What is the most cliché gift you can give to a family member? A digital photo frame that displays a rotating slideshow of family photos. Now Aura has completely renewed this product space with its magnificent Aura Ink frame, which uses electronic ink to create a display that doesn’t even look digital.
Digital frames have always been so popular (if mostly disappointing) because the idea of them has an undeniable appeal: it seems magical to imagine hanging artwork on your wall that you can change depending on your mood. In practice, these devices often seem clunky. You need to plug them in and figure out how to hide a bulky cord, and does anyone even want another bright screen at home anyway? This problem was already on the minds of Aura’s founders when they founded the company 10 years ago, but until now it was not possible to use color electronic ink in a digital frame.
“E-ink is definitely the next level,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “There are people who tell us that they posted it, they invited friends and their friends said, ‘How did you print that photo so quickly?’”
E-ink is the same technology seen in e-readers, allowing you to read a book without feeling the same strain you feel when staring at an LED screen for too long. But there are not that many color e-ink devices on the market other than the Kindle Colorsoftbecause the company that makes electronic ink screens can currently only produce six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white and black.
It’s hard to imagine what your favorite family portraits and travel photos would look like with just six colors. But Aura has created a dithering algorithm (a technique that combines a limited color palette into patterns that the eye reads as smooth gradients) that generates images close enough to the originals that its e-ink frame can finally hit the market.
“I’m learning color theory from our senior scientists, and as far as I understand, there’s no good definition of how many colors this represents well,” Jensen said. “It’s all theoretical and it comes down to how people perceive it. Everyone is a little different, so it actually took a lot of testing with a lot of people in a lot of different spaces and different lighting conditions to get to where we are today.”
All Aura frames connect to the Aura app, which is where you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found the process to be fairly user-friendly, easy enough for a less tech-savvy relative to navigate, which is important for a product that lives or dies by whether non-technical users will actually configure it.
The app also has social features, so if your sister has a great new photo of her baby, she can upload it to your shared library and it will appear in your frame. (I didn’t try this, since I don’t know anyone else with an Aura frame, but if I did, I’d probably use this feature to prank my family members with ridiculous photos. Am I a bad person?)
In addition to the 13.3-inch Ink frame, Aura also sent me their more classic 12-inch LED. Aspen framework as a point of comparison. But the LED frame surprised me with how good it looks on its own (it feels like the Prada of digital frames). The lighting is as discreet as an LED screen can be and is anti-glare, making the frame look much more premium. Aura frames also benefit from surrounding the LED display with a paper-like matte display, which helps trick the eye into reading it as a printed photograph.
Aura says it designed its dithering algorithm for people portraits, since users tend to highlight family photos. I’m a rebel, so I decided to load my frames with travel photos. When comparing the same photo in Ink and Aspen, it’s very clear that the colors aren’t accurate, but as a digital photographer who isn’t that picky, I didn’t care much. The distorted color palette almost seems like an artistic choice, even if I know it reflects a technological limitation. But when I showed the two Aura frames to an analog film photographer who pores over small color aberrations in his darkroom prints, he thought the Ink frame needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the photos below and are bothered that the white balance isn’t perfectly consistent in each of the three images on my phone, you might not like the Ink frame.
By default, the Ink frame changes photos once a day, and will typically make this change in the middle of the night, when you’re least likely to be paying attention. If you manually change images through the app, don’t be alarmed if the frame appears glitchy: It takes about a minute for the hardware to run the dithering process and render the six-color e-ink version of your image.
I’m really bad with anything involving hammers and nails (all the art in my apartment is hung with Command strips), but the mounting hardware Aura includes feels sturdy. It’s easy to attach and remove the frame from the wall, but you’ll probably only need to remove it to charge the frame via USB-C once a month. (When the lights are off or you are not in the room, the screen turns off, which helps save battery.) I don’t think the Ink frame looks too out of place, but if it does, maybe it’s because it’s surrounded by art done in other media. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a bad job at placement. Look, I can’t help but add the Ink frame to a gallery wall I set up three years ago!
For $499, I wouldn’t call Ink cheap frame (the Aspen It costs $229, by the way). But aside from its color inconsistencies, which can be argued to be more of a feature than a bug, I loved having the Ink frame on my wall. Considering the inevitable technical limitations of e-ink, I find it difficult to imagine how Aura could have created a better product.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
