With its wooden build, bold screen and innovative rear light, this digital photo frame is the most beautiful I’ve ever tested

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Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame: review

The Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame is an innovative photo frame built on the third-party Frameo platform. While its premium styling and large, glare-free display are undoubtedly a visual treat, the feature most likely to draw admiring comments from visitors to your home will be the rear-facing wall light, described by the manufacturer Lexar as the ‘world’s first’.

If you’ve read any of my past reviews of digital photo frames built on the Frameo platform, you’ll be familiar with how easy the app is to use. Adding users is a cinch. You simply tap ‘Add Friend’ on the frame, and it generates a code. Once you or your loved ones have downloaded the app, you can enter the code, and you’re good to go.

Sending photos to the frame has been improved since I last used the Frameo app. You can still select up to 10 photos to send at a time or upgrade to the Frameo+ app for $1.99 / £0.99 a month or $16.99 / £7.99 a year to unlock unlimited sends. Once you’ve selected which frame you want to send the photos to, you can add captions and adjust their alignment. In a marked improvement over earlier versions of the app, you can now manually select the positioning of images in both landscape and portrait orientation, ensuring your snaps are cropped exactly how you want them.

best digital photo frames a run for their money. From a decent viewing distance, my black-and-white shots of the Puente Romano in Córdoba look crisply detailed. Up close, though, it doesn’t always look quite as precise – that’s an inevitable side effect of that larger screen size, which gives it a pixel density of 141 PPI, rather than the staggering 212 PPI of the Pexar 11-inch Digital Picture Frame.

(Image credit: Future / Josh Russell)

Another area where it falls a little short of the excellent example set by its predecessor is color balance. One of the things that blew me away about the older Pexar frame was its impressively vibrant hues, but the Starlight looks more muted to me. Even compared to the screen of my iPhone 16 Pro – not a device notorious for its hyper-saturated colors – the Barbie pink of camellias or blazing gold of rhododendron blooms look more conservative and less exuberant. It’s not miles off the mark, but it’s just enough that photos look a little more subdued than I’d like.

Despite these slight missteps, the Pexar Starlight’s performance is still impressive, giving your photos plenty of pop. In a large part, this is thanks to the frame’s bright display and super-dynamic, contrasty pictures – even if the colors look a little duller from time to time, photographs I’ve uploaded still look bold and assertive, making for an impressive focal point in my living room.

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Naturally, this is helped by the design of the Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame, which is flat out gorgeous. That 15.6-inch screen is bright and almost entirely glare-free – honestly, it’s so unperturbed by all the artificial light in my office that it’s like it’s subject to some kind of quantum tunnelling effect where the light just passes straight through it.

(Image credit: Future)

The frame is a bit of a stunner as well. Its wood grain finish is beautiful and feels delightfully tactile, while the bezels around the screen are nicely textured to mimic a proper mount. Admittedly, the plastic this is made from doesn’t feel quite as authentic as the paper-like effect on the Aura Aspen but the overall effect still gives it a more premium feel than the Pexar 11-inch Digital Picture Frame before it.

Given its name, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the biggest new feature of the Starlight is backlighting. I didn’t notice it a whole lot when viewing the frame stand-mounted or under bright light, but mounted on the wall or in the evening, it looks picture perfect. Honestly, it makes the frame a statement piece in its own right. I do wish there was an option to change the warmth of the backlight, though, as it can look a little cool for the kind of soft amber light I prefer after dark.

Ultimately, I feel like the Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch is the difficult sequel to Pexar’s breakthrough album, the Pexar 11-inch Digital Picture Frame. It’s more ambitious, more innovative and yet it compromises on a few of the things that made its predecessor such a hit. It still features pretty highly on my list of favorite digital photo frames but for $159.99 / £149.99 you can snap up its stablemate instead.

Netgear Meural Canvas II will set you back a whopping $599.99 / £649.99 – for that spend, you get great features and better color, yet it has a much lower pixel density as a result of its bulk.

(Image credit: Future)

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Dimensions	7.1 x 10.2 x 1 inches (180 x 259 x 25mm)
Display size	15.6-inch
Resolution	1920 x 1080, 144 pixels per inch
Aspect Ratio	16:9
Touch Screen	Yes
Sound	Built-in speaker
Orientation	Portrait or landscape
Storage	64GB
Connectivity	Wi-Fi, SD card, USB-A, USB-C

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(Image credit: Future / Josh Russell)

Should I buy the Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame?

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Attributes	Notes	Rating
Features	The Frameo app is easier to use than ever, thanks to new settings for cropping your photos.	4/5
Design	The Pexar Starlight is stunningly designed, with a gorgeous wood-grain frame, textured white bezels and that classy backlight.	5/5
Performance	Impressively bright and glare-free, the Starlight offers crisp, contrasty images – it’s just a shame its colors can occasionally look a little more subdued than other frames.	4/5
Value	With an increased price and build quality, the Pexar has also lost some detail and color accuracy, which is a real shame. But it’s still not a bad frame for this kind of spend.	4/5

Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame review: also consider

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Header Cell – Column 0	Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame	Aura Aspen	Pexar 11-inch Digital Picture Frame
Dimensions	7.1 x 10.2 x 1 inches (180 x 259 x 25mm)	12.7 x 10.1 x 1.1 inches (323 x 257 x 28mm)	7.4 x 11.2 inches (18.9 x 28.4cm)
Display size	15.6-inch	11.8-inch	11-inch
Resolution	1920 x 1080, 144 pixels per inch	1600 x 1200, 170 pixels per inch	2000 x 1200, 212 pixels per inch
Aspect Ratio	16:9	4:3	5:3
Touch Screen	Yes	No	Yes
Sound	Built-in speaker	Built-in speaker	Built-in speaker
Orientation	Portrait or landscape	Portrait or landscape	Portrait or landscape
Storage	64GB	Unlimited cloud storage	32GB
Connectivity	Wi-Fi, SD card, USB-A, USB-C	Wi-Fi	Wi-Fi, SD card, USB-A, USB-C

How I tested the Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame

Tested over several weeks
Uploaded a range of color and monochrome photos
Have many years of experience working with photography

I spent several weeks testing the Pexar Starlight 15.6-inch digital photo frame. To test out how easy it is to use, I first set up the frame and added several users to it. I then sent over a range of photos using the Frameo app, both individually and in large batches to see how easy the transfer process is, before tweaking the fit and alignment of each image.

I made sure I uploaded a significant variety of photos to test out how the frame’s display performed against different criteria. To test its resolution and contrast, I used a variety of black-and-white photographs, from mountains in the Scottish Highlands to Spanish architecture. When assessing its color performance, I used vibrant shots of blossoms, flowers and fireworks, comparing its color reproduction against the screen of my iPhone 16 Pro.

Not only have I tested over half a dozen of the best digital photo frames released over the last 18 months, I’m also a keen photographer, having snapped over 40,000 images on my Canon SLR and iPhone 16 Pro. On top of this, I spent over a decade working in print publishing, meaning that I have a keen eye for managing photography and assessing how it’s translated to another medium.

First reviewed: November 2025
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