Making the Colorsoft possible, Amazon executives said Tuesday at a launch event in New York City, required a lot more than just trading in a new screen. “Frankly, the technology wasn’t ready for it yet,” said Kevin Keith, who manages Kindle products for Amazon. “And we now think the technology is ready for it.” (Kobo, Remarkable, and others may disagree that it wasn’t ready sooner.)

The Colorsoft is based on E Ink’s Kaleido technology, but uses an entirely new display stack for Kindles, all the way back to a newly designed oxide backplane that makes it easier for the E Ink panel’s tiny bits of ink to move quickly . The E Ink world has been working on similar technology for a while, and Amazon thinks it’s the key to making color work well. The Colorsoft has new LED pixels and a new way to shine individual light through them to improve the colors. It’s also brighter than ever, making the whole thing feel more alive. Some of this technology also helped the new Paperwhite turn pages faster and easier, but it was designed to run Colorsoft.

All that display technology, Keith says, allowed Amazon to introduce color without adding page-turn latency, lowering the device’s resolution, or harming on-screen contrast. “All the things you think about in Kindle (high resolution, long battery life, fast page turns, good fluidity) we weren’t willing to sacrifice,” says Keith. The goal was to offer a color screen that still looked as good in black and white as the Paperwhite, and he’s confident Amazon has succeeded.

During a quick demo at Amazon’s launch event, I was impressed with the Colorsoft’s display. It’s not an iPad screen, but it’s sharp enough and bright enough to make comics pop without being so saturated that it looks wrong. The most obvious drawback is that when there is a color image on the page, the device does a full blinking refresh every time you turn the page; Keith says this only happens when there’s a large enough image on the screen, but it happened to me even with some pretty small images. But those images look good! Again, not iPad-level good, but certainly sharper and brighter than some color E Ink displays we’ve seen on devices like the Kobo Clara Colour.

Best of all, pages turn quickly and books open quickly. If this thing is significantly slower than the new Paperwhite, I didn’t really notice. With a regular book, the 300ppi screen looks about as good as the other Kindles. You can pinch to zoom on most images, and in my demos the image zooms in smoothly but pixelatedly until it refreshes a moment later. We’ll have a lot more testing to do, though, and I’m afraid all the screen flickering could get annoying when navigating through a long graphic novel.

The biggest advantage of a color screen so far is that it makes the whole interface a little nicer. It makes your home screen and library easier to read, now that you can see your book covers in color. It’s also a big win over the lock screen, which now presents a much more vibrant standby screen while it’s on your bedside table. (Keith seems to think that many aesthetically minded BookTok people will love the color screen.) The only truly color-specific feature is that you can now add accents in multiple colors and later look them up by color in the Kindle app on your phone .

For more traditional readers, the Colorsoft is basically just a more expensive Kindle Paperwhite with one fun new trick. But don’t be shocked to see Colorsoft technology eventually come to other parts of the Kindle lineup. Amazon waited so many years to add the technology and wanted to get it right before offering it to buyers. Now it feels like things went well. Which means it could ultimately be anywhere.