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.
