Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
There’s nothing on my walls. As a renter, part of that is practical, as anything I put up there is likely to leave its indelible mark despite my best efforts to the contrary — and ding my security deposit accordingly — but a hugely contributing factor is also my indecision. If I’m not absolutely in love with what I’m hanging up, why expose myself to that headache?
But I’m also not a monster who actually wants to live in a featureless void, and do look to smart solutions for filling my space with color and form that have the benefit of being a bit more ephemeral, satisfying my itch for novelty while keeping their physical impact minimal.
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Projectors represent a fantastic option there, turning that blank space into a giant canvas at a moment’s notice, and always being ready with fresh content. But they also carry with them some major limitations, from struggling with brightness on sunny days, to limited placement options unless you’re going with a pricier ultra-short-throw projector.
What about just mounting a TV on the wall and using that as my art fix? Displays like Samsung’s The Frame series are designed to accommodate exactly this need, offering aesthetics that actually feel right at home next to traditional artwork, while being able to change what they’re showing as fast as my attention span wanes.
The Frame solves that daytime visibility problem, but both screens and projectors suffer from another big obstacle: power consumption. Even if money’s no object, it’s tricky to justify the energy expenditure of an active display solution for something like wall art.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
So why not bring the mobile world’s favorite low-power, high-visibility display tech to my living room wall: electronic paper? That’s exactly what InkPoster is doing, blowing up the sort of screens we love on E Ink tablets to a size suitable for framing. This year at IFA 2025 in Berlin, I got to check out InkPoster’s lineup of digital frames, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed by how well the idea works — if not a little intimated by the pricing.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
First introduced earlier this year at CES, InkPoster offers color E Ink screens ranging from 13.3 to 31.5 inches — and here at IFA, is previewing a new grayscale model. While I’d still have to mess with my wall to install the initial mounting hardware, that’s a once-and-done affair, and a big benefit to these over active screens is that you don’t have to worry about wiring them up for power; they all run off internal batteries, and claim to go for a full 12 months between recharges.
Like all screens of this class, that’s possible because energy is only used when updating the picture, and once it’s set, the art remains perfectly visible indefinitely without consuming more power. They also don’t employ any sort of internal lighting, so they’ll blend seamlessly in with traditional paintings and prints, and aren’t going to be fighting to be seen against bright ambient light.
The image quality offered by the E Ink displays at this scale is better than I expected, at least keeping in mind some of the caveats you’re always going to deal with when working with any kind of electronic paper medium. Colors actually look bold and nicely saturated, something I’m not used to from color e-readers.
Getting up close, pixels are definitely visible (density ranges from 150 DPI on the 13.3-incher to just 94 DPI on the 31.5-inch model), but this is wall art, not a screen you’re holding only a foot or two from your eyes, so that’s far less a concern than you might think. And with the sort of curated vintage-poster art feed available through InkPoster, that doesn’t work half-bad as a sort of pointillist aesthetic. The pixels are even less noticeable on the grayscale frame, though you will spot them in areas of higher contrast.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
Then there’s the issue of updating the screen, and in order to get the highest-quality output possible, that requires some serious juggling of all those little E Ink micro-beads. When refreshing, the displays go through a rather jarring series of rapid transitions that take several long seconds to complete, and while I do think the results are worth it (you won’t notice a hint of ghosting on any of these panels), the experience does feel a bit at odds with the otherwise refined vibe InkPoster is going for.
Speaking of that, these are clearly positioned at shoppers who don’t bat an eye at paying a premium for their art, with pricing starting at $700 for the smallest model and going up to $2,400 — surprisingly, not even for the largest option, but for a 28.5-inch model that upgrades image quality thanks to Sharp IGZO tech.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
For someone like me who might love to hang a few across several rooms of their home, that’s not an insignificant problem, and I probably won’t be installing one of these particular InkPoster frames anytime soon. But I am 100% down with the idea of them, and with technology like this, it is only a matter of time until manufacturing gets to the point where the economic impact of this kind of home artwork solution becomes a heck of a lot more affordable.
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