Amazon boosts its eReader lineup with fantastic Voyage

If it seems as if eReaders don't ever really change, there's a reason for that: eReaders don't ever really change. Though there's still a little competition between Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a couple of others, the recipe for a solid eReader is well-established: a backlit e-ink display, excellent battery life and dirt-cheap prices.

Despite this, Amazon has continued to improve upon its line of eReaders. Its latest flagship, the Kindle Voyage (MSRP $199) focuses on the first two elements of the recipe, while sacrificing the third. The result of this grand experiment? The best eReader we've ever seen.

Of course, this is also the most expensive eReader in Amazon's lineup, available for a healthy $80 premium over Amazon's already superb Kindle Paperwhite. Is the extra money worth investing? We took the Voyage on a journey through our labs to find out.

So why the extra $80 at checkout? Much of that has to do with subtle upgrades that make the reading experience more pleasant. First off is the screen: The Voyage goes a step beyond the Paperwhite and brings its pixel density to a crisp, magazine-quality 300 DPI. The screen is covered by a piece of glass instead of plastic, and it's flanked by new touch sensitive page-turn buttons that buzz slightly when pressed.

Dedicated eReaders typically use an "e-ink" screen. This screen type reflects plenty of ambient light, which is why it's easy to read out in the sun, and why it doesn't fatigue your eyes like a typical phone or tablet. If you want to be a bookworm in the dark, however, you need an eReader that supplies its own light. Last year's Kindle Paperwhite could do this, but it lacked the ability to tell when your surroundings required only a little light to remain visible. The result was that you had to adjust the brightness manually to save battery and make things easier on the eyes.

The Kindle Voyage fixes this problem with the inclusion of an ambient light sensor that will judge just how bright your screen needs to be for your current conditions, and adjust to meet them. In the long haul, that will save battery.

Though the feature is now years old, Amazon continues to load up its eReaders with X-Ray, a handy assistant program. The Voyage's capacitive touchscreen allows you to highlight words, passages or characters and really dig into as much information as you can handle. You can also look up word definitions, tweet passages or bookmark your favorite segments for later.

The one part of the experience that still stings is the laggy display. Page turns are sluggish, and if you're used to the instant gratification of a smartphone you'll have to get used to it. That's always been an issue with e-ink screens, but we had hoped that for $200 Amazon would be able to figure it out.

Battery life varies wildly based on how much you use the light on the device. We weren't able to exhaust the battery by any appreciable amount within a 24-hour period with the lighting disabled. If you turn the front light on, you can expect your battery life to dip, but you can conceivably take the Voyage on a weeks-long vacation and not worry about charging it until you get back.

Despite its stranglehold on the eReader market, Amazon isn't resting on its laurels. Instead, it's dramatically enhancing some areas of the eReader experience to satisfy buyers who just want the best of the best.

But one question lingers: Should most people shell out the extra $80 over getting a Paperwhite? To that we'd answer that the Kindle Voyage is about as close to perfect as it gets for an eReader.

But the Kindle Paperwhite could've been described in the same glowing terms. And with the Voyage starting at $199, this will set you back a pretty penny for what truthfully amounts to a minor upgrade (with a few extra goodies).

Price aside, the Voyage is simply the best eReader you can buy. It's better than even the Paperwhite in appreciable ways, enhancing what was already a superb experience. It's not the cheapest, but on voyages short or long, it's a travel companion that you'll never want to be without.