What is the most cliché gift you can give to a loved one? A digital photo frame displaying a rotating slideshow of family photos. Now, Aura has completely refreshed this product space with its beautiful Aura Ink frame, which uses electronic ink to create a display that doesn’t even look digital.

Digital frames have always been so popular (but mostly disappointing) because there’s an undeniable appeal to the idea: It’s like magic to imagine hanging a piece of art on your wall that you can change to suit your mood. In practice, these devices generally seem bulky. You have to plug them in and figure out how to hide a bulky cord, and does anyone want another bright display in their house anyway? This problem was already on the minds of Aura’s founders when they started the company 10 years ago, but the use of color electronic ink was not feasible in a digital setting until now.

“E-ink is definitely the next level,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “People tell us they hung it up and had friends over and their friends asked, ‘How did you print that photo so quickly?’ »

E-ink is the same technology you see in e-readers, which allows you to read a book without feeling the same tension you get from staring at an LED screen for too long. But there aren’t many color e-ink devices on the market besides the Colorsoft Kindle, because the company that makes e-ink displays can currently only produce six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white and black.

It’s hard to imagine what your favorite family portraits and travel photos would look like with just six colors. But Aura created a dithering algorithm – a technique that mixes a limited palette of colors into patterns that the eye reads as smooth gradients – that makes images close enough to the originals that its e-ink frame can finally be commercialized.

“I learn color theory from our chief scientists, and from what I understand, there is no good definition of how many colors this correctly represents,” Jensen said. “It’s all sort of theoretical and depends on how people perceive it. Everyone is a little bit different, so it took a lot of testing with a lot of people in a lot of different spaces and different lighting conditions to get to where we are today.”

All Aura frames connect to the Aura app, where you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found the process to be quite user-friendly – easy enough to navigate for a less tech-savvy parent, which is important for a product that lives or dies on whether non-technical users will actually configure it.

The app also has social features, so if your sister has a great new photo of her baby, she can upload it to your shared library and it will appear on your frame. (I haven’t tried this, because I don’t know anyone else with an Aura frame, but if I did, I’d probably use this feature to prank my family members with ridiculous photos. Am I a bad person?)

In addition to the 13.3-inch Ink frame, Aura also sent me their more classic 12-inch Aspen LED frame for comparison. But the LED frame surprised me with its beauty in itself (it looks like the Prada of digital frames). The lighting is about as discreet as an LED screen can be, and it’s anti-glare, which makes the frame look much more premium. Aura frames also benefit from surrounding the LED display with a matte, paper-like screen, which helps the eye read it like a printed photograph.

Aura says it designed its dithering algorithm for portraits of people because users tend to emphasize family photos. I’m a rebel, so I decided to load my frames with travel photos. When comparing the same photo on the Ink and the Aspen, it’s very clear that the colors aren’t accurate, but as a digital photographer who isn’t that picky, I don’t care. The distorted color palette almost seems like an artistic choice, although I know it reflects a technological limitation. But when I showed the two Aura frames to a film photographer who carefully studies small color aberrations in his darkroom prints, he thought the Ink frame needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the photos below and are bothered by the fact that the white balance isn’t perfectly consistent in each of the three images on my phone, then you might not like the Ink frame.

By default, the Ink Frame changes photos once a day, and it usually makes this change in the middle of the night, when you’re least likely to pay attention to it. If you’re manually editing images through the app, don’t worry if the frame appears to have any issues: it takes about a minute for the hardware to run through the dithering process and render the six-color e-ink version of your image.

I’m terrible with anything that involves hammers and nails—all the art in my apartment is hung using Command strips—but the mounting hardware Aura includes seems sturdy. It’s easy to put the frame on and off the wall, but you’ll probably only need to take it down to charge the frame via USB-C once a month. (When the lights are off or you’re not in the room, the screen goes to sleep, which saves battery power.) I don’t think the Ink frame looks too out of place, but if it does, maybe it’s because it’s surrounded by art made in other media. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a bad job with placement. Look, I can’t resist adding the Ink frame to a gallery wall I put together three years ago!

At $499, I wouldn’t call the Ink frame cheap (the Aspen is $229, by the way). But aside from its color inconsistencies – which you might think is more of a feature than a bug – I loved having the Ink frame on my wall. Given the inevitable technical limitations of e-ink, it’s hard for me to imagine how Aura could have created a better product.