Digital Photo Frames on the Horizon
Posted by bryboy on Jun 30, 2008
Make way for a new type of gadget or furniture, whatever you may consider it. Digital Photo Frames are the new craze today and even though they cost close to the usual LCD monitors we find in the market today, they are more than just plain gadgets. They are ideal frames to place in the home and you don’t even have to stick to one image. No photo paper needed, all you have to do is save the images to a memory media and fix the settings and you have a slideshow in any room.
On the other hand, if you want some interactivity, these Digital Photo Frames can also function like a notebook. And one other thing that makes it stands out of the standard picture frame is that you can play music along with the slideshows or plainly if you want some good tunes to listen to. Just make sure you monitor the battery life. They do not come with extra batteries once you buy one.
Movies are playable as well in DivX format. Quite a number of possibilities for a small device that costs a fortune for sure. It is the typical plight of new gadgets in the market and unless you find competitors aggressively developing their own, expect the benchmark price to be the one to be followed by most Digital Photo Frame manufacturers.
Digital photo frames (DPFs) are simple LCD screens, ranging from 7 to 15 inches. I just got one to join in the fad. Simple as it is, I got one of the lower-end ones, a 7-inch screen and taking SD and USB thumbdrives. Let me cut to the chase. Why not a larger LCD monitor, and instead this small DPF instead?
Well, it is extremely portable and self-sufficient. It reads memory media and displays the pictures, and is relatively simple to use. It’s really much cheaper than a notebook, and functions as well as a notebook when it comes to displaying your pictures. Besides the simple slideshow functions, it also plays your MP3s, text files and is even codec-ready for DivX movies. It plays DivX movies very smoothly, I must say… no lag at all.
The setback I see with these DPFs is that they don’t often come with battery packs. So they’ve lost that aspect of portability.