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Last year, Aura released the Aura Ink, its first digital photo frame using an e-ink display rather than the LCD screens common to the other devices that made them the major player in the market (Aura customers have already uploaded more than one billion photos this year alone). When I reviewed the original 13-inch Aura Ink last year, I recommended it, with a few major reservations. Today, Aura announced its second-generation 10-inch Ink frame, and while I wouldn’t exactly say they’ve solved every one of my issues, the new device is significantly improved—and much cheaper.
The benefits of e-ink (and the tradeoffs)
Most digital photo frames will remind you of an iPad with a decorative border around it. They’re great for displaying hundreds of your photos with vibrant color, but not everyone loves the look, or the fact that these frames always need to be plugged in. An e-ink frame, on the other hand, uses a variant of the sort of low-power screen you’d find in a Kindle Colorsoft—less bright, but more paperlike, and much closer to the look of a traditionally printed photo.
The Aura Ink is a great choice if you want a digital frame that looks more like a “real” photo and doesn’t need to be plugged in and doesn’t light up like a tablet (though it does have a light, it’s really to make up for the fact that color e-ink screens don’t reflect light very well, and thus can make your pictures look way too dark without an additional boost). You’ll still get all the benefits of an LCD frame like the Aura Aspen, including the ability to load photos from anywhere using the versatile Aura app (you can now even text them directly to the frame), but you’ll only need to charge it once every few months.
Now for the downsides: Where most digital frames allow you to flick between photos with a swipe, the Aura Ink is much more sluggish—switching from one photo to another takes about 45 seconds. While an LCD can match the colors in your photo exactly, e-ink uses a “dithering algorithm” to blend tiny pixels together to create the illusion of different hues (“millions” of them, according to Aura). In practice, this means up close, your pictures will look rather grainy, and the colors won’t be nearly as bright as what you see on your phone screen.
The 10-inch Aura Ink offers some significant upgrades
Credit: Joel Cunningham
All of that said, the Aura Ink is a great product, provided you know what you’re buying, and the new 10-inch model offers some big upgrades over the 13-inch original released in 2025:
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Resolution has been bumped up from 150 ppi to 200 ppi, so your images look more detailed and less grainy. (Though the difference is hard to capture in a photo, I can definitely see the improvement when comparing them side-by-side.)
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Instead of the six base colors available on the older frame, the 10-inch Aura Ink blends nine different hues to approximate the colors in your images, offering greater color accuracy and improved contrast.
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The transition effect when you move between photos has been updated to look more intentional—like waves of color moving across the screen versus a series of increasingly intense flashes.
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It’s a heck of a lot cheaper: $349, versus $499 for the 13-inch model—though that’s still significantly pricier than Aura’s most popular offering, the 10.1-inch Aura Carver, which starts around $200 less.
A great choice—for the right person
I write a lot about e-ink devices, from e-readers to tablets, and my common refrain, especially with color devices, is that they’re great at what they do, but you should understand what they do before you plunk down your money. The Aura Ink will never look as bright and colorful as an LCD frame, and if you want a frame that can switch between images every few minutes or even play video, you’ll need to look elsewhere (to maximize battery life, Aura recommends swapping photos on the Aura Ink no more than 12 times per day).
But if you want to display photos that look more like the ones that hung on the walls of your childhood home, in a frame that doesn’t need to be plugged in all the time, you’ll probably dig it, provided you can stomach the $350 price tag.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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