Created 22 June 2025
Product recommendation: BOOX Tab X C
The best paper reading experience since paper?
I recently bought the BOOX Tab X C. It is a 13.3 inch Android tablet with a color E-Ink display.
If you’ve ever owned a Kindle, you know what the E-Ink reading experience is like; the unlit/front-lit display is much easier on the eyes, and that’s important if you plan to spend a long time on it. The Tab X C provides the same reading experience but in a large format. The 13.3” screen is just about the size of a sheet of US letter paper, which means it shows documents at the intended print size. I’ve found the Tab X C to have the best reading experience among all my devices for research papers and other longform text that aren’t E-Books.
Before the Tab X C, I had also bought a Remarkable Paper Pro. Between the two, I like the Tab X C much better, for a few reasons.
Android vs. Proprietary OS
First is that the Tab X C runs Android and can install apps from the standard Android store out of the box. For me this mostly meant that I could install Chrome and read web pages in addition to PDFs, which the Remarkable cannot do (probably by design). This isn’t really a criticism of Remarkable, it’s more a question of fit for my personal use case.
Physical Size
Second is the simple fact that the Tab X C is bigger, 13.3” vs. the Paper Pro’s 11.8”. The larger screen means larger text without the hassle of having to zoom and pan, which on an E Ink display is not a great experience.
Display Engineering Tradeoffs
The third reason is a little more subtle/technical. The tab X C uses a Kaleido 3 panel while the Paper Pro uses a Gallery 3 panel. I did some shallow research (i.e. use AI) to compare the two, and it seems that the Gallery 3 (used by the Remarkable Paper Pro) is designed for displaying color more faithfully, and trades off refresh rate in the process. That means the Tab X C display is more responsive and suffers from less ghosting, but does a comparatively poor job at displaying colorful content, as you can see in the images below (the Kaleido 3 has half the PPI of the Gallery 3 for color content, and less than 10% of the color space; black and white PPI are the same in both panels). However, since my main goal was to read research papers, which typically have few if any colors, I would much rather have the faster refresh.
Furthermore, although in theory both panels had the same black and white resolution, in practice I found the Tab X C to render text much more sharply and with higher contrast than the Paper Pro. I’m not sure if this is due to differences in the panels or the software of the two devices, although I suspect it’s the former - the fact that the Gallery 3 uses cyan, magenta, yellow and white pigments (no black) might mean that it struggles with pure black. You can see a comparison below.
Cover & Stylus
Now, the Remarkable Paper Pro does do a few things better than the Tab X C. For one the writing experience is better. The Paper Pro’s screen offers more friction and feels closer to writing on paper. The Tab X C’s screen is smooth and it feels like the stylus is gliding over glass (well because it is). But I don’t really write or draw that much, so this isn’t a major issue for me.
The Paper Pro’s cover and stylus are better. They attach far more securely to the tablet than the Tab X C’s counterparts. I seldom bring my tablet(s) outside, and if I do I always put it in a backpack. So this is also a non-issue for me.
Price
I paid $891 for the Tab X C and $852 for the Paper Pro. Both figures are the total after tax. However, I did buy the expensive cover and eraser stylus for the Paper Pro. The Paper Pro tablet itself is $629 before tax ($688 with 9.37% tax) and comes with a non-eraser stylus and no cover. The Tab X C comes with a non-eraser stylus as well but also includes a cover.
Should you get one?
At almost nine hundred dollars it is admittedly a tough sell. You could buy a color laser printer for around $250, and a black and white laser printer for half of that. With the rest of that money you could probably buy enough toner and paper to last a lifetime. Or you could just use the office printer (if they still have one). And let’s not forget real paper’s superior “display quality”: despite all the advancements from E Ink, even a cheap laser printer can produce 4x the resolution of the Tab X C or Paper Pro (1200 DPI vs. 300 PPI), not to mention the unbeatable contrast of black text on white paper.
That said, there are many things that a tablet can do that paper simply can’t. Perhaps one day a sheet of “paper” will be able to load a website, but for now I’m sticking with my tablet.