Are Meural digital art frames worth paying so much for?
Meural digital art frames look excellent on paper. They have a large, high-resolution display with attractive frames and a compatible mobile app. Unfortunately, their strong appeal ends here. Meural digital art frames are plagued by countless negative reviews for one of the worst customer & after-sales services on the market, issue-plagued frames, failing displays, and a clunky, outdated interface you’d expect from a much cheaper digital frame.
To get a most from Meural digital art frames, you need to pay for the annual near-US$70 subscription fee – without which, leaves you with few ways to load photos to the frame. Even when photos are loaded, due to the frame’s 16:9 aspect ratio, most will appear with black bars around the sides or top & bottom of the image (ruining the immersive viewing experience).
These frames are prohibitively expensive and are some of the heaviest art frames on the market. You’ll find that many smart TV sets are lighter, cheaper, and more versatile for displaying pictures, professional photos, and artwork. The result is that these frames struggle to find their place on the market – a fact that’s further worsened by a cascade of issues, negative reviews, and poor real-world performance.
If you’re after value for money or want a digital frame to share special memories with your loved ones, show off some of your favorite artwork, or spice up your home gallery, there are many better-value options on the market. Pix-Star’s 15-inch digital art frame is an excellent choice. It can be wall-mounted, you get free-for-life cloud storage, web album support, offline functionality, and much more.
How long do Meural digital art frames last?
If you spend any time reading through Meural digital art frame reviews on popular platforms like Amazon, you’ll quickly realize that there are countless one and two-star reviews for these frames. Many of these issues are due to the frame stopping working after just a couple of months, with the screen being one of the first to give in.
Another popular issue that’s commonly reported on is horrific customer support. Despite the poor real-world performance and reliability of Meural digital frames, there’s arguably nothing worse than their customer support. Many reviewers say that they spent hours on hold, being switched between reps & departments – which ultimately ended up being cut, or with call-back promises that inevitably never were to take place.
If you’re looking for good value for money, these probably aren’t your frames. Despite their high price, the only feature they offer over most normal premium digital frames is their display size. This unfortunately comes at the cost of build quality, features, functionality, and real-world reliability.
How to send paintings to Meural digital art frames?
The best way to send paintings to Meural digital art frames is via the supported mobile app. That being said, it’s not the most intuitive setup and it’s plagued by issues, and clunky interface, and a slow response time. All of the photos you send from the mobile app are first loaded to the Meural cloud servers. It’s only from here that they can be synced to your frame. This is often slow, filled with errors, and a not-so-smooth overall experience.
While Meural digital art frames also support USB/SD cards, the setup up process is poorly documented, hard to get right, and even the smallest mistake will render the whole process void. Even when a USB/SD card is connected, paintings still need to be copied to the frame’s limited internal storage (which is already a major pain point for syncing photos daily from the Meural cloud).
You would expect that a digital frame of this price would offer more versatility for sending and receiving photos. By comparison, Pix-Star’s digital photo frames (premium digital frames that cost less than half of Meural digital art frames) let you send & receive photos via email, mobile app, web interface & dashboard, web album support, USB/SD card, and can be imported directly from your computer from anywhere in the world.
Pix-Star’s frames don’t rely on cloud servers to receive photos and incoming photos are automatically saved to the frame’s local storage (8GB – which is enough for 20,000 to 30,000 photos).
Do Meural digital art frames require a subscription fee?
Meural digital art frames rely heavily on the Meural art collection – a collection of artworks with more than 30,000 paintings and art pieces. Since USB/SD card connectivity is so complex to set up and work with, syncing photos from the Meural cloud is often the only option you have for receiving new photos. This syncing process is done through the app (which has a bad reputation for being overly complex, outdated, and clunky.
To access the Meural art collection and have them sync to your frame daily (which is necessary due to the frame’s severely limited internal storage space), you have to pay a nearly US$70 annual subscription fee. Even with this package active, you can’t hold that many photos on your frame’s internal storage, and still, need to sync new photos daily.
When you factor in the very high price of the frame (some models cost over $500) along with the cost of the subscription over the frame’s lifespan, it quickly becomes one of the most expensive digital frames on the market.
Can Meural digital art frames work without Wi-Fi?
Meural digital art frames are very reliant on their connection with the Meural cloud. Without this connection, there’s very little these frames can do. They have severely limited internal storage space and a high-resolution display – and high-resolution photos take up a lot of space.
This limited local storage quickly runs out and setting up USB/SD card compatibility is very complicated (and the provided how-to instructions are borderline unusable.
The only way to send photos to these frames is via the mobile app. If you want to use more than the free-allotment of photos from Meural’s 30,000-piece artwork collection, you need to pay for an almost $70 annual subscription plan. You’ll need to sync new photos every day as very few can be saved directly to the frame’s internal storage.
Considering the extremely high price of these frames, you’d expect them to do a lot more – especially considering that competing frames like the Pix-Star is significantly more versatile and offer multiple features that aren’t available with Meural digital art frames.
