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.
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