We have spoken a lot about Mueral and their digital canvas, which is a painting-size digital frame that allows you to display all of your favorite pieces, giving you options like having the Mona Lisa to compliment your living room wall with. For a while, they seemed to be one of the few companies challenging this market. However now, there is another player that has announced their own frame, stirring things up and creating some competition.
Palacio’s Canvia is a frame with similar abilities to Mueral, only they build in “image processing techniques” that help to adjust the image to appear (more so) as though it was displayed on a canvas and not a digital screen. It not only adjusts the brightness of the screen based on the lighting in the room. It can also apply digital effects to make it look more so like it was actually painted on canvas material. It can, of course, be hung both vertically or horizontally, and comes with an app to control the media with.
You can use the app to browse through their catalog of famous/popular images, create playlists, and control everything remotely. You can zoom in on the image using your phone, allowing you to see the “print/canvas effect” in more detail, such as brush strokes. You can have it display artwork information as well. If you want to make things a little more personal, you can choose from your own images or take a new one with your camera and send it straight to the frame.
There is, of course, the option of choosing which size of frame you’d like to be around the screen, as well as colors.
Most of these features are available in the frames we have discussed in the past, but this one comes with some upgraded hardware. These frames feature a Rockchip RK3288 quad-core processor inside (up to 1.8Ghz performance) with 2GB of DDR memory. You also get 16GB of internal memory for downloading all of your favorite images to it, as well as the option to expand on this (or load images via) using a microSD card via the backside, and USB.
One of the only issues we’ve had when using a Mueral frame (which has been a great frame), was Wi-Fi connectivity. We found that the stability wasn’t dependable, causing it to fall offline a lot, despite being quite close to the nearest mesh repeater. Getting the network back to the frame has not always been so easy at times. Hopefully, Palacio’s frame will perform better since it packs support for up to 11AC Wi-Fi, which should give it plenty of range and all the speed it needs to deliver.
You don’t get the gesture controls as you do on the Mueral, but if the network stability is there, it wouldn’t be so bad pulling out your phone to change or control things with. We, of course, can’t say much as we have nothing to test out on our end, but the idea sounds nice and we can’t wait to see how it performs among the competition.
