What is the most cliché gift you can give a relative? A digital photo frame that displays family photos in a carousel. Now, Aura has completely revamped this product space with beautiful Aura Ink frames that use e-ink to create displays that don’t look digital.
Digital picture frames have always been very popular because they have an irresistible appeal, but they have often been disappointing. It feels magical to imagine hanging a piece of art on your wall that can change depending on your mood. In reality, these devices usually look clunky. You have to figure out how to plug it in and hide the bulky cord. After all, who wants another bright screen in their home? This problem has been on the minds of Aura’s founders since they started the company 10 years ago, but until now it has not been possible to use color e-ink in digital photo frames.
“E-ink is definitely the next step,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “People got off the phone and invited their friends over, and they said, ‘How did you get that photo printed so quickly?’”
E-ink is the same technology found in e-readers, allowing you to read books without feeling the strain you get from staring at an LED screen for too long. But aside from the Kindle Colorsoft, there aren’t that many color e-ink devices on the market. That’s because companies that manufacture e-ink displays can currently produce only six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white, and black.
It’s hard to imagine what your favorite family or travel photos will look like in just six colors. But Aura has developed a dithering algorithm, a technique that blends a limited color palette into patterns that the eye reads as smooth gradients, rendering images close enough to the original for e-ink frames to finally hit the market.
“I am learning color theory from senior scientists, and as far as I understand there is no exact definition of how well it represents many colors,” Jensen said. “It’s all kind of theoretical and depends on how people perceive it. Everyone’s a little bit different, so it actually took a lot of testing with a lot of people in different spaces and different lighting conditions to get to where it is today.”
Every frame in Aura connects to the Aura app so you can upload photos from your phone, the web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found this process to be very user friendly. It was easy enough for non-tech savvy people to navigate, which is important for a product that lives or dies based on whether non-tech savvy 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 the shared library and it will appear in the frame. (I haven’t tried it because I don’t know anyone about Aura Frame, but if I do, I might be able to use this feature to prank my family with ridiculous photos. Am I a bad person?)
In addition to the 13.3-inch Ink frame, Aura sent me a more classic 12-inch LED Aspen frame for comparison. However, I was surprised at how cool the LED picture frame looked on its own. (It’s like the Prada of digital picture frames.) The lights aren’t as obtrusive as LED screens, and the anti-glare features make the frames look much classier. Aura’s frame also has the advantage of surrounding the LED screen with a paper-like matte display that tricks the eye into reading it like a printed photo.
Aura says it designed its dithering algorithm for portraits because users tend to emphasize family photos. Being the rebel that I am, I decided to put some travel photos in my frames. If you compare the same photo in ink and aspen, it’s pretty obvious that the colors aren’t accurate, but as a not-so-fussy digital photographer, I didn’t really care. The distorted color palette almost seems like an artistic choice, even though we know it reflects technical limitations. But when I showed two Aura frames to an analog film photographer who was eagerly studying the small chromatic aberrations in darkroom prints, he thought the Ink frames needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the photo below and find it bothersome that the white balance isn’t perfectly consistent across each of the three images on my phone, you might not like the ink frame.
By default, Ink Frame changes your photos once a day, usually in the middle of the night when you’re least likely to pay attention. If you manually change a photo through the app, don’t be surprised if the frame appears defective. It takes about a minute for the hardware to run the dithering process and render a six-color e-ink version of the image.
I am very bad at anything involving hammers and nails. All of the art in my apartment is hung using command strips, but the mounting hardware included with the Aura feels sturdy. It’s easy to mount the frame on the wall and take it off, but you’ll probably only need to take it out once a month to charge it via USB-C. (The display goes into sleep mode when the lights are off or you’re not in the room, which helps save battery.) The ink frame doesn’t look too out of place, but if it does, it’s probably because it’s surrounded by art made in other mediums. Or maybe a black frame. Or maybe I did something bad during my placement. See, I can’t help but notice that I added an ink frame to the gallery wall I put together three years ago!
At $499, the Ink frame isn’t cheap (the Aspen is $229, by the way). But aside from the color inconsistency, which you could argue was more of a feature than a bug, I liked having the ink frame hanging on the wall. Considering the inevitable technical limitations of e-ink, it’s hard to imagine how Aura could have created a better product.
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