Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD review

How do I upload photos to Meural? Only you control who sees your content. Curate your photos into personalized playlists and schedule to play at different times of the day or on special occasions. Easily upload, crop and showcase your pictures and 15 sec video clips from your phone to frame via the Meural App. Get details in Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD review.

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To upload pictures and videos with the Meural app:

Start the Meural app.
Click the UPLOAD icon at the bottom. The Upload pop-up displays.
Press PHOTO.
Select each of the photos, live photos, and videos to upload.
Now click Next at the top right.
Tap Send to Meural.
Select the Meural to upload to and tap SEND TO MEURALS.

Pros & Cons – Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD

Pros

Easy to use
A versatile display
Gesture controls
Lots of display and content options
Excellent light and orientation sensor

Cons

Subscription required
No user-accessible local storage
No option to operate on battery
No hardware navigation options

Specs – Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD

Full Name Meural Wi-Fi Photo Frame
Screen Size 15.6-inch / Full HD LCD
Resolutions 1920 x 1080 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio
Dimentions 16 x 10 x 1.68 in (408 x 259 x 42.4 mm)
Weight 2.9 lb (1.3 kg)
CPU 1.8 GHz
Memory 1GB DDR3
Refresh Rate 60 Hz
Storage Space Cloud-based 4 TB (free), 20 GB for member
Wi-Fi Standard Support Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4GHz & 5GHz)
Video Format Support .HEIC, .mov, H.264
Sensors Gesture, Orientation, Ambient light

Meural Smart Price

The Meural WiFi Photo Frame is available now, but certainly isn’t cheap at $299.95. There’s also the option of content provided by the Meural Art Library, but it requires a subscription costing $69.95 a year. Netgear offers a larger device under the Meural name called the Meural Canves II, which is available in both 21-inch and 27-inch models.

Build

With its clever matt-finish frame, the Netgear Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD was more than a digital photo frame: it was a canvas for display high-end works of art (delivered by subscription) in a realistic way.

Design

The 15.6-inch Meural WiFi Photo Frame is not only smaller than the existing Meural Canvas II (which comes in 21- and 27-inch sizes), it’s also less expensive, with the new family-focused frame priced at $300 versus $400 and $600 for the two Meural Canvas II models. It’s a 15.6-inch screen that measures 16 x 10 x 1.68 in (408 x 259 x 42.4 mm), with a premium woodgrain-trimmed around the edges.

Connector

The bezel does not have any holes for sensors which is great because the holes immediately give away that this is an electronic display and not a real piece of art. There is an unobtrusive on/off switch below the frame (in landscape mode) and a small latch for an SD card and a micro USB connector).

Kickstand & Cable in Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD

Right where the kickstand attaches to the frame is the power port. The Meural comes with a standard power adapter connected to a 5-foot long wire. It’s something to consider when mounting the device. You’ll have to find a power outlet for it and a way to hide this cable.

The kickstand allows the frame to stay upright, vertically, or horizontally. There’s also a well-thought-out L-shape groove and a mounting piece for you to hang it up on a wall in either position with ease.

Display

Equipped with a full-HD (1920 x 1080) IPS anti-glare display, the wall-mountable Meural WiFi Photo Frame comes with a wood-grain trim and a removable metal stand that allows for placing it on a flat surface in either portrait or landscape mode.

WiFi

Capable of connecting to dual-band Wi-Fi networks, the Meural WiFi Photo Frame can be synced with photo albums on your iPhone or Android phone, and any new snapshots added to a synced album will automatically be uploaded to the frame. That said, the frame doesn’t offer integrations for Facebook or Google Photos.

Image load

You can also link photo albums stored on your phone to the Meural frame, which means that pictures on display will be constantly updated as you add in new images. From the app you can make Playlists, too, which can be made up of multiple images from multiple sources, both your own and professional photos and works of art.

You can set the length of time an image should be on the screen for and how images should be displayed (fill the screen, keep their aspect ratio and so on). And, if you get bored, then the app provides a way to skip to the next image.

Storage – Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD

Behind that large display is a quad-core ARM processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage, although only 4GB can be used for storing photos. As you’d expect, Wi-Fi is a standard feature and there’s support for both iOS and Android devices allowing for photo albums to easily be uploaded to the Meural using the dedicated Meural app. Netgear offers up to 4GB of Meural cloud storage for free, or you can increase the storage cap to 20GB by signing up for a $8.95-per-month subscription plan. The storage plan also includes access to more than 30,000 works of art, just as it does for Meural’s larger frames.

Portrait mode

The frame’s 16:9 display is designed to automatically display images in the correct orientation, meaning that if you’ve placed or mounted the frame in portrait orientation, you’ll only see portrait photos; conversely, if the frame is sitting in landscape mode, you’ll only see landscape-oriented images. An light sensor adjusts the display brightness according to the ambient light in the room, and it also turns the frame off when the room goes dark.

Motion sensor

You can wave your hand at the Meural WiFi Photo Frame to switch to the next or previous photo, while gesturing up will display details about the image, including when and where it was snapped (based on the metadata contained in the image file).

The Frame has a light sensor so it can adjust the lighting on its own, or turn itself off when you turn out the light to keep the room completely dark. That’s a nice touch.

Media library

Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD offers some 200 free pieces of known artworks and photos, but if your ant to display more than that, you’ll have to opt for the membership. being a member also allows access to a vast amount of digital content, including magazines and comics.

For example, if you’re a fan of the famous Peanuts, you’ll find all 18,000 of them. Other than that you’ll also find content from Marvel, National Geographic, Game of Thrones, and so on.

App usage

Via the app, you can skip through your photos, but you can also control a lot about how they’re displayed. You can set not to show photos in the wrong orientation, so you’ll get different photos depending on which way around your Photo Frame is stood.

You can schedule when playlists should be displayed, letting you switch and have different photo playlists at different times of day.

And, you can set how images should be scaled to fit the 16:9 display. Power saving lets you shut the screen down at night and when the ambient light isn’t bright enough.

Power consumption

In use, the screen uses about 20W of power, which is pretty minimal for what it is. If you were to have it on for 12 hours a day, then over a year you’d use around 87.6kWh, which works out at around £13.58 a year in electricity.

Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD Performance review

The core image quality on the Meural WiFi Photo Frame excels, the Canvas II’s viewing angles are better. Get too far away from off-centre and image quality does appear to degrade; it can be hard to see what’s going on. Positioning this device properly is key then.

Excellent colour reproduction and a life-like quality mean that your best photographs will look their best. I’d go as far as to say that this is the best way to show off your digital photo skills, releasing images from your computer and camera.

The screen technology also isn’t ideal for video, so if you want to show off home videos, a rival product, such as a Nixplay photo frame may be a better option.

With this model, viewing angles aren’t quite as good as with the Canvas. Go off centre too far, particularly when the frame is in portrait mode, and the on-screen image gets noticeable darker. You can work around the issue by carefully placing the screen, but the Canvas is that little bit better.

Subscription

The main idea of the Meural Canvas was to showcase professional artwork from across the globe, and that’s still an option here. If you buy a membership (£8.95 a month or £69.96 a year), you’ll get access to more than 30,000 images, many of which are by famous artists, covering big galleries from around the world.

Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD alternative

Samsung The Frame

If a standalone digital photo frame isn’t enough, Samsung’s The Frame pulls double duty as a TV when it’s on, and art when it’s “off.” Like other smart frames, it offers a small selection of paintings for free (a few hundred, by my count), and a larger selection for a monthly subscription fee of $4.99 a month. The screen doesn’t “pop” in quite the same way as, say, the Meural, and it’s more expensive than both the Meural and Samsung’s standalone TVs. But if you like the idea of having both TV and art in one frame, it’s a great alternative. (I personally own this TV, and I love having something other than a black slab to look at on my wall when the TV is off.)

Amazon Echo Show 15

The Amazon Echo Show 15, one of Amazon’s newest Echo offerings, has a 15.6-inch Full HD screen as well as a 5-megapixel camera to take photos and videos and video chat with friends. The smart display works with Amazon Photos and Facebook as a digital frame (and Prime members have access to unlimited photo storage). As a smart assistant, it can play music, pull up recipes and more.

Pros & Cons – Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD

Pros

Cons

Specs – Meural Smart WiFi digital photo frame 15.6 HD

Meural Smart Price