A frame that paints, then holds still.
The first frames are being built around electronic paper and six real inks. It does not glow. It keeps its picture with the power off. Changing takes about forty seconds, the way a page turns rather than the way a video cuts.
Reserve · $50 depositFirst frames are being built — reserve to hold your place · museum mode free forever
THE PANEL, ACTUAL LAYOUT · ARTWORK SHOWN AS A SIX-INK STAND-IN
The object
Six inks, no backlight, no battery anxiety
The panel prints in black, white, red, yellow, green and blue. Everything between those is made of dots, the way a lithograph is. It reads by the light already in your room, so it dims at dusk and brightens by a window, which is what a print does and what a screen never does.
Power is only drawn while it is painting. Unplug it mid-move and it keeps whatever was on it, indefinitely. There is no glass, no gloss, and nothing on the front but the picture.
The current frame target
- Panel target
- 13.3 in · 1600 × 1200 · 150 ppi
- Colour target
- Six pigment inks, no greys
- Time to change
- About 40 seconds
- Power target
- Only while painting · USB-C
- Frame target
- Oak or blackened ash · 22 mm deep
- Hanging
- One nail, portrait or landscape
- Service
- Warranty and parts terms before frames ship
What it paints
Real museum works, free forever. Then things made for you.
Choose one source at a time and a rhythm — once a day, or a dozen. The frame does the rest without asking again.
FREEMuseum
Museum
138,000 works from the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and Smithsonian Open Access, with the title, the artist and the institution on the placard. These cost us nothing to serve, so they cost you nothing.
SUBSCRIPTIONSpecimen of the Day
Specimen of the Day
An original natural-history plate, rendered for your frame in the spirit of an eighteenth-century engraving. Exotic animals, botanicals, insects, named in Latin on the placard.
SUBSCRIPTIONYour categories
Your categories
Name a subject — moths of the British Isles, carnivorous plants, deep-sea fish, and your frame fills in that part of the catalogue, one plate at a time. Everything it draws stays in the catalogue for everyone.
What we refused to build
A digital picture frame is usually a hostile object
Glossy plastic, a glowing panel, a phone's aesthetic parked in a living room, and software that eventually starts asking for things. Here is what we ruled out, in writing, so you can hold us to it.
No notification when a painting changes
That is what the wall is for.
Nothing on the panel but the art
No badge, no logo, no clock, no weather.
A lapsed subscription changes nothing on the wall
Museum mode continues on your rhythm. No blanking, no watermark, no nagging in your living room.
No feed, no likes, no other people's frames
There is nothing here to scroll.
Nobody can buy a species
The catalogue is a commons. A category is a lens on it, never a claim, and no amount of money makes one exclusive.
Success is you not opening the app
We measure that, and we are not trying to move it the other way.
You are not the product
Your photos never train anything. Your taste never leaves your house. We sell frames and art — not you.
Price
Buy the frame once. Subscribe only for the work made for you alone.
There is one specimen a day and everybody sees it, the way everybody read the same newspaper this morning. That is why specimens are unlimited. Work drawn from your own camera exists for you alone, so that is the only thing counted.
The frame$399 when frames ship
The frame
$399 when frames ship
Reserve with a refundable $50 deposit. The rest is not charged until a frame is ready.
Museum mode, free forever
Everything in the open collections, on your rhythm, with no account and no subscription.
Most peopleCommission · $7
Most people
Commission · $7
A month, or $70 a year.
Unlimited plates, one category
Honestly unlimited, on any rhythm, across every frame you own. Nothing to count and nothing to run out of.
Museum · Specimen of the Day · one category of your own
For the collectorCurator · $19
For the collector
Curator · $19
A month, or $190 a year.
Five categories, 40 renders
Run five categories at once across up to five frames, with forty renders a month for your own photographs.
Everything in Commission · five categories · your photographs
If you want your category drawn faster
If you want your category drawn faster
A category fills at your own rhythm, about sixty plates a month, and costs nothing extra. If that is too slow you can sponsor a batch — a hundred plates for $30, thirty cents each, which is what they cost us. They are drawn within the week and every one joins the catalogue permanently, for you and for everyone whose category includes them.
What we will not do with it
What we will not do with it
No auto-refill switched on by default, no low-balance warnings, no bulk discount pushing you to buy more than you came for, and no invented currency with a name. Nobody can pay to own a species, and no category is ever exclusive. They are plates, priced in dollars, and the number lives in your register rather than on your wall.
Questions
The ones people actually ask
Does it look like a tablet on the wall?
Forty seconds sounds broken. What does it look like?
What happens if I stop paying?
Is the AI-made work sold as real art?
Are the specimen plates scientifically accurate?
What happens when the company goes away?
The local-network feed
The local-network feed
The frame accepts a painting over the local network with no account, and that path is documented and will not be removed. A frame that can only be fed from our servers would be a frame we had rented you.
What you can send it
A panel-ready PNG file — an image that has already been fitted, sharpened, colour-corrected, and reduced to the frame's exact six ink colours, at the frame's exact panel dimensions. This is the same file format MusePaper's own paintings arrive in.
How to send it
The frame runs a small web server on your own network. While the feed is turned on, from any device on the same network, a PUT request with the image bytes to the frame's own address uploads it; a status endpoint reports whether the feed is on and whether it is currently holding a local painting.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 200 | Your painting is now on the wall. |
| 503 | The feed is currently turned off. |
| 400 | The upload was empty. |
| 413 | The file is too large. |
| 422 | The file wasn't a valid, correctly-sized, six-colour image. |
| 500 | Something on the frame's own side went wrong; nothing was painted. |
Turning it on
The feed is on by default while the frame has not yet been paired to any household. Once claimed, it defaults to off. There is deliberately no way to turn it on or off over the network — that is always a local, physical decision made on the frame itself.
Why this exists
Because a frame that can only show you something when MusePaper's servers say so isn't something you own — it's something you're renting. This is the door that stays open no matter what.