If you’re one of the seven people out there who obsessively follow developments in electronic paper technology, then boy oh boy, are you in for a treat today. E Ink (which makes e-reader displays, if you couldn’t tell from the name) has announced the Kaleido 4, which is best described as a new type of tablet screen.

According to E Ink, the Kaleido 4 has doubled the color gamut volume of its predecessor (which currently powers devices such as the Kobo Libra Colour, Kobo Clara Colour, and Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft) to “more than 40K.” If you’re currently scratching your head wondering why that number isn’t a percent, I’m right there with you. “Gamut,” which refers not to the specific number of colors a screen can reproduce but a much more approximate range of colors with which it can do so, is generally expressed as a proportion of an RGB reference color space (if you’ve ever read a laptop review before, you’ll be familiar with, and perhaps slightly traumatized by, the moniker of “sRGB,” which is one such set). That doesn’t work with e-reader displays for… reasons.

Here’s an explanation E Ink once gave to the prominent digital signage-focused publication Sixteen:Nine : “A reflective display that can reflect more light will be capable of showing brighter and more saturated colors, but this advantage will not increase its %sRGB or %NTSC. ” Right, hope that clears it up. Anyway, the reason I’m going into all this is that the “40,000 colors” figure floating around isn’t a straightforward color count.

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