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

It’s hard to imagine what your favorite family portraits and travel photos would look like with only six colors. But Aura has created a dithering algorithm — a technique that blends a limited color palette into patterns the eye reads as smooth gradients — that renders images close enough to the originals that its e-ink 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 said. “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, which is where you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found the process to be pretty 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 on your frame. (I didn’t try this, since I don’t know anyone else with an Aura frame, but if I did, I would 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 its more classic, 12-inch LED Aspen frame as a point of comparison. But the LED frame surprised me with how good it looks in its own right (it feels like the Prada of digital frames). The lighting is about as unobtrusive as an LED screen can be, and it’s anti-glare, which makes the frame look way more premium. Aura’s frames also benefit by surrounding 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’m a rebel, so I decided to load my frames with travel photos. When comparing the same photo on the Ink and the Aspen, it’s very clear that the colors aren’t exact, but as a digital photographer who isn’t that picky, I didn’t care very much. The distorted color palette almost seems like an artistic choice, even if I know it’s reflective of a technological limitation. But when I showed the two Aura frames to an analog film photographer who painstakingly studies the small color aberrations in his darkroom prints, he thought that 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 across each of the three image from my phone, then you might not like the Ink frame.

By default, the Ink frame changes photos once per day, and it will usually do this change in the middle of the night, when you’re least likely to be paying attention. If you manually change the pictures via the app, do not be alarmed if the frame looks like it’s 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 very bad with anything involving hammers and nails — all of the art in my apartment is hung up using Command strips — but mounting hardware that Aura includes feels sturdy. It’s easy to take the frame on and off the wall, but you probably only will need to take it down to charge the frame via USB-C once per month. (When the lights are off or you’re not in the room, the display will go to sleep, helping save battery.) I don’t think that the Ink frame looks too out of place, but if it does, maybe it’s because it’s surrounded by art made in other mediums. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a bad job at placement. Look, I can’t help that I added the Ink frame to a gallery wall that I assembled three years ago!

At $499, I wouldn’t call the Ink frame cheap (the Aspen runs $229, by the way). But aside from its color inconsistencies — which you can argue are more of a feature than a bug — I’ve loved having the Ink frame on my wall. With the unavoidable technical limitations of e-ink in mind, it’s hard for me to imagine how Aura could’ve made a better product.