Digital Art For Your Wall-Mounted TV

Makarand writes "According to the San Francisco Chronicle, if you own a plasma or LCD TV hanging on your wall, you could display high-definition video reproductions of famous paintings on your TV screen after watching your favorite sitcoms. Companies have begun selling devices that can display the work of world-famous artists and photographers on your TV screens. The art is stored on removable flash memory cards (sold separately) and is displayed onto high-definition TVs by electronics that cost around $500."

Comments

Why?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Lame

Expensive much?

[Cyno01]

$500 seems insanly over-priced for this sort of thing. Most dvd players i know of will play picture discs burnded with jpgs, how is this better?

Re:Expensive much?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know of many DVD players that can output JPG's in High Def. Actually, I don't know of any at all...

Maybe makes sense for LCDs..

[mlyle]

But plasma televisions have severe burn-in issues. If this is something you'd regularly do, it seems like the quickest way to turn your $8000 big screen into a $20 art print with lower resolution and a cheap-looking plastic frame.

Not to mention that power dissipation/efficiency of plasma televisions is not -wonderful-.

Re:Maybe makes sense for LCDs..

[Merlinium]

Ok, I had a plasma screen, and we use plasma screens and LCD screens, as well as projectors here at work, and I can tell you burn in is a HUGE issue, these people will be out of business after they get a lot of burn in screen issues thrown back at them, the easiest way to turn a $3,000-$10,000 plasma screen into junk is to display static images on it.

Another issue is life of plasma screen issues, plasma screens as well as other video devices have a set life time before failure or unusability, to constantly run your screen for extended periods of time for nothing other then a few pictures is a huge waste, the technology for this type of thing is still 3-5 years away, the OLED screens with the flexibility and thinness (creates wallpaper) is still in its infancy, but when then comes into its maturity, then displaying art via electronic means will be worth while.

Imagine the possibilities, wall paper the becomes your TV screen, or change the color of rooms, or turn a wall into a ocean view with sunset. Life will be good then for the digital media, until that time, its just not a very feasible idea to waste your power and money on something like this.

Screen Burn

[CPIMatt]

Plasma displays are terrible about burn-in. I think this is a horrible idea. If you want a high resolution image of a famous painting, just get one on paper. It would probably look better too.

-Matt

$500?

[NMerriam]

I just bought a 32" LCD HDTV and even I think this is stupid expensive.

Even an ancient Packard Bell computer can output a 1280x768 image to an HDTV. Heck, an old Palm Pilot with one of the Presenter-to-go dongles can put out enough pixels for still images!

so... err... ahh...

[jjeffries]

It's a screen saver. For TVs.

Wow. Revolutionary.

What's the patent number?

Only Bill Gates....

[stuartkahler]

could charge upwards of $200 per month for digital collections of art by painters that have been dead for hundreds of years.

What moron decided on custom $3000 boxes to serve media instead of and off-the-shelf DVD player with scripted DVDs? For 1/10th of the price, you could sell a nearly identical version of this at Best Buy. Thousands of historical paintings, licensed modern works or 10 min vid clips of easily obtainable things like the ocean, forests or everyone's favorite fish tanks.

Personally, I would just download JPGs and MPGs of whatever I want and play it on my $40 DVD player that reads regular files off any burned CDR or DVD-R.

$195 per month??

[danharan]

"Now we've got a presentation system that's always on and ready to go, and you flip a switch and it goes from art to tapping into our (computer) server.''

This is so never going to fly. If art can be digital, and you can plug this thing in to a computer... all sorts of people will compete without the $500 gizmo.

I could see your local art galleries offering this service for a fee and to advertise their upcoming and current shows. Many will be only too happy to broadcast their images for free.

Anyone else find it amusing that Bill Gates is financing a company (Corbis) that seeks to make money selling what others will give away for free?

Some issues not mentioned before

[CrackHappy]

I just wanted to sum up some things that popped in my head as potential problems with this scenario, and why I think it will fail badly:

1) Multiple thousand dollar equipment, easily breakable and STEALABLE in PUBLIC places.
2) High month-to-month costs.
3) Plasma burn-in/wear and tear.
4) Why replace something you could buy for $100-$1000 potentially (prints, etc.) that will last practically FOREVER, with something this expensive, that will NOT last very long.
5) Power consumption - some of these monitors consume a CRAP load of electricity.
6) Cheaper and easier alternatives. Why buy this proprietary crap, when you can easily, and for MUCH Less set up your own system to display images / screensavers / whatever you want.

Just my thoughts. Some of these are in the posts before, but some of them aren't.

Any ideas or refutations on these?

Re:Let's buy some...

[Valar]

In one of my classes, the professor offered 3% bonus if the class could not have one cell phone go off the whole semster. Half way through that class period, a cell phone goes off in the front row.

ARRRGGHHH.

People need to get over it. Two years ago, you could afford to be out of the loop for a whole _hour_ to go to class, so why can't you now? Just because you don't have to? Blah.

In other words.....

[Sowbug]

For $500, you can turn your $5,000 TV into a $5 poster.