E Ink announced the next generation of its Kaleido color e-paper screen technology today, delivering several welcome improvements. The company’s existing Kaleido 3 displays can be found in e-readers and tablets from companies like Kobo, PocketBook, and Boox, while Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft uses a customized version to improve performance. The new Kaleido 4 technology addresses some of Kaleido 3’s shortcomings with improved color reproduction, better contrast, and faster screen refreshes.

Other E Ink technologies, like its Gallery 3 display found in the Remarkable Paper Pro, use colored pigments that move around to form full-color images, but Kaleido 3 employs a color filter over an e-paper panel with just black and white pigments. That approach results in color e-paper screens with fast refresh rates, but it generates color images at a lower resolution with a limited palette that tends to make them look desaturated. The extra color filter also leaves plain text looking darker than it does on e-readers with only a black-and-white E Ink screen.

E Ink claims its new Kaleido 4 display tech doubles the “color gamut volume” of its predecessor, which should improve how color images look. However, the technology is still limited to producing just 4,096 colors (modern LCD and OLED displays can produce millions) and, as with Kaleido 3, at a lower resolution than black-and-white text is displayed. But Kaleido 4 does increase white reflectance by 15 percent and boosts contrast by 50 percent, so plain text will potentially look less muddy than it often does with Kaleido 3.

The reason that E Ink’s seemingly superior Gallery 3 technology hasn’t been used in more devices is because those displays have a slow refresh rate that can often feel frustrating to use. Kaleido 3 refreshes much faster, and thanks to a new oxide TFT backplane (that sounds similar to what the Kindle Colorsoft uses), Kaleido 4’s performance is even faster with refresh rates up to 18fps, making the screens capable of playing back video.

Companies like Amazon and Kobo haven’t yet announced any new devices that will feature Kaleido 4 screens, but Hanvon Technology will be the first to adopt the new technology in its upcoming M10C II tablet. It will only be available in China, but the M10C II will feature a Kaleido 4 display with a micro-etched tempered-glass surface designed to reduce glare while providing a more authentic paper-like feel when taking notes using its battery-free pen.