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Monday, May 21, 2007
Digital Picture Frame
I have really been wanting to get a nice digital picture frame for my office to show off all my pictures of my two boys. Seems like the static frames I have grow out of date SO FAST. I got my wife an 8" Pandigital frame with 128MB of internal flash and 800x600 resolution from Costco for Mother's Day. I created a slide show of her and the boys and even played a song in the back ground. She loved it. The frame isn't too bad, but some of the back grounds are very grainy and dithered (you can tell they are NOT doing full 16-bit color). Also, now that we have it, I really would like to power down the display from 10PM to 7AM (not sure why, it just doesn't seem right to have it on all night). I also don't like how far back it tilts when sitting on a desk. I may try to reduce the color depth manually on some of the photos in a better program and then upload them to see if the darker back grounds look less dithered, but initial trials didn't work out too well.I really want one of the Philips 8" frames. It has a clock feature, auto off setable times, and can even apply sepia effects to the photos (though not randomly, I don't think). When you see it as an 8" frame, it is actually the diagonal. And while Philips calls this an 800x480 display, they say only 640x480 is viewable??? Anyway, this is just a little smaller than a 5x7" photo. I sort of want a 6x8" or 8x10" display for home, but that is getting pretty expensive still.
Now, I also see a Mustek PF-T80R 8" frame that has a piano black finish and features a clock and all sorts of other settings (not sure about the auto-off). It is pretty expensive at $299, though. And it doesn't have WiFi like many other frames up in this price range...
Comments:
After buying a Pandigital 8" display with 128MB of memory and 800x600 resolution, and reading a lot of reviews that ranked this Philips very high, I decided to get one. I was especially eager to see three things that the Pandigital did not do:
1) Auto-off times (no need to have that digital photo frame lighting up your room at 1AM).
2) Sepia and B&W modes.
3) Clock feature.
Well, I can tell you that Philips executed very poorly on the last two. The Auto-off feature works very well, but I can get a timed outlet for the difference in price. The second, you have to pick your photos to apply the effect to (no ability to apply it to random images as the slide show runs). ???? I could do this with any photo editing software (same goes with the useless collage of the SAME image...wtf? what good is this? Ditto for the cheasy borders and effects). I wanted a random sepia application mode and the collage effect would be VERY cool, if it would rotate through images in the slide show in each position of the collage layout. It doesn't. Finally, the clock. Pitiful. Unless you call a grotesk black bar over the top of your image with a white digital display of the time (no date just blah white on black background text). I was expecting a nice rendered silver or white analog clock that overlayed on top of your image. Subtle and not obscuring the picture, yet still readable. Blah.
Finally, image quality. It isn't bad, but it isn't much better than the pandigital. Actually, in side by side comparison, I actually preferred the pandigital more. It is sharper and it doesn't do the annoying crop that the Philips does (it is a larger LCD that is partially hiden behind the frame...which ends up being 640x480 displayed, but the image is actually larger so you end up with ~10% of the image cropped). And the stand is horrible (so is the pandigital...which makes the frame tilt too far back). Basically, it was not worth the 33% more price over the pandigital.
1) Auto-off times (no need to have that digital photo frame lighting up your room at 1AM).
2) Sepia and B&W modes.
3) Clock feature.
Well, I can tell you that Philips executed very poorly on the last two. The Auto-off feature works very well, but I can get a timed outlet for the difference in price. The second, you have to pick your photos to apply the effect to (no ability to apply it to random images as the slide show runs). ???? I could do this with any photo editing software (same goes with the useless collage of the SAME image...wtf? what good is this? Ditto for the cheasy borders and effects). I wanted a random sepia application mode and the collage effect would be VERY cool, if it would rotate through images in the slide show in each position of the collage layout. It doesn't. Finally, the clock. Pitiful. Unless you call a grotesk black bar over the top of your image with a white digital display of the time (no date just blah white on black background text). I was expecting a nice rendered silver or white analog clock that overlayed on top of your image. Subtle and not obscuring the picture, yet still readable. Blah.
Finally, image quality. It isn't bad, but it isn't much better than the pandigital. Actually, in side by side comparison, I actually preferred the pandigital more. It is sharper and it doesn't do the annoying crop that the Philips does (it is a larger LCD that is partially hiden behind the frame...which ends up being 640x480 displayed, but the image is actually larger so you end up with ~10% of the image cropped). And the stand is horrible (so is the pandigital...which makes the frame tilt too far back). Basically, it was not worth the 33% more price over the pandigital.
Just bought one of the Digital Spectrum 10" 256MB frames from Costco for $169 (after $30 off coupon). Liked it OK. It has the same dithering problems on some of the darker shots, but it actually did some of the BMP pictures better than the Pandigital. There were all sorts of different size original images that I could try on the sample, and I did some side by side comparisons. Asside from that, I finally figured out that you can fix the stupid Pandigital stand by pulling it and it extends to prop the picture up better (wow...I feel stupid).
The new Digital Spectrum display has a clock and calendar as well as an alarm...uh, but no capacitor to hold the info if you unplug it for even a second (or power outage), so you have to reset ALL your settings everytime the power goes out...that sort of sucks. Oh, yeah, and the remote is sort of big for the new DS frame, and the stupid firmware doesn't let you see a picture while you adjust the contrast/brightness and color/tint...WTF???
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The new Digital Spectrum display has a clock and calendar as well as an alarm...uh, but no capacitor to hold the info if you unplug it for even a second (or power outage), so you have to reset ALL your settings everytime the power goes out...that sort of sucks. Oh, yeah, and the remote is sort of big for the new DS frame, and the stupid firmware doesn't let you see a picture while you adjust the contrast/brightness and color/tint...WTF???
