E-ink traveled a long way from its humble beginnings in tablets. The technology, once limited to black-and-white text, pushes its way onto your walls with a creative new application: displaying high-quality photos.
Aura, a company already known for sleek digital displays, dropped its newest model, the Aura Ink 14″. This new device offers a significant departure from the company’s previous designs and solves one of the biggest headaches of wall-mounted digital frames.
Its Cordless
Aura’s earlier frames used traditional LED screens, which meant an annoying, dangling cord often ruined the aesthetic of a carefully decorated room. The new Ink frame, however, leverages e-ink technology—the same tech you’d find in a basic word processor—to finally go completely cordless.
This is a game-changer. You can now hang the frame on a living room wall, in a stairwell, or literally anywhere without needing an unsightly power cable.
Huge Battery Life
So, how long does the battery actually last? Aura claims the Ink achieves up to six months of battery life. To make this possible, they added smart tech, including motion and light sensors that automatically turn off the screen when no one is around. Users can also utilize the mobile app to set their own custom schedule.
Color That Mimics Print
While you might associate e-ink with a grayscale display, the Ink frame uses Spectra 6 technology. This system incorporates six primary colors—red, yellow, green, blue, black, and white—to create the illusion of millions of tones.
Aura even developed its own special image blending software, a proprietary rendering algorithm, to handle the color simulation. According to Aura co-founder Eric Jensen, the team studied ancient tapestry weaving techniques to figure out how to effectively blend the dots to simulate vibrant colors.
The result delivers a more muted color profile than a standard LCD, but that is an intentional and positive design choice. It helps the digital photo look remarkably like a traditional, printed photo, making it a perfect, non-intrusive fit alongside other artwork on your wall.
One Trade Off
Because the frame uses e-ink, a trade-off exists: when the photo changes, the screen must refresh, which causes a brief, rather jarring flash of bluish light.
Aura anticipated this concern and designed the frame to update the photo every hour by default. However, if you prefer to see your gallery change less often, you can set it to update up to 12 times a day—just know that more frequent refreshes will drain the battery faster.
With its high-end look, a glass front, and a paper-textured mat, the $599 Aura Ink frame feels less like a piece of cheap technology and more like an actual piece of art, finally making the dream of a seamless digital photo display a reality.
