Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Which is best for you?

Amazon just launched the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, an upgraded version of the Kindle Scribe that lets you read and write in color. It's a welcome upgrade for the Scribe that opens up some fun new possibilities, like color-coding your notes on a book or being able to read your favorite manga and comic books in color. But it's also quite expensive. In my Kindle Scribe Colorsoft review I called this slate the Cadillac of Kindles, and for good reason: Amazon slapped a $629 starting price on this e-paper tablet, so it costs more than a new iPad Air.

At that price, you have to be someone who loves reading and writing to buy one of these new Kindles, because otherwise you could get more features and a better screen for less by buying an iPad or Android tablet. And if you are someone who prizes the ability to put stylus to screen to jot down notes or doodle during boring meetings, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft has serious competition in the ReMarkable Paper Pro.

I know because I wrote our ReMarkable Paper Pro review last year and loved it, calling it the best e-paper tablet for writers I'd ever used. Now that I've had a chance to test out the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft side-by-side with the Paper Pro, I've learned a lot about which is best for what, so I figured I could help you make your decision by breaking down the differences between the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs. ReMarkable Paper Pro. Let's dive in!

Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Price

One of the tricky things about deciding between these two e-paper slates is the price: they both start at $629, though that climbs depending on what accessories and upgrades you want.

So let's quickly talk through what you get for that price: Amazon's Kindle Scribe Colorsoft starts at $629 for the 32GB model and comes with a free Kindle Premium Pen stylus, which has a built-in "eraser" tool on the rear end as well as a function button you can customize to do things like switch to a specific art tool, etc.

You can pay $50 more (so $679) for an upgraded model of the Scribe Colorsoft with 64GB of storage space, effectively doubling how many documents you can store at once. If you want a folio to protect the Kindle, you can get one direct from Amazon for $139.

The ReMarkable Paper Pro, by comparison, starts at $629 and comes with 64GB of storage and a basic ReMarkable Marker stylus that has no eraser end or function button. If you want the fancier ReMarkable Marker Plus stylus with the "eraser" tool on the end it will cost you (surprise!) $50 more, for a total of $679.

If you'd like to cover up your ReMarkable Paper Pro to protect it, you can get a basic Book Folio cover from the company for $89 or pay $229 for the Type Folio, which has a keyboard built in. ReMarkable offers some small discounts if you buy multiple products in a bundle, such that if you were to splurge for the Paper Pro with Marker Plus and Type Folio it would cost you $829 before tax, rather than something north of $900.

So if you want to get the best possible device for the least amount of money, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft has the slight edge here because it comes with the Kindle Premium Pen stylus no matter what — you don't have to pay extra for the better stylus. The trade-off is that you get less storage space on the Kindle, and you have to pay $50 more if you want the same amount of space as you get with the ReMarkable Paper Pro.

Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Design

Both the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the ReMarkable Paper Pro are thin, rectangular slates, though the Paper Pro is bigger and sports a slightly larger (11" vs 11.8") display. Both also have tiny feet on the back which help them rest flat on a table without scratching anything.

The e-paper tablets both weigh around a pound, though the ReMarkable slate is slightly heavier (14 vs 18.5 oz) and has a thicker bezel at the bottom of the device than the Kindle. This little lip at the bottom can be handy when you want to hold the device upright without touching the screen, but while using both tablets I don't find I miss it much on the Kindle.

Similarly, both have a single power button near the top (on the top edge for the ReMarkable vs on the top right edge of the Kindle) and a single USB-C port on the bottom edge for charging and data transfer.

So in terms of design, there really isn't a huge difference between the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro. However, the ReMarkable Paper Pro does have a slightly larger screen and weights slightly more than the Kindle, so if screen real estate is king you probably want the Paper Pro.

Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Display

The screens on the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro look similar but are very different in their construction, which matters if you care about how it feels to drag the stylus across the screen.

I'll dig into that in depth in the Writing section, but before I do I want to point out that there is one area in which the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft clearly outperforms the ReMarkable Paper Pro. Put simply, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft can get brighter than the ReMarkable Paper Pro, so it's going to be easier to use in dark settings without external light.

In terms of display quality, well, some of this is going to be anecdotal because I'm no display expert. But first let me point out that technically the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is capable of displaying black and white images slightly sharper than the ReMarkable Paper Pro, while color images will be slightly less sharp.

That's because the ReMarkable Paper Pro's unique Canvas Color display has a rough PPI (pixels per inch) of 229 no matter what you're looking at. But the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft's Kaleido 3 screen has to halve its resolution when displaying color, so you get B&W images in 300 PPI but color images in 150 PPI.

In my experience, you won't notice the difference between the different resolutions unless you're paying very close attention. However, the fact that the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft can get noticeably brighter than the ReMarkable Paper Pro will make a difference in dark areas. Plus, the colors on the Scribe Colorsoft can seem to "pop" a bit more than they do on the Paper Pro because you can crank up the brightness for a bit of extra vibrancy.

Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Performance

I have both the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the ReMarkable Paper Pro in front of me on my desk right now, and I have to admit that neither seems to perform basic functions in a particularly snappy or fast way. So if you're expecting responsiveness on a par with the best tablets from Apple and the rest, you're in for a disappointment.

Both slates are powered by quad-core CPUs, but the Kindle has double the RAM of the Paper Pro (2GB vs 4GB).

That said, I'm having a hard time figuring out which of these e-paper slates actually "performs" better because I've noticed inconsistent results when running basic tests like tapping the same file on both screens and seeing which opens the document faster.

The one thing I can say about using both at the same time is that the ReMarkable Paper Pro seems to load documents and new pages in those documents at pretty much the same (reliably slow) speed. But while testing the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft I noticed that load times seemed much more variable: sometimes the Kindle loaded the next page in a document or a recently opened document within two seconds, whereas other times loading the next page or a recent document seemed to take 3-5 seconds — not very long, obviously, but long enough to doubt whether the device had registered my input.

So ultimately I don't think you're going to notice a big difference in performance between these two e-paper slates, and their relative snappiness shouldn't make a big impact in your buying decision.

Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Writing

Both of these e-paper tablets come with a stylus because writing and annotating documents on them is half the reason to buy one. So if you care about what it's like to put stylus to screen, I have some key details you need to know before you buy.

This is an area where there's a big difference between the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro. For my money, no stylus and tablet have ever been as nice to write with as what ReMarkable sells, but the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is no slouch in this department either.

That's because Amazon put special effort into trying to make the feel of dragging the Kindle Premium Pen against the screen of the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft feel as much like paper as possible. The company crows about having put new texture-molded glass on the Scribe Colorsoft and further squished the display stack (that is, all the tech beneath the screen) further to minimize the lag between when you put the stylus to the screen and when your input appears. And I can vouch that it seems to have made a difference, because I enjoy the feel of writing on the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft more than I did when testing last year's basic Kindle Scribe.

But while the feel of writing on the Scribe Colorsoft is better than any Kindle I've tested to date, it still can't hold a candle to what it feels like to write on the ReMarkable Paper Pro.

That's because the Paper Pro's Color Canvas display is more textured than the Scribe Colorsoft (though they feel equally smooth to the touch) so that when you drag the ReMarkable Marker across the screen it feels and sounds like a pencil scratching across paper.

Maybe not as much as an actual No. 2 pencil would on real notebook paper, but as close to the real thing as to be indistinguishable unless you were doing both side-by-side. The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, by comparison, does give you a bit of texture and resistance when dragging the Premium Pen across the screen but mostly feels like dragging plastic across glass.

Another reason I prefer writing on the ReMarkable Paper Pro over the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the way annotations work on each device. See, with the ReMarkable Paper Pro you can open pretty much any document or file and start making marks directly on the page using the Paper Pro's 10 different art tools (including a highlighter, marker, pen, pencil, paintbrush and the like) and 9 different colors.

The marks you make on a document stay directly where you put them no matter how you move or change the document, which means you can do things like scratch out words (if you're editing someone's school paper, for example), color in illustrations and doodle on the document wherever you please, just like it was a real piece of paper.

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, on the other hand, offers you two ways of marking up documents (besides highlighting passages) and neither feels as intuitive as what you get on ReMarkable slates.

First, you can use the "Active Canvas" feature to jot down notes and annotations directly on a document. However, the Kindle doesn't actually render what you write or draw directly where you put it; instead, it automagically creates a space between the text (between paragraphs or sometimes between sentences) and puts your annotation in an "Active Canvas" between the text. That way, when you scroll around or change the size of the text your note will stay readable between the lines.

The other option to take notes on the Kindle (as of publication) is to use the expandable margins, which let you tap a little arrow icon on the side of the screen to pull out an expandable margin where you can jot down notes tied to the text.

This enables you to make annotations that feel like footnotes, since you can see a little icon that you have a note on this page but can't actually read the note(s) until you open the margin and look at them.

Both of these systems are effective on the Kindle, but they feel a bit like a compromise compared to the ReMarkable Paper Pro's intuitive "write directly on the page and see it" feature. For my money I much prefer the experience of writing on the ReMarkable Paper Pro over the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, but both are perfectly usable.

Kindle Scribe vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Libraries

Now let's talk a bit about what kinds of files you can get on these devices, and how easy they are to access.

If you just want to load them up with your own documents for work, you're in luck: both slates can display PDF and EPUB files with no trouble. ReMarkable has a nice suite of software that makes it easy to quickly drag and drop files to your Paper Pro, but you have to set up additional connections to third-party services (i.e. Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) to do more advanced tricks like send Google Docs/Slides/Sheets to the slate as PDFs, transferring Word documents, PowerPoint files and more.

One key limitation of the Paper Pro is that it can't easily display DRM-protected ebooks like those you buy in Amazon's Kindle store, so you're limited to buying/downloading ebooks from DRM-free sources.

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft has the advantage here because you can buy any ebook on the Amazon Kindle store and have it sent directly to your Kindle Scribe Colorsoft in moments, giving it a huge leg up in terms of available content. The Kindle Store is filling up with products specifically for Scribe users too, like ebooks full of Sudoku puzzles you can do right on the screen as well as digital coloring books you can work on using the Scribe Colorsoft's limited palette.

The Scribe Colorsoft also supports Bluetooth while the Paper Pro does not, so you can connect a pair of Bluetooth headphones to the Kindle and use them to listen to your Audible audiobooks on the go. Plus, you can also send files from outside Amazon's walled garden (like term papers and DRM-free ebooks) using the Send to Kindle feature.

So while ReMarkable's Paper Pro is fairly versatile, there's no question that the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft has the edge in terms of library access and the convenience of the Kindle Store.

Kindle Scribe Colorsoft vs ReMarkable Paper Pro: Bottom line

If you've made it this far you know that while these two $600+ e-paper slates look awfully similar, there are some key differences between them which can help you make the choice between where to spend your money.

For most people I suspect the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the wiser choice because while it doesn't feel half as nice to write on as the ReMarkable Paper Pro, the Scribe has a brighter screen, more features and easier access to ebooks and other digital goodies via the Kindle Store accessible right on the device.

But for me personally, I think I still prefer the ReMarkable Paper Pro because it just feels so much nicer to use than the Kindle. Sure, the Kindle can feel snappier sometimes and gets brighter, but when I put the stylus on the screen no other tablet I've ever used feels as nice beneath my hands as the ReMarkable Paper Pro. And while I appreciate that the Kindle supports Bluetooth and gives you easy access to the Kindle Store, I'd rather jump through the hoops of loading the ReMarkable up with whatever I want to do (books to read, documents to edit, digital coloring books to fill in) than put up with the inferior writing experience and frustrating Amazon focus of the Kindle.

So if you care about writing and editing above all, I still recommend the Paper Pro. If you just want a fancy e-paper tablet with color for entertainment, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is probably your best bet. And if you just want a great slate for entertainment and don't care about writing or e-paper at all, get an iPad Air—it's just as expensive and way more versatile than either of these (excellent!) e-paper slates.

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