Continuous Video Format Without Frames Reddit
Why you should trust us
Nena Farrell has covered technology and connected home products since 2016, originally at Sunset Magazine (where she was an associate home editor) and now as an updates writer on the audio, visual, and smart-home team at Wirecutter.
Brendan Nystedt contributed to an earlier version of this guide. He's been an enthusiast photographer and a writer covering consumer electronics and tech for the better part of a decade. Nystedt has worked for Wirecutter, Reviewed, and Wired, and he has written for numerous other outlets.
While preparing this guide, we consulted reviews both from owners and from trustworthy outlets, such as Wired and PCMag. Unfortunately for the layperson shopping for these devices, there are many SEO-driven clickbait blogs offering hands-off reviews. We ignored those websites.
How we picked
Before I started the 2021 update to this guide, I did about five hours of research on sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo to see what new models were available. I went through owner reviews, looked for top sellers in the category, and generally tried to suss out which frames and manufacturers were worth a closer look.
Previous research indicated that Wirecutter readers were most interested in digital frames measuring 8 to 11 inches diagonal. This display size makes the most sense because it's significantly bigger than the average phone screen yet small enough for you to tuck the frame away in a corner or to set it atop a bookcase. Style is subjective, but it was also a factor, albeit a minor one, in our decision-making process.
A display's aspect ratio is important to consider. For example, 16:9 frames are often too narrow to show most digital photos without pillarboxing the image (installing black bars on either side). A 4:3 ratio is the ideal ratio that we looked for in frames. Additionally, we looked at each screen's resolution: When even most smartphone cameras can shoot at least 10-megapixel images, it hardly makes sense for us to test anything below a 1080p display (which equates to a measly 2 megapixels). There are also a number of frames with 2K, or 2048p, displays, which we considered as well.
We looked at nearly two dozen of the top frames and then winnowed down the pool, according to the above criteria, to eight new frames for testing in fall 2021: the Aura Carver, Aura Mason Luxe, Nixplay 10-Inch Touch, Pix-Star 10-Inch Digital Picture Frame, Aeezo Portrait 01, Aeezo Dream Plus, Aluratek 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame, and the updated Skylight Frame. We also retested the Aura Mason and Nixplay 2K Smart Photo Frame 9.7-Inch for that same update. Since then, we've also tested the Aura Carver Luxe.
How we tested
We put each digital picture frame through a battery of tests. While examining everything from the setup process and display quality to the design, ease of use, and even the quality of automatic brightness adjustment, I took notes on each frame's strengths and weaknesses. I then uploaded to each frame an identical set of 74 photos from my library. These photos included professional ones from my wedding, as well as older and newer smartphone and digital-camera photos.
In my own home, I installed the frames in several locations to gauge clarity, brightness, and glare in different ambient lighting. I also made sure to view each frame straight-on, as well as at increasingly oblique angles, to see whether the contrast decreased or if any of the colors shifted. This process also helped me gauge the ease of installation and any possible snags related to the required power adapter. After narrowing the initial pool of contenders, I installed the top three at a family member's home across town. I did this to test my remote control of the frames and to record their experience using the frames in contrast with my own.
Security, privacy, and digital photo frames
Photographs are in a funny place when it comes to privacy. On one hand, we share them constantly on social networks and with friends. On the other hand, they're deeply personal and many people would prefer their private photo collections stay private. Because of this, we expect digital photo frames to meet a certain baseline of privacy and security. To assess this, we read through publicly available security and privacy documentation for each of our picks, and we sent a security questionnaire to each company who makes them. One company, Aura, who makes our two picks, responded, while the maker of our now-previous budget pick, Aeezo, did not.
Aura told us that it doesn't share or sell customer data for advertising purposes, and photos are encrypted in transit and at rest on Aura's servers. Aura's engineers can only access your photos at your request to troubleshoot issues, and any photos deleted from the Aura app also permanently removes them from Aura servers and frames. Aura uses facial recognition for its Smart Suggestions feature, which processes locally on the customer's device to suggest adding more photos of a certain person to a frame. Customers can opt out at any time. We also appreciate that Aura includes a more readable summary of its privacy practices at the top of its privacy policy and includes help guides explaining how to control your data and permissions.
We previously recommended Aeezo in this guide, but the company didn't respond to our security questions in June 2022. While our testing shows that Aeezo uploads all appeared to stay within the local network, just as the company describes, the fact that the company didn't respond to us signals that they don't take security seriously. If you're not bothered by these privacy concerns, we still include the Aeezo frames in Other good digital photo frames.
Our pick: Aura Mason
Our pick
The Aura Mason combines attractive hardware and simple software to create a digital photo frame that is the easiest to set up and operate. We found the quality of its screen to be on a par with that of bigger, pricier frames, and the Mason was a clear improvement over many cheaper options. You go through the entire process on your Android or iOS device, no clunky remote required. And setup gives you the option of inviting family members and friends to view and upload pictures. If you're primarily a phone photographer, you should have your pictures up on this frame in a relatively short amount of time.
Aura's software helps you easily set up the Aura Mason as a gift. Using the app, scan a QR code on the box to pair it with your account. That lets you invite family members to contribute photos before the recipient unpacks the frame and plugs it in. You can also have the frame shipped from Aura directly and use the company's email-setup process to associate it with your account while the frame is in transit. Though we didn't try the gift-setup method ourselves, we do appreciate Aura's focus on the gift angle. This is a feature other frames don't have (to replicate the experience, you have to prepare the frame yourself manually and then give it as a gift afterward).
Once you download the Aura app, pair your phone to the frame, and connect it to your Wi-Fi network settings through your phone, you're all set. Based on our experience with the Aura platform, you won't have to wait for updates to install (any updates occur overnight or when the screen is off for an extended period). In addition, you won't have to do anything on the frame itself with a remote control because there isn't one (something that competing frames tend to require).
The Mason's 1600×1200–resolution, 9-inch screen looks sharp, has excellent contrast, and displays colors well. Its automatic light sensor worked surprisingly well in our trial runs, cranking up the screen's brightness to combat sunlight. Using Aura's "presence sensor," the Mason also reliably turned the display off at night and when no one was around—a task that other frames struggled to manage.
Compared with a lot of other frames in this category, the Mason has an aesthetic that combines form and function quite well. The frame has nifty features, such as touch-sensitive strips that let you mark favorite photos and go forward and backward with a swipe. Yet the grooved, textured plastic makes the Mason look like a nice frame you might buy for a print photo. Instead of relying on a flimsy stand to prop itself up, the Mason has weights on two sides that allow you to position the frame in either portrait or landscape mode.
Once the Mason is up and running, there are many display options to choose from. Working with its default settings, you get behavior that's more suggestive of a real picture frame than a digital one. You'll find no cheesy animations between photos, only simple fades and swipes. The Mason does a remarkably better job than competitors at automatically cropping photos that are in the wrong orientation for the frame. And if it gets things wrong in that regard, a link in the app displays the photos it cropped automatically. So you can re-crop them if you want (but, based on my experience, you will need to do this very rarely).
A nice surprise I discovered while testing: Unlike every other brand of frame we tested, the Mason and other frames in the Aura family are compatible with Apple's Live Photo feature. So you'll see such images come to life for an instant when they first appear on the display.
All Aura frames, including the Mason, have video capabilities, allowing you to upload videos the same way you would upload photos. Current versions of the Mason include a built-in speaker to allow you to hear sound from your videos if you turn sound on. You do this manually for each video by tapping on the touch-sensitive strip, versus there being an on or off sound setting overall. If you don't intervene, the video will play once silently and then freeze for the rest of its time on screen, unless you tap the touch-sensitive strip to replay with sound on. All replays will include sound, but the next video the Mason shows will return to the muted auto-play setting. Aura will remember the volume the frame is set at, and volume can also be controlled onscreen or from the app when a video plays.
With other video-capable frames I tested, a frequent downside was that if you left the sound on, the frame would occasionally burst into sound and video when you were least expecting it, but this doesn't happen with Aura's frames playing videos.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The list of web-based services that Aura's platform connects to is short, limited to Google Photos. You can hook up a Dropbox folder in an officially sanctioned way using IFTTT. But that can feel like a bit of a hack and can make it difficult to get photos onto the frame from other sources. For example, to upload photos from my Flickr account, I had to download them from the Flickr app into my phone's photo library, and from there I uploaded them into Aura's library.
Upgrade pick: Aura Mason Luxe
Upgrade pick
The Aura Mason Luxe has everything we like about the Mason, but with a higher-quality display that's slightly larger (9.5 inches versus 8.75 inches) and an ability to play videos. The Mason Luxe has a smaller border, to accommodate the larger screen size, and a 4:3 screen ratio, which is ideal for most photos.
The 2K (2048×1536 resolution) screen is a clear improvement when you place the two models side by side. Smaller photo details showed up much more clearly on the Mason Luxe's 2K screen, and different colors and editing styles were easier to see too. Viewing wedding photos and other high-quality snaps on the Luxe frame was especially nice.
But even though the upgrade was appreciated, it doesn't seem necessary, and not everyone wants to see every little detail. One of my family members who helped test the frames said they sometimes wished for less detail on photos of themself, and they found the resolution of the original Mason more flattering. By comparison, a different family member immediately recognized the Luxe as being a better screen, and they preferred that screen overall for its higher quality.
Like the Mason, the Mason Luxe has a built-in speaker and video capabilities, and will default to those videos playing silently unless you tap the touch-sensitive strip to activate sound.
Other good digital photo frames
If you want a good-looking frame on a budget: Our previous budget pick, the Aeezo Portrait 01, was bumped to this section after not hearing back from the Aeezo team about its security policies. This budget frame looks good, especially for the price, with a matte black frame that looks higher quality than many others on the market. It also does a nice job cropping photos without pillarboxing. But its uploader is the main downside, which functions similarly to uploading a post to Instagram. We hope to hear back from the Aeezo team and reconsider this frame as a future pick.
If you want a nicer-looking frame: The Nixplay 2K Smart Photo Frame, our previous also-great pick, is now sold only with its large, silver mirrored frame. Its design is beautiful, and the screen is fantastic. And the NixPlay experience is easy to navigate, with app and email uploading options. But the thick frame leads to a worse motion sensor, so this model is off more often than not, and it uses a remote. The shiny silver frame also easily shows fingerprints. And this frame is expensive, though it's often on sale for around $265.
If you don't mind side-by-side photos: The Aura Carver and Carver Luxe have all the software features of our main pick. But instead of physically rotating to show both landscape and portrait modes, it sits on landscape mode only. To balance this, the Carver places two portrait-mode photos side by side when it shows them, or shows a landscape photo full-screen. This frame has the same touch bar on the top as the Aura Mason, and the side-by-side photos looked nice on the large 10.1-inch screen. The only difference between the two is that the Carver Luxe has an HD screen (1920 x 1200 over the regular Carver's 1280 x 800), and both include a speaker and can show videos. Both Carvers regularly retail for $180, the same as the Mason, but are often available for $20 - $30 cheaper.
If you want a less-expensive 2K frame: The Aeezo Dream Plus is a 2K frame that currently retails for just $170—cheaper than anything else we recommend, except for the Aeezo Portrait 01 (which is no longer a pick due to security reasons). Like the Portrait 01, the Dream Plus has an annoyingly Instagram-like uploader but also an easy-to-use frame, which can rotate and allows you to customize a photo's arrangement on the screen. The Dream Plus has a clearly nicer frame, yet it also has a shiny border, which looks a bit more like a tablet than the matte frames of our other picks and recommendations.
What about a smart display?
If you have smart products in your home, you might own—or be interested in owning—a smart display powered by Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Smart displays like the Amazon Echo Show or Google Nest Hub allow you to have photos as the main screensaver, resulting in something similar to a photo frame. Our smart display picks are nearly all cheaper than our digital photo frame picks, but the tradeoff is a smaller, dimmer screen.
Also, the experience isn't completely similar, and there are certain sacrifices when you swap a smart display for a digital photo frame. All of our photo frame picks have higher-quality screens than the smart displays. And (with the exception of existing Google Photos users who own a Google Assistant–powered smart display) you won't find smart displays any easier to upload to and use than a digital photo frame.
(Potentially) free alternatives
People have many screens in their lives. Some of them are big and some of them are small, but if you've recently upgraded to a newer tablet, you might consider using your old one as a digital photo frame. For this purpose, we'd recommend using an older Retina iPad, since Apple's displays offer good viewing angles and are bright enough to fight glare. The iPad's built-in Photos app has integration with iCloud and will remain synced to your phone's pictures, if you choose to use iCloud. Plus, the iPad has a nice slideshow mode that shuffles, crops, and animates your pictures.
You might be tempted to use one of Amazon's cheap Fire tablets as a makeshift picture frame, but our advice is not to bother. Even though these tablets have IPS screens and are certainly affordable (especially around the holidays), their screens are too dim and offer poor viewing angles.
Skylight now offers a product called Skylight Digital, which also offers to turn an existing screen into a digital photo frame. But the compatibility is limited—it's offered only on Fire TVs and TVs using a Fire Stick.
The competition
Nixplay's Smart Photo Frame 10.1 inch is a larger model of the Nixplay design. Unfortunately, we've found that the display is noticeably worse on this model and previous 10.1-inch Nixplay widescreen frames. Not only does the screen have a less-natural aspect ratio for traditional photos, but its lower resolution (1280×800) and less-punchy colors make it less compelling.
The Touch Frame is a touch-screen version of the Nixplay 10.1-inch frame. Sadly, this model also has a noticeably worse display, and it has the same issue of an unnatural aspect ratio (16:10) for most photos, leading to a large amount of pillarboxing. This frame was also the least responsive to light, and it needed to be manually turned on and off each day.
The Pix-Star 10-Inch Digital Photo Frame has a ton of overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon, and its features are impressive: In addition to photos, it displays weather and email, and it even plays internet radio. But its ugly design, clunky software, distracting transitions, and low-res, 1024×768 screen negate anything good. It also has the most sensitive sensor of any frame we tested; that meant it usually turned back on right after we turned it off (I had to place the remote in an area of the room where it would turn off the screen without being able to see me move). Simply put, this frame's price just doesn't seem aligned with what you get.
We haven't tested the Aura Buddy frame, but it appears to be extremely similar, if not completely identical, to the Carver Luxe in size and the stationary style of its screen. Its differences are a special color and other minor details designed for pet owners. It also retails for a similar price to the Carver Luxe.
Even though the cheap Aluratek 7-Inch Digital Photo Frame was labeled "Amazon's Choice" at the time we tested it, we strongly recommend that you steer clear of it. This frame is made of cheap plastic and has a dim, low-res (800×600) LCD with terrible viewing angles. Unlike some of the other frames we tested, which have IPS screens, this Aluratek display uses TN technology, and it is nigh unviewable unless you put it right at eye level. Even at its usual impulse-buy price of less than $40, this frame is just not worth it.
Aluratek's 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame also isn't worth it, based on our testing. It has a 4:3 ratio, and while most landscape photos fit nicely, there was a lot of pillarboxing on any photos that were not that orientation. Also, this model has clunky menus and a shiny frame, which made it look more like a propped-up tablet than anything else. We don't recommend buying it, despite the relatively moderate price tag.
The Skylight Frame, which is highly rated on Amazon, is a mixed bag. It looks well designed from the front, and it has a touchscreen that makes setup a snap. And there's even an updated version that's still priced at an affordable $160 (at this writing). Even so, we prefer other frames to this one. This is a landscape-oriented frame, and it doesn't place portrait photos side by side, so you see a large amount of pillarboxing on any non-landscape photo. It has a 10-inch screen but a huge amount of frame, which brings the overall size to 14 inches; this seemed unnecessarily large compared with the size of other frames. Plus, at nearly every step of using the Skylight, you'll find yourself getting prompted to upgrade to the Skylight Pro service—nearly $40 a year—for features like uploading videos or organizing your photos into albums. Using the app is also included on the list of Pro-only features, but we were able to use the app in our tests.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-digital-photo-frame/
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