Amazon’s Kindle Oasis is the zenith of the company’s e-reader offerings (and given Amazon’s sheer dominance of the space, also the nicest e-reader available to buy, full stop.) And with the Kindle Paperwhite encroaching on many of the Oasis’ unique features since the release of the second-gen model in 2017, how do you keep the Oasis on top? 

Well, if you’re Amazon, the answer seems to be “make the screen yellower.” 

For the third-generation Oasis, Amazon has only made one real change: the new model can adjust the color temperature of the display, tinting it yellow. It’s a similar feature to f.lux or your phone’s night mode, designed to cut down on harsher blue light for reading at night by replacing it with a warmer, yellower tone. 

There are two ways to activate the color temperature: either manually by adjusting it in the drop-down settings menu or, just like on your phone, by setting it to a timer that can automatically activate on either a set timer or to coincide with sunrise and sunset. You can also adjust the intensity of the effect, ranging from a mild yellow tint to a full-out amber color, depending on your preferences. 

If you’re someone who prefers existing night mode systems for computers and phones, you’ll likely be a fan of the warmth feature for reading at night — less blue light does have a positive effect on sleep schedules and reduces eye strain. 

But I kept the warmer light on even during the day, for a much simpler reason: it turns out that the slight yellow tint is the missing ingredient to help the Kindle’s already quite good display actually look like real paper. 

As a longtime Kindle user, the regular Kindle display had never really bothered me, until I started using the warmer display on the new Oasis. Compared side by side, the old Oasis now looks washed out, with a sickly grey backdrop for the text at lower brightnesses and a corpse-like white at higher ones. 

The new Oasis doesn’t have that problem. Using the color temperature option, it can replicate that slightly off-white color that actual books have instead of the snow-white quality of Amazon’s older screens. Given the choice between the two displays, I reached for the new Oasis every single time. It’s subtle, but it makes a big difference in whatever part of my brain processes a thing as “book” rather than “screen.”

It’s not a perfect effect, and it does take some fiddling around with the brightness and temperature settings for whatever ambient light is around. But when it all comes together, the promise of the Kindle is made real: a digital book that looks like paper. Or not paper, but paper as it should be, with an inner glow that never strains your eyes and that has every book you can imagine packed inside. (Other times, the settings aren’t right and you have a weirdly glowing, yellow-ish rectangle instead of a weirdly glowing white one, but at least it’s still slightly better for your eyes.)

If this review feels oddly focused on a single feature, that’s because Amazon left the external design of the Kindle Oasis unchanged from 2017, to the point where if the review units we had weren’t different colors, it’d be impossible to tell them apart on sight.

There’s only one other change in the 2019 Oasis: an update to “the next generation of e-Ink technology for fast page turns,” according to Amazon. Testing the two devices head to head, the newer model does feel ever-so-slightly faster than the old at refreshing pages, but had Amazon not called it out in its PR, it’s not the sort of thing I would have ever noticed on my own. And if you have the previous generation Oasis, it’s virtually impossible to recommend dropping $250 on the new model. 

Now, the lack of change can be seen as a good thing: Amazon’s hardware is as excellent now as it was in 2017. The one-handed design still nestles perfectly in your hand, with the physical page turn buttons perfectly placed underneath your thumb (a luxury that I wish Amazon would extend to its cheaper devices). 

The 300 ppi E Ink display still looks crisp and clear, and the screen is still a soft-touch glass, with a light powered by 12 hidden LEDs that distribute illumination evenly across the display.

The hardware is still rated for IPX8 waterproofing, so it’ll survive a day at the beach or by a pool or an evening reading in the bath just as well as the previous model. The software is the same (running the lightly updated Kindle operating system that Amazon introduced earlier this year that adds a few settings for adjusting text size and layout). And while I haven’t had nearly enough time to test the famously long-lived battery life on the new Oasis, I have every expectation that it’ll still measure in weeks, not days. 

And yet, despite the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality here of Amazon doubling down on its previous successes, I can’t help but wish the company had tried a little harder to improve things. Two years on, and the laundry list of Kindle omissions grows increasingly absurd.

Somehow, a $250 luxury Kindle still can’t connect to 5GHz Wi-Fi networks. The lack of USB-C on a brand-new piece of hardware that’s expected to last customers years is similarly concerning, as is the relatively stagnant software. And with two years of R&D time, there was no possibility to shave down the bezels on the sides of the display, or even slightly refine the design?

The new Oasis is good, but it feels like Amazon is coasting here. With no real pressure from competition, it can afford to release a lazier update, only adding features that allow it to stay ahead of the closest thing it has to a rival, Kobo, which has offered a similar blue light filter feature for a while now. 

The new feature also helps the Oasis stand out from Amazon’s only real competition: its own Kindle Paperwhite, which has the same 300ppi display, waterproofing, and feature set as the Oasis for a fraction of the price. It was true in 2017, and it’s still true today: unless you value the Oasis’ design, buttons, or extra inch of screen space to pay a huge premium, the Paperwhite is the Kindle for most people to buy, adjustable color temperature or not. 

The Kindle Oasis is supposed to be the Kindle to which you aspire. While the Paperwhite — smaller, cheaper, and more plastic-y — is Amazon’s best-selling e-reader, the Oasis is the one that customers are supposed to want. The new screen helps elevate it even further, offering the closest reading experience yet to a real piece of paper. But at the end of the day, the price and lack of differentiation from both the previous Oasis and the cheaper Paperwhite make it a tough sell to all but the most dedicated of Kindle readers.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.