Spolehli LED Movie Poster Frame Review: Preserving Cinema
Purchase Price: $299.99
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One of my goals as a child growing up in the 90’s was to have my own home arcade. As I got older, that concept evolved into an arcade/theater hybrid as I got further along into my filmmaking career. I’m also a big history buff who hoards things because I enjoy preserving pieces of art that have significant rarity and value. While I’ve made leeway into the arcade aspect of my goal, I’m still a long ways away from having a well designed home cinema. Just because I haven’t reached the peak of my home theater design doesn’t mean I couldn’t start looking at things that would eventually add to the aesthetics. I recently acquired a movie poster that had (in my opinion) cultural significance and wanted to display it properly and safely. As always, my go to in any purchasing situation was to check Amazon Prime first. I didn’t necessarily find what I wanted in a lower price range and after searching outside of Amazon, I did eventually circle back to an LED poster frame on Amazon from Spolehli. While it was a bit on the pricey side, after hanging it up on the wall for months now, did it do the job I wanted it to do?
What does it do?
Poster collecting is an odd field to dig into. On the one hand, preserving paper is a big deal for old movie posters that hold value. Sunlight, tape and oxidation are the top enemies to every vintage poster collector. This means that if you’re collecting to preserve the historical value of a poster, it shouldn’t see the light of day. It’ll be rolled up and tubed away safely. That completely defeats the original intended purpose of a poster, which was to market and attract eyes to a movie. A middle ground would be this Spolehli frame which uses a Ploy(methyl methacrylate) aka acrylic glass material to display a two-sided poster. For those who aren’t familiar with PMMA, it’s a plastic material that is often substituted for glass due to certain benefits of how it handles light emitting through it. This still isn’t a preserving gadget, but it does have some qualities of preservation while displaying the art.
The poster I’ve wanted for years now and ultimately acquired was a special recalled poster from 2001. Dubbed the “Twin Towers”, this was the first Tobey Macguire Spider-Man poster on cinema walls promoting the movie. They were hung around the world for about a month before the tragedy of 9/11 where Sony then issued a worldwide recall to dispose of these posters. The reasoning for this was that seeing the World Trade Center buildings on a poster would be difficult on a nation mourning the loss of innocent lives. However, like most things involving monetary value, not all of the posters were destroyed and this instantly became a piece of history. Over time, the value of the remaining posters continued to climb and it was sought out not only by cinema fanatics, but comic collectors as well (which I’m in both clubs).
While this isn’t the rarest poster to collect on the market, I was drawn to it based on the nostalgia I have for the film as well as the real life story that this particular poster had to tell during an important event in the world. I wanted to display this exactly as I remembered it on the walls of an AMC theater during 2001. On a consumer level, this Spolehli LED movie poster frame holds the correct aspect ratio size of 27” x 40” that modern movie posters are printed as. There are smaller options for consumer printed posters that this company sells as well. One premium aspect I do like about this frame was the brightness adjustments that are made possible by the built in dimmer. Cheaper options don’t supply dimmers so when this frame pushes up to 6500 lumen of brightness, it makes the poster look vibrant and sharp. I plugged it into a smart wall plug and connected it to my Amazon Echo Show for a smart home integration with my arcade machines.
Light it Up
A double sided cinema poster looks absolutely beautiful displayed with this LED frame. At max brightness which is what I normally have it on, it steals away attention from everything around it. I’ve seen other consumer LED frames with posters displayed and this one illuminates it exceptionally well. Spolehli claims the frame utilizes very low power consumption with only 4-30w of use. While I’ve only had this up on my wall for a handful of months, LED lights tend to survive much better in modern times, which leads me to estimate at least a handful of years before any type of maintenance would be needed. To change the poster out of the frame, the company supplies a suction cup to pop the frame off of the internal magnet strip housed on the inner rims. It’s a simple way to quickly access the poster for changing.
Light leaking from an uncovered edge
The only issue in regard to the LED illumination was that there were slight gaps between a 27” x 40” poster and the space allotted for the paper. This causes light to leak from certain angles as the poster does not cover the entire space. The frame area where the poster would sit in is slightly bigger than a standard cinema poster which could potentially damage the corners of a poster. Some people on Amazon have mentioned using tape to seal off a tricky corner, but tape is one of the arch-nemesis of poster preservation! It’s something to be mindful of if you’re looking to insert a poster of value in which preserving the quality is actually important to you.
Exposed hanging hook
Not an Eyesore, but…
Since there are hanging hooks, they are visible on the wall holding up the frame.
There are two sets of hanging hooks on both orientations of the frame. That means that this frame isn’t specifically built for movie posters as you could hypnotically insert a printed sign in landscape orientation. Since there are hanging hooks, they are visible on the wall holding up the frame. It’s not a complete eye sore to the overall aesthetics of the framed poster, but this is one aspect that does differentiate how Cinema chains display their frames. I understand why they had to put the rails for the hooks flaring out of the frame (the magnet layout), but I prefer the hooks hidden behind the backboard for a cleaner look.
I’m also not that excited at the frame body material used here as well. Unlike art frames, I do prefer black unobtrusive designs so that it doesn’t take away from the poster it’s accenting. While this is a black frame that does look good from a distance, I don’t necessarily like the aluminum alloy material constructed from it. It’s a lofty frame and it does feel quite sturdy, but there was absolutely a cheap “piano black” vibe when the overhead lights were turned on. As with piano black in cars, fingerprints and smudges are smeared everywhere. A matte texture would have been the way to go. When I was going through the Amazon listing, I was also a bit concerned that the bezels would be quite bulky after the poster was inserted. I was pleasantly surprised that the bezels were much thinner on the actual product than in the product photo. It truly does look well displayed up on a wall.
Who would buy it?
For about $300, this was a large price to pay for a light up poster frame. Being around cinemas both as a consumer and a professional, I do value this kind of accessory more than the average Amazon shopper looking to hang a poster of their favorite movie. I’ve studied for hours (for comics as well) on the art of sleeving, backing boards and cabinet preservation. For someone like me, $300 might make sense to be used in a $15,000 home theater custom built in a basement (one day!). Whatever your actual use case, I will say that the Spolehli LED frame did mostly live up to what I had wanted in a quality LED frame. Sure there were a few things both aesthetically and quality control-wise that could have been better, but there isn’t a huge competitive market for this kind of tech product and I’m happy to have a consumer version of a product I used to desire as a wide-eyed kid at the cinemas.
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Alex
Caught in between the conundrum of his fascination with retro and the future, Alex has a very unique taste in technology. Never one to follow trends like his millennial peers yet constantly desiring to get ahead of the curve, he sees technology like he does his other love: comic books. Always looking for the best value or a hidden gem, his collector mindset reflects on some of his favorite gadgets: the Moto X (2015), HTC U11 and the Google Pixelbook. If there’s a good tech deal out there, Alex is on the hunt!