Aura’s e-ink photo frame looks like real art, not a screen

What is the most predictable gift you could buy for a family member? A digital photo frame cycling through a gallery of vacation snaps and baby pictures. Aura has completely reinvented that category with its stunning Aura Ink frame, using e-ink technology to create a display that hardly looks like a screen at all.

Digital frames have long been popular, yet often disappointing, because the concept is magical. The idea of hanging artwork on your wall that you can change on a whim feels like pure wizardry. In reality, most of these devices look clunky. They require a wall outlet and a way to hide an ugly cord. And honestly, who wants another bright screen glowing in their living room? That very frustration was on the minds of Aura’s founders when they launched the company a decade ago. But color e-ink simply wasn’t ready for a digital frame until now.

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

E-ink is the same display technology found in e-readers. It allows you to read a book without the eye strain caused by staring at an LED screen for hours. Yet color e-ink devices remain rare, aside from the Kindle Colorsoft, because the manufacturer currently only produces six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white, and black.

It is difficult to imagine what a cherished family portrait or travel photo would look like with just six hues. Aura solved this challenge with a custom dithering algorithm. This technique blends a limited color palette into patterns that the human eye reads as smooth gradients. The result is an image close enough to the original that the frame could finally go to market.

“I’m learning color theory from our chief scientists, and as far as I understand it, there’s not a good definition for how many colors this represents well,” Jensen explained. “It’s all sort of theoretical and comes down to how people perceive it. Everyone’s a little different, so it’s actually taken a lot of testing with a lot of people in a lot of different spaces and different lighting conditions in order to get where we are today.”

All of Aura’s frames connect to the Aura app. From there, you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. The setup process is refreshingly user-friendly. It is simple enough for a less tech-savvy relative to handle, which is critical for a product that depends on non-technical users actually getting it running.

The app also includes social features. If your sister takes a great new photo of her baby, she can upload it to your shared library and it will appear on your frame. I did not test this, since I do not know anyone else with an Aura frame, but if I did, I would probably use it to prank my family with ridiculous photos.

Aura also sent me its more classic, 12-inch LED Aspen frame for comparison. The LED frame surprised me with how good it looks. It feels like the Prada of digital frames. The lighting is about as unobtrusive as an LED screen can get, and the anti-glare coating makes it look far more premium. Aura also surrounds the LED screen with a paper-like matting display, which helps trick the eye into reading it as a printed photograph.

Aura says it designed its dithering algorithm for portraits of people, since users tend to highlight family photos. I decided to load my frames with travel photos instead. When comparing the same image on the Ink and the Aspen, the colors are clearly not exact. But as a digital photographer who is not very picky, I did not mind. The distorted color palette almost feels like an artistic choice, even if I know it reflects a technical limitation. When I showed both frames to an analog film photographer who studies small color aberrations in his darkroom prints, he thought the Ink frame needed improvement. I disagree. But if you look at the photos and are bothered that the white balance is not perfectly consistent, you might not like the Ink frame.

By default, the Ink frame changes photos once per day. It usually performs this change in the middle of the night, when you are least likely to notice. If you manually switch pictures through the app, do not be alarmed if the frame looks like it is glitching. 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 am terrible with hammers and nails. All the art in my apartment hangs using Command strips. But the mounting hardware Aura includes feels sturdy. The frame is easy to take on and off the wall, though you will probably only need to remove it once per month to charge via USB-C. When the lights are off or you leave the room, the display goes to sleep to save battery. The Ink frame does not look out of place to me, though that might be because it is surrounded by art made in other mediums. Or maybe it is the black frame. Or I did a poor job with placement.

At $499, the Ink frame is not cheap. The Aspen runs $229. But aside from its color inconsistencies, which you could argue are more of a feature than a bug, I have loved having the Ink frame on my wall. Given the unavoidable technical limitations of e-ink, it is hard to imagine how Aura could have made a better product.