is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Aura, maker of digital photo frames beloved by grandparents everywhere, is introducing its first frame with a color E Ink display.
The Aura Ink uses a 13.3-inch E Ink Spectra 6 panel and is designed to live on your wall for months at a time before it needs a recharge. I’ve been testing one for the past week on my own wall, where it has mostly displayed family photos that were otherwise relegated to Google Photos albums, and that has been genuinely delightful. It’s a tempting concept for anyone with an aversion to Too Many Cords, but this first-gen product comes with a steep first-gen price: $499, which is $200 higher than the next-priciest frame in Aura’s lineup.
Making an E Ink frame that could live cord-free on the wall has been a goal for Aura’s cofounder and CTO Eric Jensen for nearly a decade, but the technology hasn’t been there. The LCD panels in Aura’s current frames display photos in vivid color, but they draw too much power to be used for long without a cord. “A backlit LCD is just nowhere close to being able to hang on your wall and stay alive for months,” he tells The Verge in an interview.
E Ink offers the kind of battery life they were looking for, but until now, it hasn’t been capable of displaying photos realistically. Jensen says that the dream of a cordless frame finally became possible with E Ink’s Spectra 6 display tech. “It’s the first one that’s capable of really showing home photos, normal photos like we all have sitting in our camera rolls.”
The panel in the Ink frame can only technically display six colors: white, black, red, yellow, green, and blue. When you display a photo on the screen, electrically charged particles are arranged to mimic the colors of your photo — basically the same thing as the tiny dots arranged to create color images in a newspaper.
There’s no backlight on this display, unlike an LCD, though it uses a subtle front light to give the image a little pop — Jensen says testers reported photos were too dim without it. I didn’t even realize it was there until I went looking for it; if you cup your hand over the edges of the image, you can see the glow, but otherwise it’s extremely subtle. There’s a motion sensor embedded in the frame’s white “mat,” which turns the front light off to conserve power at night or if nobody’s around.
There’s a stand included if you’d rather put it on a table than the wall.
The Ink will, by default, display a new photo once a day, changing overnight. This is partly to conserve battery, but also likely because there’s a lot of flickering over the course of 30 seconds as it switches to a new image. It’s not bright; it just looks a little alarming to see your adorable baby’s eyes flashing as the colors settle into place. You can have it rotate automatically up to six times a day, and you can press one of the physical controls on the top of the frame to advance the image or go back to the previous one.
I chose the highest automatic refresh option, and I’ve been flipping to a new photo frequently throughout the day. I’ve barely put a dent in the battery. It’s at 92 percent after four days of stress-testing it. Aura’s estimated three months of battery life with one daily refresh seems entirely reasonable, and I doubt you’d have to recharge within a month if you opted to change the photo more frequently than that. Aura includes a super long USB-C cable with the frame — almost 10 feet by my measurement. The port is accessible even when the frame is on the wall, so you can most likely plug it into an outlet without moving the frame when it’s time to charge. A couple of nails are included for wall mounting, as well as a stand if you’d rather set it on a table — though at 11.5 x 14 inches, it’s a sizable addition to a side table.
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