The digital photo frame landscape has looked pretty much the same for the past few years. The best ones come from a few brands, and while new models have come out, the designs have usually focused on new frames and styles versus any real change in the technology or how to use the device. They’re pretty simple: Upload your photos and enjoy them anytime on the digital screen.

While Aura’s newest frame still embodies that basic concept, the Aura Ink stands out as a fully portable digital photo frame. The portable design is made possible by an E Ink screen like you’d find on a digital notebook or a color e-reader, instead of the usual LCD screen. The photos end up stylized like a newspaper photo, rather than your classic bright-screen display.

The result is a much more muted screen and representation of your photos, with all the benefits we already like about Aura’s frames and app (including free and unlimited photo storage). It’s a refreshing option in a sea of similar-looking digital frames, and great for anyone who wants a digital photo frame they could mount. I recommend uploading the best of your best pictures on it. This is a frame for your best (and absolute brightest—dim photos will only look darker) photos you’d want to look at all day, rather than fun photos from this weekend.

Print Edition

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Photos on the Aura Ink look different than those on other digital frames. The E Ink Spectra 6 technology that powers the screen gives it a slightly sepia-toned look. The screen only uses six color pixels: white, black, red, yellow, green, and blue. To bring your photos to this type of screen, Aura designed an algorithm to convert photos into pixels of those six tones and still look like the original picture. The result is newspaper-like, with a design that devolves into a multitude of different colored squares if you look closely.

Brighter photos are much easier to enjoy on the Ink’s screen. Darker photos, paired with the dimmer E Ink screen, were much harder to see. But a photo of my family at golden hour still showed the sky fading from blue to yellow and orange, for example, and the range of greens of the plants around us. My son’s smiling face while wearing his astronaut costume was just as cute, with the various shades of his blond hair still nicely relayed.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Aura did build a gentle front light into the Aura Ink, similar to what you’d find on a Kindle device, but it’s not nearly as bright as my Kindle when I crank the brightness all the way up. Compared side by side with my Kindle Colorsoft, which also has a color E Ink screen, the Aura Ink looks to get about half as bright. Aura also changed the physical controls on the device. Instead of a touchbar at the top, there are three buttons on one side: One to flip forward through your photos, one to flip backward, and an “action” button that just shows the battery status with an LED light.

It does look much, much more realistic and photolike than any other photo frame out there, but the photos displayed on it still appear dim compared to a true printed picture, let alone another digital screen. It’s best in a well-lit room, with the light sensor in one of the upper corners to activate the front light.

Power Play

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The screen doesn’t look different just for fun. It’s what makes the Aura Ink fully wireless. While the rest of Aura’s lineup needs to be plugged in at all times, as does just about every other digital photo frame on the market, the Aura Ink promises a battery life of about three months on a single charge. Devices like e-readers see similar benefits with this type of screen. The Kindle Colorsoft lasts about eight weeks on a single charge, while the larger Kindle Scribe (2nd Gen) has a similar three-month battery life.

That battery life can vary based on how often the photo changes, which is what takes up most of the Ink’s power. If you’ve ever used an e-paper device like a digital notebook or e-reader, the experience of the flashing screen as it loads the next image will look familiar, but the Aura Ink amps it up with a much longer set of flashes as it runs the next photo through its algorithm to become a six-pixel print. That transition between photos takes less than 30 seconds. Aura defaults to this happening once overnight to both preserve the battery and your eyes during the intense transition phase.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Aura has been trying for years to get us to mount its frames. The Aura’s first frame back in 2017, the Aura Classic, was wall-mountable, and then Aura’s latest frames, like the Aura Aspen, have had a flat, wall-mountable design. But the downside was the cord running below it for all of these models, which takes away from the clean gallery-wall design it’s otherwise well-suited for, and limits the locations it can be hung.

Now, with the Aura Ink’s truly cordless design, it’s possible to hang it without any cord clutter. The 13-inch screen makes it a little larger than the 12-inch Aura Aspen but smaller than the 15-inch Walden, and is a nice size for hanging. The Ink comes with a little mounting kit of two nails and a small hook that the digital frame clicks into, and it can easily click back off for charging (the charging port is on the side if your hanging spot is near an outlet). I was able to hang it on one of my existing pushpins without issue, and the frame easily blended into my existing gallery wall.

Overall, it’s an impressive feat of technology, though I wouldn’t call it perfect. I’d like to see the front light get a little brighter. It’s considerably more expensive than other digital photo frames, too. But as I look at it on my gallery wall, I have to say that if you didn’t already know it was digital, you’d likely have no idea. If you’re looking for a frame like that for your home, this is the one to get.