Aura’s stunning e-ink photo frame doesn’t look digital

What’s the most tacky gift you can give a relative? Digital photo frame, displays a rotating slideshow of family photos. Aura has now completely refreshed this product space with the amazing Aura Ink frame, which uses electronic ink to create a display that doesn’t even look digital.

Digital frames have always been so popular (but often disappointing) because there’s an undeniable appeal to the idea of ​​having them – it feels like magic to imagine a work of art hanging on your wall that you can change depending on your mood. In practice, these devices usually look outdated. You need to connect it and figure out how to hide a huge cord, and does anyone want another bright screen in their home anyway? This problem was already on the minds of Aura’s founders when they started the company 10 years ago, but color e-ink wasn’t yet possible to use in a digital setting.

“E-ink is definitely next level,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “We’ve had people tell us they’ve pinned it, and they’ve had friends over, and their friends were like, ‘How did you print that picture so quickly?’

E-ink is the same technology you see in e-readers, which allows you to read a book without feeling the same pressure you feel when staring at an LED screen for a long time. But there aren’t many color e-ink devices on the market except for the Kindle Colorsoft, because the company that makes the e-ink displays can currently only produce six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white, and black.

It’s hard to imagine how your favorite family and travel photos would look in just six colors. But Aura has devised a dithering algorithm — a technique that blends a limited color palette into patterns that the eye reads as smooth gradations — that gets images close enough to the originals that its e-ink frame can finally go to market.

“I’m learning color theory from our top scientists, and as far as I understand it, there’s no good definition of how many colors a color represents well,” Jensen said. “It’s all theoretical and about how people perceive it. Everyone is a little different, so a lot of testing was done with a lot of people in a lot of different spaces and different lighting conditions in order to get to where we are today.”

All Aura Frames connect to the Aura app, where you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found the process to be quite user-friendly — it’s easy enough for a less tech-savvy person to navigate, which is important for a product that lives or dies based on whether non-technical users will actually set it up.

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 haven’t tried this, because I don’t know anyone else with Aura Frame, but if I did, I’d probably use this feature to prank my family members with silly photos. Am I a bad person?)

In addition to the 13.3-inch Ink frame, Aura also sent me the more classic 12-inch LED Aspen frame as a point of comparison. But the LED Frame surprised me with how nice it looked on its own (it looks like Prada digital frames). The lighting is unobtrusive like an LED display, and is anti-glare, making the frame look more premium. The Aura Frames also benefit from surrounding the LED display with a matte, paper-like display, which helps trick the eye into reading it as a printed image.

Aura says it designed its frequency algorithm for photos of people, 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 image on Ink and Aspen, it’s pretty clear that the colors aren’t accurate, but as a not-so-picky digital photographer, I didn’t care too much. The distorted color palette feels like an artistic choice, even if I know it reflects technological limitations. But when I showed the two Aura frames to an analogue film photographer who was carefully studying small chromatic aberrations in darkroom prints, he thought the Ink frame needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the images below and are bothered that the white balance isn’t quite consistent across each of the three images from my phone, you may not like the ink frame.

By default, Ink Frame changes photos once a day, usually in the middle of the night, when you’re unlikely to be paying attention. If you change photos manually via the app, don’t be alarmed if the frame looks like it’s glitchy—it takes about a minute for the device to run the dithering process and render the six-color e-ink version of your photo.

I’m pretty bad at handling anything involving hammers and nails—all the art in my apartment is hung using command strips—but the mounting hardware Aura includes feels sturdy. The frame is easy to install and remove 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 go out or you’re not in the room, the screen will go to sleep, which helps save battery power.) I don’t think the ink frame looks out of place too much, but if it does, it’s probably because it’s surrounded by art made in other media. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a bad job of placement. Look, I couldn’t help but add the ink frame to the gallery wall I put together three years ago!

At $499, I wouldn’t call the Ink Frame cheap (the Aspen, by the way, is $229). But aside from the color inconsistencies — which you could say is more of a feature than a bug — I loved having the Ink frame on my wall. Taking into account the unavoidable technical limitations of e-ink, it’s hard for me to imagine how Aura has managed to make a better product.