The Aura Ink is not your typical digital photo frame, and on the basis of the specs alone it doesn’t sound too impressive. That’s because it’s a color e-ink display, with all the drawbacks that entails.

It can display only four different colors – white, yellow, red, and blue – takes around 30 seconds to change from one photo to the next, and is expensive at $499 for a 13.3-inch model. And yet, despite all this, it’s actually the best digital photo frame I’ve ever used …

Much as I love technology, I have to say that when it comes to photos, there’s no substitute for a print. For many years I had a set of large, gallery-quality photo frames on my walls and would refresh them with new prints from time to time.

The frames themselves were expensive, the prints moderately so, and it was relatively time-consuming to swap them out, but I persisted with them until I moved to a more central London apartment with way more glass and way less less wall space.

I substituted a couple of digital photo frames, and while those obviously have many benefits, for me they have never quite compared. So I was intrigued with a new product which claimed to be more like a print that a digital frame.

Aura Ink look and feel

The Aura Ink is a 13.3-inch color e-ink display inside a 17-inch frame. The display is surrounded by a white plastic matt, which does a surprisingly convincing job at imitating a card one. The outer frame is black plastic, though does a pretty good job of looking like it’s metal, and even feels somewhat like that.

The company says that it looks like a paper print. How true that is depends to a very large degree on the photo in question. Aura readily acknowledges that some photos will look better than others, and while it suggests photos taken in bright daylight will look best, I found it was a little more random than this. More on this shortly.

But for photos where it works – which is most of them – I have to say that it does indeed look remarkably like a paper print. Images do fall apart when you hold the frame right up to your face: at that point, you see something looking very much like an old-world dot-based newspaper print or billboard poster.

At normal viewing distances, however, it looks like a somewhat grainy film print. If, like me, you’re old enough to have shot with film, then I would say the appearance of the prints is very similar to something shot with stock like Agfa Vista 800, Fuji Superia/Press 1600, or Kodak Max 800.

A key benefit of e-ink displays is that they don’t require any power to display content, only to update it. In the case of the Aura Ink, the company has added a subtle front light which also uses power, but uses motion and light sensors to only switch this on when needed. The result is a claimed battery life of around three months between charges.

It is this long battery life which completes the illusion of a paper print, since no power cord is required. You can use the supplied attachments to either hang the frame on a wall or place it on a table or desk. When it does need charging, you just use the supplied USB-C charger (or any one you already have) to charge it overnight.

How it works

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes human beings as creatures who still thought that digital watches were a pretty neat idea. Well, I have to confess that I still think e-ink is a pretty neat idea.

While I sometimes read on an iPad, my Kindle Paperwhite is by far my preferred reading device, and I still can’t quite believe e-ink works as well as it does.

The Aura Ink uses the E Ink Spectra 6 color display panel, which I’d again say is pretty wild technology in terms of how much it can achieve with so little. Here’s an animation showing how it works:

This is obviously similar in nature to a conventional RGB display where different pixels or sub-pixels are illuminated in close proximity to give the illusion of other colors, but in this case it is manipulating physical ink particles. Aura says the company applies its own proprietary dithering algorithm to the panel.

Using error diffusion, this algorithm selects and places the available colors near each other to create the appearance of a full-color photo.

“Because Aura frames are designed for sharing and displaying photos of loved ones, we hold color accuracy, brightness, and overall photo reproduction to a higher standard—even while working within the unique characteristics of e-paper, such as its narrower palette, more muted tones, refresh process, and pixel structure,” says Eric Jensen, Aura’s CTO and co-founder.

(Aura actually refers to six colors, as you can obviously create the others by mixing these, but it has confirmed to me that the above animation is accurate.)

In use

As you’d expect, the Aura Ink has a companion app used to wirelessly load photos into the frame, and there’s a web interface too.

In terms of capacity, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Aura says there is no limit to the number of photos you can add to the app and therefore display in the frame. The bad news is that this is because the photos are hosted on the company’s server, so if it ever went bust, your frame would likely cease to work. This is becoming a growing issue with smart products.

An additional drawback is that you have no control over the timings. When I uploaded one entire album, it happened almost immediately, while another (similar-sized) one sat at the auto-adding stage for more than half an hour.

By default, it will update the photo once a day. You can change this in the app up to a maximum frequency of 12 times a day, though the company does caution that this will have an impact on battery life. There are also next and previous buttons to allow you to manually change the photo. Finally, you can select a photo in the app and set that to display immediately.

You can give guest access to other people, so they can send photos to the frame remotely. A popular way of using this kind of feature is to gift a frame to parents in order to send them regular photos of their grandchildren. The Ink frame has a specific setup workflow if you are gifting the frame to someone.

Ironically, for a product where color is the most exciting feature, some of my favorite photos to display on it were monochrome ones.

As mentioned, I found it somewhat random in terms of which photos looked good and which didn’t. It’s not as simple as the company’s guideline of well-lit daylight photos looking good and low-light photos not. Indeed, some night shots look great – you can see a couple of examples in the gallery below.

For example, this photo was shot in good light but looks incredibly grainy (click/tap to view larger):

Here’s a close-up:

Yet this one, which was shot in way more challenging lighting conditions, directly into the sun, looks just fine at normal viewing distances.

Put your nose up against it, however, and it breaks down in exactly the same way, so it’s unclear to me why some look fine at normal viewing distances and others don’t.

Overall though, I would say that the hit rate was somewhere around 90%. Here’s a gallery with an unedited and random selection of photos to enable you to judge for yourself. Click or tap each photo to enlarge.

Of this selection, I would say that the Lloyds building (the one with the X) and the colorful metal sculpture are the two that don’t really work.

Pricing and conclusions

The elephant in the room here is of course the cost. $500 is a great deal of money to pay for a 13-inch digital photo frame, especially for one which is in many ways inferior to far cheaper products. I suspect the market for their Aura Ink is a relatively niche one.

Additionally, I’m very wary of hardware products which rely on a company’s server for basic functionality.

However, despite these drawbacks, I have to say that I absolutely love the Aura Ink, for two reasons.

First, as I said in the introduction, there is something very special about a paper print compared to a typical digital screen. We all spend way too much of our time looking at screens, so there is something relaxing about gazing instead at something which very much looks like paper. That grainy paper-like look makes me feel nostalgic for my days of shooting on film and doing my own developing and printing in a home darkroom.

Second, the months-long battery life. Regular readers will know that I am allergic to visible cables; I have a 15-inch digital photo frame mounted on the wall, and while ducting is neater than a loose cable, it’s still very different from hanging a print.

The ability to simply hang this frame on the wall without any power feed at all is a huge benefit in my eyes. I haven’t yet done that as I’ll be moving home in the new year, hence using the press image at the top of the piece, but it will certainly be one of the first things I do after the move.

There’s also been another unexpected benefit. With my conventional photo frame, a motion sensor detects when somebody is in front of it, switches it on, and starts a slideshow running at five-second intervals. It can be pleasant to stand and view a number of photos for a while, but I found that having the same photo on display for a full day gives me a new level of appreciation for them. For me, it’s turned out to be an excellent compromise between a constant slideshow and a static print.

I would absolutely adore a huge version of this, like the 30 by 20 inch prints I used to hang on my wall. But the color e-ink panel technology is so costly that this would be prohibitively expensive. I’m hoping the costs will fall rapidly enough to be able to make such products feasible in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, though, this rapidly became one of my favorite pieces of technology.

The Aura Ink is available now from Aura Frames at $499.99.

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