E InkPhoto Frames

Photos that suit e-ink

A Spectra 6 frame has six inks. Photos already close to those colors look lovely; photos that rely on subtle shades and shadow turn muddy. A few minutes choosing pictures makes more difference than the choice of frame.

Updated

Still from the video: Which photos look good on a color e-ink frame?
Which photos look good on a color e-ink frame?

One table, in daylight and at dusk

We rendered the same still life twice, once in window light and once lit by a single dim lamp, and ran both through our converter at a 13.3-inch frame’s 1600 × 1200 pixels. Shown here in the measured ink colors, the daylight version keeps its lemons, apple and cobalt jug. At dusk the colors sink into brown and gray: the converter uses black for 52% of the dots, against 6% in daylight, and white for just 3%.

The still life in bright window light
Daylight, the photo.
The daylight still life dithered to six inks in their measured colors: the fruit and jug keep their color
Daylight, on e-ink. Bright colors near the inks survive.
The same still life lit by one dim lamp
Dusk, the photo.
The dusk still life dithered to six inks: murky browns and grays, the lemons barely yellow
Dusk, on e-ink. 52% of the dots are black.
  • Black 52%
  • White 3%
  • Yellow 7%
  • Red 17%
  • Blue 9%
  • Green 11%

The ink mix of the dusk version. In the daylight version, white is the biggest share at 45%.

What works

  • Bright daylight photos with strong color: beaches, flowers, a red coat in the snow. 9to5Mac found daylight shots generally worked on the Aura Ink (9to5Mac).
  • Black-and-white photos, which 9to5Mac found looked surprisingly good.
  • Bold art, illustration and classic paintings. Creative Bloq found these render “with far greater brilliance” than shadowy photos (Creative Bloq).
  • One big, simple subject. A single face or object filling the frame survives dithering better than a crowd.

What doesn’t

  • Dark and low-light photos. The panel’s black and dark blue are close together and its white is really a light gray, so shadows lose their detail, as the dusk still life shows.
  • Subtle skin tones and soft gradients. A sky fading from blue to white becomes visible dots.
  • Tiny detail. At about 150 pixels per inch on a 13.3-inch frame, fine text and distant faces blur into the dither pattern.
Close-up of the dusk version: the lemon at the front is a speckle of dark dots with little yellow
The lemon at the front of the dusk version, enlarged: mostly black, red and green dots, in the measured ink colors.

Preparing a photo

  1. Crop to 4:3. Most frames are 1600 × 1200 pixels, and a phone photo is usually 4:3 already, but a 16:9 shot will be cropped.
  2. Brighten it and add a little contrast and saturation, because the inks print duller than your screen. The converter has sliders for both.
  3. Preview it. Run it through the photo converter with your frame’s preset, try the “muted” preview too, and look from a few feet away, as you would on the wall.

Frame apps do their own processing (Aura, Bloomin8 and others use their own dithering), so a real frame may look a little different from our preview. A photo that looks bad in the converter rarely looks good on the wall, though.