What is the most cliche possible gift you can give a relative? A digital photo frame, displaying a rotating slideshow of family photos. Now Aura has completely revamped this product space with its wonderful Aura Ink frame, which uses e-ink to create a screen that doesn’t even look digital.
Digital frames have always been so popular (but mostly frustrating) because there’s an undeniable charm to their concept—it’s magical to imagine hanging art on your wall that you can change to suit your mood. In practice, these devices usually look clumsy. You have to hook them up and figure out how to hide a bulky cable, and does anyone want yet 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 was not feasible until now to be used in a digital context.
“E-ink is definitely next level,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “We’ve had people tell us they closed it, they had friends and their friends said, ‘How did you print that photo so fast?’
e-ink is the same technology you see in e-readers, which allows you to read a book without feeling the same pressure you suffer from staring at an LED screen for a long time. However, there aren’t that many color e-ink devices on the market besides the Kindle Colorsoft, because the company that makes e-ink displays 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 created a dithering algorithm—a technique that combines a limited color palette into patterns that the eye reads as smooth gradations—that renders images close enough to the originals that its e-ink frame could eventually come to market.
“I learn color theory from our chief scientists, and as far as I understand it, there’s no good definition of how many colors it represents well,” Jensen said. “It’s all kind of theoretical and depends on how people perceive it. Everyone’s a little different, so it’s been a lot of testing with a lot of people in a lot of different places and different lighting conditions 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 — easy enough for a less tech-savvy relative to navigate, which matters for a product that lives or dies 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 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 the more classic 12-inch LED Aspen context 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 subtle as an LED screen can be, and it’s anti-glare, which makes the frame look that much more premium. Aura’s frames also benefit by surrounding the LED screen with a paper-like matte screen, which helps the eye read it as a printed photo.
Aura says it designed its algorithm for portraits of people because users tend to tag family photos. I’m a rebel, so I decided to load up my photo 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 really care. The warped color palette almost feels 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 studies small chromatic aberrations in darkroom prints, he thought the Ink frame needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the photos below and it bothers you that the white balance isn’t completely consistent in each of the three images from my phone, then you might not like the ink frame.
By default, the ink frame changes photos once a day, and it usually makes 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 worry if the frame appears to be malfunctioning — it takes about a minute for the hardware to run the warping process and render the six-color e-ink version of your image.
I’m really bad with anything that involves hammers and nails—all the art in my apartment is hung using command strips—but the mounting hardware included with the Aura is durable. It’s easy to lift and remove the frame from the wall, but you’ll probably need to take it down to charge the frame via USB-C once a month. (When the lights are off or you’re not in the room, the screen will sleep, helping to save battery.) I don’t think the ink frame looks too out of place, but if it does, it might be because it’s surrounded by artwork made in other media. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a poor job of placement. Look, I can’t help but say that I added the ink frame to a gallery wall I put together three years ago!
At $499, I wouldn’t call it that Ink frame cheap (the Aspen runs $229, by the way). But aside from its color inconsistencies — which you could argue is more of a feature than a bug — I loved having the ink frame on my wall. Bearing in mind the inevitable technical limitations of e-ink, it’s hard for me to imagine how Aura could have made a better product.
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