OT digital photo frames

[John Stumbles]

Quick heads-up please: I'm looking for a digital photo frame which can display pictures at good quality (ideally, comparable to a decent PC monitor) at under £100. No movie playback, audio, CCTV or such frills: just nice pictures at good resolution, brightness, viewing angle etc.

It's to be a present for a non-technical person so it needs to Just Work - to be able to put in an SD card or USB stick and display the pictures on it in a pleasing random order.

Any pointers to good makes/models/suppliers?

tia

[AlanD]

I notice a lot of frames are not 4:3 aspect ratio - often some widescreen type ratio, therefore 'standard' 4:3 images from compact cameras usually get stretched to fit, and look rubbish. Also many frames have a resolution of

480x234 or similar, which often look grainy.

I bought 2 of the 12" 'Pictorea' frames from ebuyer before Christmas, 1 as a present for my 89YO grandmother.

Link to product range

are pretty cheap for the size, and 800x600 resolution (12" model) and

4:3 ratio. Picture quality is excellent, my only complaint would be that there is no random playback order - same every time. I loaded a 2GB card with hundreds of images and posted a frame off to her for Christmas. It seems it's the best present she's ever received by the remarks I get on every phone call - no complications, just plug in and go and she's over the moon with it.

I kept the 2nd frame for myself and have today ordered the 15" model (1024x768 resolution) for another relative's upcoming birthday. I expect it will be the same reaction again.

Alan.

[Steve Walker]

We bought a 12" Pictorea from ebuyer recently, it's pretty simple and the display quality is good.

[Dave Liquorice]

They are more likley to be 3:2 (ie standard photo 6 x 4 inches ratio) rather than 16:9. Streching to fit isn't on, hacking a bit off top and bottom better, but there should be a pillar box mode as well IMHO.

With the abilty to store huge numbers of images on an SD card there really ought to be some form of navigation system built in so you can find photos of Hols '97 or Winter '10 etc...

[Bruce]

You can pay an awful lot for a digital photo frame, or not very much at all. The cheaper ones have low resolution, typically 480 x 234 pixels, and in my opinion are not worth having.

You can get frames from 7" upwards that have higher resolution, typically 800 x 480 pixels. They are the ones to go for.

You don't have to pay upwards of £100 for a Sony, there are good quality high resolution frames at less than half that price. I suspect there are very few manufacturers of the LCD screen component (probably three at most) and therefore very little variation between the dozens of different brands of digital photo frame using the same LCD screen.

Some backlights are brighter than others giving better image quality. So it would be wise to look at several different brands before making up your mind.

However, if you are prepared to take a risk on mail order (you can always return it for a refund) this inexpensive offer caught my eye:

[Adrian C]

Yup. I just wish these cheap devices could have had VGA, DVI or CVBS inputs so they could have a dual life as a small cheap video monitor.

7-inch VGA monitors cost lots more money compared with similar size digital picture frames.

e.g.

[Stuart Noble]

The Toshiba one I have only sorts alphabetically, so you can't guarantee chronological order. I changed the file names on all 3 gig's worth to

001.jpg etc with a useful bit of freeware called Renamer

[fred]

Bulk Renamer is another good one for that, lets you add a YMD prefix based on creation date among other powerful features, also freeware.

On displaying video on the picture frames, I think they are using uber cheap screens that will show still images perfectly well but wont respond well to moving images. I'm hoping it will be come the next must have feature on them too.

[PeteS]

I run a Perl script that uses ImageMagick to trim the images to the correct aspect ratio (portrait format excepted) and then resize to the exact pixel size of the photo frame. This operates on all pictures in a directory.

This makes the pictures display without stretch or black edges and makes the resultant files much smnaller so more pics can be stored. Load times are perhaps faster too, and I suspect that the resampling m ay be done better with ImageMagick.

Pete

[Mike Barnes]

(I love the description of the non-reflective screen as "Not Gleaming"!)

I've bought several similar units (but 8-inch not 7-inch) for use as monitors and I've been very pleased with them. The legibility is surprisingly good.

[Andrew May]

Does anyone sell a frame that is square like a slide projector screen so that it will display landscape and portrait photos at the same size?

Andrew

[Dave Liquorice]

I much prefer this Chinglese:

and

[Adrian C]

Thanks, I could recase that to look like a digital picture frame, and it would do so much more hanging on the back of a hidden Wyse/Compaq thin client PC :-)

[Owain]

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember John Stumbles saying something like:

Have a look on

[whisky-dave]

Start saving now for an iPad and use that :-)

[pete]

That only has a 1024 * 768 resolution - same as my very first laptop from 1996 ... which had a larger screen, too

[Bruce]

Looks like you may have finally found a use for the iPad!

Send an email to Steve Jobs - this is probably just what he has been looking for. ;-)

[Dave Liquorice]

And could probably have more than one program running at a time. I find it amazing that the iPhone has taken off with such a limitation and on the orginals no cut 'n paste and a fairly poor camera. Shows what marketing can do...

[Peter Johnson]

I got a 10in Linx one from Staples for £64 a few weeks ago. Default display format is widescreen which stretched my 35mm-origin images but it is possible to over-ride that so they display properly. Portraits are small, though. The images look good and the frame knows if it is in portrait mode, turning the images accordingly. One feature I liked the sound of until I found how it had been implimented is the ability to set timers to turn it on and off so I thought I'd set it to turn off at night and back on in the morning. Turned off ok, turned on too, but displaying the menu so restarting the images has to be done by hand. Images are displayed in alpha/numeric orde; there are a dozen or so transitions and they can be set to be used randomly.