Our Innokin Kroma-A review takes a look at the compact, 75 W device from the well-known brand. Is it a great choice for your first mod, or does it miss the mark?
Is it worth picking up?
The Kroma-A is a great device if you want something powerful that maintains a manageable size and a comfortable, well-presented design. It isn’t the device for you if you’re really serious about cloud-chasing or if long battery life is more important to you than portability.
However, if you’re happy with the somewhat limited 2,000 mAh battery, the performance from the Kroma-A is hard to fault, it’s simple to use and it looks great too. It’s definitely worth picking up at the £34.99 price-point in the UK or the $46.95 from US sellers.
Full review
Innokin has put out some excellent devices over the years. From the release of the first MVP, they’ve been one of the biggest names in the industry, and they have a reputation for putting out consistently excellent devices. So the Kroma-A has some pretty big shoes to fill right off the bat, promising a compact yet powerful and dependable mod, and letting you vape at up to 75W from the in-built 2,000 mAh battery. But with a price of £34.99 for the mod, without an included tank, it’s worth finding out a little bit more about what it can do and how it performs before making your purchase. Our Innokin Kroma-A review runs through what it can do.
What You Get
The Kroma-A comes in a well-presented box, with an outer sleeve covering a central box that opens like a book, to reveal a section with your mod on the right and everything else in a separate box on the left. The kit itself is quite basic though, just containing the device, a USB charging cable and an instruction manual. You can also buy it in a kit with a tank included, but if you already have a tank, the basic kit includes everything you really need.
Innokin Kroma-A Review – The Design
Appearance
The Kroma-A is a compact mod with an ergonomic design and a clear focus on aesthetics. The mod has a curved body, with a slight indent towards the top of the back side for your thumb that makes it much more comfortable to hold. The back section has a black textured grip, with the rest of the device either white or black depending on which one you pick up – personally I like the contrast provided by the white body but both look pretty cool. From some stores you can also get it in red, purple or blue.
On one of the large faces, there’s a Kroma-A logo, but on the other there’s a black panel that follows the curve of the grip section but actually contains the display screen. This leaves the front edge of the mod free for the two small adjustment buttons and the larger circular fire button, which has a multi-color LED light ring around the outside of it.
Overall the look of the device is pretty straightforward, but the unique placement and design of the screen means it manages to do everything it needs without compromising on aesthetics.
The Display Screen
The OLED display screen is one of the major design features of the Kroma-A, and despite the unique shape it’s pretty much just a standard rectangular display in the center of the panel. It has a standard layout, with your main setting shown in the center of the screen, a battery level indicator in the top right, and your resistance and the firing voltage shown on the right. It doesn’t really do anything special, but it’s clear and well-presented, and you can flip the orientation if it better suits how you use the Kroma-A.
The Fire Button
The fire button isn’t exactly exciting but it’s one of the most important parts of the device and the thing you’ll use most of all. The button protrudes out from the front slightly and lets out an audible click as you press it down. The position and the fact it doesn’t offer much resistance makes it comfortable to press, and the LED ring around the button lights up to give some visual confirmation too.
The LED ring indicates the charge left in the battery, with green indicating full or near-full, amber for medium and red for low – basically a traffic light system for the mod. This is handy because you always have a pretty good idea of how much charge you have left even if you don’t look at the indicator on the display screen.
510 Connection
The mod features the industry-standard 510 connection for your tank or atomizer, which allows you to use pretty much any tank or rebuildable atomizer with the mod without issues. It’s gold plated and spring-loaded, so connectivity is always great, and it’s in the center of an indented circle which gives some protection for the connection point in the event of leaking.
USB Charging Port
Finally, there’s a USB charging port at the bottom of the front edge of the mod, just below the adjustment buttons, which is used for recharging the device. The positioning on the front edge means it’s easy to keep the mod stood up during charging.
Overall
The Kroma-A is really well designed, doing a great job of balancing simplicity with aesthetics and keeping the whole thing compact too.
Innokin Kroma-A Review – The Features
Variable Wattage Up to 75W
While it’s basically standard for mods these days, the Kroma-A works in variable wattage mode, with a maximum power setting of 75 W. There are many devices that offer higher power vaping than this, but 75 W (or potentially 80 W) is the highest you can realistically go with a single-battery device, so anything offering substantially more is much less compact. Plus, for most vapers’ purposes, 75 W is plenty of power and you don’t really need to go much further than this unless you’re really into cloud-chasing. In other words, it does everything you’re likely to need it to.
Adjusting your setting works in the same way it has on many modern Innokin devices, where you have to hold down the adjustment button to go into adjustment mode before actually pressing them to change the setting. This effectively prevents accidental activation, and while it does mean it takes you longer to change setting, it isn’t really much of an issue in practice. You make adjustments in 0.5 W increments, and it works with any coils down to 0.2 ohms in resistance.
Temperature Control Vaping with Ni, SS and Ti Coils
The Kroma-A also features a temperature control suite, which works with all common temperature control wire types: nickel, titanium and stainless steel. You can set a maximum temperature of anywhere from 300 to 600 °F / 150 to 315 °C. To switch modes, you simply press and hold the fire button alongside the “+” adjustment button, and the device cycles through the available options (with each wire type for TC having its own associated mode). It doesn’t allow adjustments to the TCR (which gives you some additional control over the responsiveness of the TC mode), but you can adjust the ramp-up wattage in 5 W increments by holding the fire button and “–” and then dialing in your setting with the adjustment buttons. TC mode works with coils down to 0.1 ohm of resistance.
Overall, this is more than enough to get a satisfying TC vape, although it would have been ideal if the device had allowed you to change the TCR too.
Additional Features
The Kroma-A also has a few additional features that are worth mentioning, including the ability to flip the display screen (by holding both of the adjustment buttons) and several key safety features. These include low voltage cutoff, low resistance/short circuit cutoff and a 15 second cutoff if you puff too long. These safety features really shouldn’t be needed most of the time, but it’s important to have them in place regardless.
Innokin Kroma-A Review – In Use
Battery Life and Charging
The Kroma-A has an in-built 2,000 mAh battery, which is a pretty solid offering given the compact size of the device. Of course, how much you’ll get out of this depends a lot on the settings you use when you vape and how often you vape. However, broadly speaking you’ll comfortably get a day of use out of the device before it needs to be recharged, unless you really push it to the extremes either in terms of wattage settings or how frequently you vape.
It also recharges at 2A, which is much faster than a standard mod (and even faster than many dedicated battery chargers), so you won’t be waiting too long between charges either. In testing, the device went from completely empty to fully charged in just under two hours. The LED around the fire button also starts off as red early on in the charging process, then switches to green when it’s almost complete. When it’s completely charged, the LED switches off.
Overall, while there are devices available with much bigger, more long-lasting batteries, when you take the compactness of the mod into account, it’s a really great offering.
Performance – VW Mode
The Kroma-A uses the Aethon chipset, with the marketing material boasting a 0.05 second response time – this is obviously very quick, so for all intents and purposes it responds immediately. The performance is great throughout the wattage range, and so you’ll get great performance whatever wattage you’re operating at. There really isn’t much to add here, it works really well with pretty much any tank or atomizer you’re vaping with, and it’s impressively responsive and powerful.
Performance – TC Mode
The Kroma-A also does well in TC mode. Once you’ve got it set up – choosing the appropriate coil material after connecting the tank, and holding “Fire” and “−” together to adjust your ramp-up wattage – it works just as you’d want it to. You set the maximum temperature you want the coil to reach and start vaping, with the display counting up as your puff continues with an ongoing display of the current coil temperature during your puff. It stays within 5 °F of your chosen setting the majority of the time, and adjusts quickly so you don’t notice a drop-off in output when you reach your maximum. Overall it’s a solid device in TC mode.
Ease of Use
Mods can vary quite a bit in how easy they are to use, with menu systems frequently being a little irritating and not particularly user-friendly. The good news is that the Kroma-A manages to be about as user-friendly as a mod can be. Changing modes is really easy, because the device prompts you to choose one whenever you attach a new tank or coil (or indeed, if you remove and re-attach your old one), so you simply navigate to the relevant option using the adjustment buttons and hit “Fire” to confirm. You can change modes by pressing and holding the fire button and the “+” button too, so you don’t need menus at all.
Other actions like changing settings are similarly simple: press and hold and adjustment button to go into adjustment mode, then use the “+” and “−” buttons to dial in your chosen setting. Flipping the screen just requires holding both adjustment buttons. Overall you’ll need to spend a little time with the (very short) manual at first, but you can perform the most important tasks right away with little instruction.
Comfort and Portability
The small size and ergonomic design of the Kroma-A make it a great choice when it comes to comfort and portability. It’s still a mod, of course, so it won’t do as well in terms of portability as a vape pen or a pod-style device, but overall you’ll still be able to fit it into most pockets and it won’t take up too much real estate in a bag. Comfort is where the Kroma-A really shines though, the little nook on the back side of the grip makes it fit perfectly in your hand, and your index finger naturally falls on the fire button. Overall it’s really good in this department.
Build Quality
Innokin has been putting out high-quality vaping devices since the early days of the industry, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Kroma-A is a well-made mod. The buttons click in easily, the threading is well-machined, with no sticking of cross-threading issues, and the whole device feels solid and well put together. Overall there are no complaints in this department at all.