Aura’s newest e-ink photo frame is even better and more affordable than its last

If you’re into interior design, decorating, or just love displaying your family photos, Aura‘s latest product line will feel magical. Aura’s cordless Ink photo frames have the versatility of a digital photo frame, but their e-ink displays don’t even look digital, blending seamlessly into the rest of your framed photos.

A follow-up to its 13-inch, $499 Ink frame, Aura is unveiling a new product that’s a little less pricey: a 10-inch Ink frame that is now on sale for $349.

“Ten years ago when we were first starting Aura, we were interested in making an e-ink picture frame. We just wanted a frame that looked like a printed photo and magically changed, but the tech was not there at that point,” Aura co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “So it’s great to be able to see it moving forward.”

Aura uses E Ink’s Spectra 6 display for its Ink frames, which can only render six different colors. What sets Aura apart is its proprietary dithering algorithm, a technique that blends a limited color palette into patterns that the eye reads as smooth gradients.

While the 13″ Ink frame looks beautiful, it is obvious that the colors are not exact to the original photo. For the new 10″ Ink frame, Aura worked with E Ink on expanding its Spectra 6 technology to incorporate three new proprietary colors: off white, mustard, and orange.

“The net effect is that the edges are smoothed a bit more,” Jensen said. “You can see if you zoom in on a face, the places where we would’ve had to previously put white next to red, or something a little more jarring, we can now fill in with the right color, and it effectively makes it a little bit higher resolution.”

With the extra three colors, the Ink 10″ is getting truer to representing an original photo, but the colors still appear less saturated on the digital display than in a printed image.

For both Ink frames, Aura paid special attention to rendering skin tones accurately, since most people use these frames for family photos. (Personally, I think the slight variations in color give scenery photos a cool, vintage look). It may not matter as much if your kid’s bright pink shirt looks closer to red on the Ink, but if her skin is unnaturally grey, then it would look pretty weird, hence Aura’s meticulous calibration of these colors.

The 10″ frame only comes in one colorway: a black frame with a dark grey linen-textured mat. It looks a bit jarring at first, and I wouldn’t hang it on a gallery wall next to ten other white-matted photos, but it looks great on its own.

“We intentionally made it dark so that it didn’t have as much contrast with the e-ink display next to it,” Jensen said.

Like Aura’s other frames, the Ink 10″ is compatible with Aura’s app, where customers and their family and friends can easily upload photos from their phone to an album of photos that display on their frame.

“On average, there’s about four people sharing to each frame,” Jensen said, meaning that it’s common for customers to share their Aura albums with others. If your mother has an Aura frame, for example, she can grant you permission to add photos to her frame, letting you easily drop the newest photos of her grandson at the park.

On Ink frames, the company recommends setting the frame to only update once per day, since changing photos consumes battery life (and it’s a bit odd to watch the dithering algorithm in action).

Aura comes with hanging hardware, a stand, and a USB-C charging cable, and the company claims that the Ink 10″ can last three months on a single charge. In my experience with the Ink 13″, I’d say the battery actually lasts about a month. But this is perhaps because I had displayed it in an area of my home that gets a lot of light, so the front light is probably lit more often than if I had placed it elsewhere.

The new Ink frame still doesn’t generate perfect, one-to-one reproductions of your photos, but the precision of color doesn’t matter that much. What matters more is that, if you aren’t expecting it, you could easily be fooled into thinking that the Ink 10″ is just an ordinary framed photo.