallery is obviously also much more expensive than Kaleido, so expect to find it only on premium devices for the time being.
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