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NYT Reviews Digital Picture Frames
prostoalex writes "New York Times reviews the digital picture frames available commercially: 'Yes, with the ultimate digital camera accessory: the digital picture frame, a flat-panel screen designed exclusively for showing digital photos. A digital frame can do something no ordinary frame can do: change what's in it at the touch of a button, or even treat you to a slide show. Think of it as a screen saver that doesn't tie up your computer.' For those who would rather build the devices themselves - both Linux Toys and Wi-Fi Toys contain the chapters on creating Linux-based digital picture frames out of old laptops. Channel 9 on Microsoft Developer Network also has a step-by-step walk-through of building a Windows-based digital picture frame."
WHy would I want that if I cant even afford the 21" Flat Screen I so desire? I like my familys photos stuffed away where they can't annoy me.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
I have seen this idea for ages and seen many implementations (inc. my own) but I still dont understand why people bother. Last thing I need is something stitting on my desk distracting me. Its not as if paper pictures are that inconvenient and sure when you may want to remind your self of what your wife looks like before returing to the wrong home (again) but you have a great big 19 inch screen to look at her with.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
And if in a fit of rage you get in a fight with your spouse...
My television only picks up the low end of the VHF spectrum up to channel 6, you insensitive clod!
Building one seems like a neat idea, but using a laptop seems like such overkill to me, in terms of processing power and power requirements.
Is there some solution like the EtherNut that can also drive a flat panel display? And where to get a decent deal on a flat panel? If I'm builing a picture frame, bigger is better! I guess displays up to 1280x1024 have dropped in price a fair amount, but what about more resolution than that?
Some ThinkPads have got some nice resolution in a small format screen - anyone have a good source for those? (I know, I know, probably ebay!) I suppose in the end the cheapest solution is going to be a whole laptop from ebay... Perhaps diskless and underclocked to reduce the power consumption and heat generation. Anyone tried that?
Such devices look very interesting the day they launch but get oudated in six months or so; since there will devices in market with higher resolution at lower price in next six months.
So unless and untill there is a very unique idea behind it like iPod, it's not worth the money you spend.
Now my question is, Can I install Linux on it?
I can just imagine my grandmother coming over to my house and seeing people's faces warp in their frames. I would be freaked out at night walking past one of those.
Back in my day, we watched T.V. by candlelight.
Basically, you take an old discarded laptop and build a picture frame around it.
I'm pretty sure I can build one for less than $160. Plus, it sounds like a fun project. OTOH, I really like the idea of having a seperate remote like the AV Tech picture frame and similar models have. And having a WiFi picture frame would be neat, I guess (remind me to adjust the firewall rules ;).
... when picture frames have their own IP adresses.
Another option is to get a cheapo portable DVD, in Canada RadioShack has a Nexxtech for C$149. Burn your photos to disc and away you go.
I have a table comparing various digital picture frames.
There have been some public trials of these already. Very good, if you like blue. :-)
As an amature photographer, I wouldn't mind having one, I would love to keep seeing my work as I pass the digital frame doing my business. At the moment they are in a folder on an external drive just sitting there. No point using them for my desktop either because i'm always doing work.
On another level however, I wonder if they could be used in waiting rooms, it would certainly add variety in those mind numbing places.
However, I'd also want as little interaction with the device as possible, just upload the photos, configure how I would want them displayed and leave it. Making it the same 2 steps as with a normal picture frame (nailing it in and then setting up the picture to display). Anything else like useless software is a waste and takes everything away from the point of decorating your room. Just have a simple UI to upload the photos and be done with it, wireless would be nice for the picture uploads and a neat tidy power cable coming out from the wall behind it.
Jonathanjk.com
... cubic inches (of centimeters), as they say in the automobile industry. Well, in terms of showing photos to family and friends, there's no substitute for resolution.
Not until we have a standard 13x18 cm (European size, don't know what the US equivalent is) picture frame that's capable of displaying 3 or 4 megapixels (i.e. the entire photo without downsizing), that isn't too heavy or power-consumption happy and that accepts standard memory cards, this market will bloom.
Come to think of it; where are our 4 megapixel monitors? Why do we still have only 75 or 100 DPI effectively on our current monitors?
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Wife factor is very high, especially because I had it professionally framed, which cost more than the motherboard!
i built one myself using an old Dell Latitude xpi 133, a perl script, and redhat 5.0 at the time...the laptop wasn't doing anything else, so i just did it as a project...i had the perl script generate an html file with javascript that would cycle through all pictures in a given set of directories every minute or two
turned out pretty good except for the UGLY LAPTOP SITTING ON THE TABLE IN THE DORM!
I have always considered digital picture frames to be the most colossal waste of time, money, and hardware that has ever been conceived by the technology industry.
Hey, look, a beautiful high-resolution large LCD monitor. Let's tack it to a wall and use it for displaying still images, despite the fact that still images display perfectly well on paper and have infinitely better contrast that way. Not to mention colour gamut issues that are generally solved quite well with photo-printing inks relative to how they are solved on LCDs.
I have an idea. If you have an urge to buy one of these, give me five hundred dollars instead, and give you a frame, and whenever you want a picture call me, and I will print the fucking thing for you and manually (yes, I know, scary word) put it into the physical frame.
I think it's a great idea, but there's just one issue that comes to my mind here:
.
All we seem to be doing these days is making things require electricity, when they never used to.
I'm not an environmental freak or anything, but it's shocking to see how much we're becoming dependent on electricity; even razors that don't currently require batteries will probably become battery operated, like this
See how many wind-up watches there are these days; at the rate technology is progressing, your average picture frame could soon be battery powered.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Tablet PCs are ideal for this project. Its already compacted to just a screen, plus it has the added bonus of pen enabled screen. You could use it as a digital noteboard if you so desired.
The pricetag may be a little high, but you end up with a device that is still useable as a laptop/tablet PC. When you want to use it you can just unhang it and go.
While a laptop or tablet PC generally has better resolution and more functionality, it is not always superior to a digital picture frame. My father-in-law set his up at our wedding reception. He had scanned in photos of my husband from when he was a kid to when we started dating. I added some of my own baby pictures, and we had a fun series of photos charting our growing up and dating.
Yes, we could have used a laptop. But this was a wedding reception, and it was so nice not having an ugly computer sitting on the sign-in table. We got a lot of positive comments about it, and no one was tempted to start browsing the web during the party.
More sugar!
I have 3 Ceiva picture frames deployed at grandparents/great grandparents house. This product is simple amazing. Don't think of it as a geek toy, but as a way to communicate with pictures. They love being a part of our kids lives this way. It is EXPENSIVE..but well worth it.
bootable DVD/DivX/MPG4/MP3 Mplayer and image slideshow, no hard drive required and in 10/20/50mb iso sizes (leaving plenty of space for pics)
open source of course
How long is backlight expected to last without changing its spectral characteristics?
- Needs to look exactly like any other picture frame. That means no cord hanging down the wall, that it can be hung on the wall, and that it's not surrounded by an ugly black 2" plastic border.
- Can be updated via memory card. Although my dad does have a wireless network, it makes more sense for him or I to pull a card out of a camera and stick it right in the frame than it does to copy it to the PC and then to the frame. Even better, stick a memory card copier into the frame so that I can dump my camera pictures into it and still get my camera card back.
- 8x10 size. 4x6 might be nice for a desktop, but if you want visitors to come and admire your pictures you don't want them all standing with their nose to the wall trying to see.
- Is inexpensive. If these things cost like $50 my parents would have a bunch of them. But at over $200 apiece, forget it.
No, I'm not building him one, that's stupid. There's something to be said for having a final product that actually looks nice and not like something I cobbled together in my basement just because I can.And yes, we will be getting him a better photo printer soon.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
These things are great, just remember to turn off the porn when the family comes over for Christmas!
Heck, for that matter think of the impact of a worm that posts pictures of the goatse guy on every networked digital picture frame it can find.
Everyone would revert back to cave paintings overnight.
My father took 10,000 slides over the years, and between his slides and print photos taken by members of the family, I have many, many large boxes of pictures from pre-1900 to now. We've also kept many of the cameras, back to the Kodak boxes and the accordian fold-outs.
The resource costs of the photos and their processing has probably been large, and the photos and slides just sit in albums and boxes. Particularly the slides - it takes a projector and some time to see them properly.
I've gone to a digital system now and have thousands on my computer that require no additional resources (besides disk space) and can be scanned through quickly, dumped into slide shows, and otherwise used more easily. No piles of albums, no processing costs, no boxes, no slide projectors.
If we implement digital frames and a supporting environment correctly, so we can zip our digital archives to digital frames at work, at home, and at friends, then the resource cost might be less over a lifetime, even with the electricity and tech-production costs. What is the annual electrical use of a digital frame? But, this will take attention to environmental costs and their proper calculation. Not sure what the balance is in this case, but it isn't obvious that the new system inherently uses more resources.
[...]Think of it as a screen saver that doesn't tie up your computer.
It's getting worse, ain't it?
When you're trying to do this on the cheap, what's the point of spending hundreds of $$ on a used laptop with CD-ROM and hard drive? I spent about $30 on a old NEC 150Mhz with a floppy drive. Stuck a DOS boot disk in there with PCMCIA drivers and put a CF card with PCMCIA adaptor in. Works perfectly! Sure, it won't do anything besides display pictures, but in this day and age, you should be doing all the processing on your computer beforehand anyway.
In hindsight, I probably should've spent a few more $ on a Thinkpad that boots directly from PCMCIA. It would've saved me a lot of time in finding the correct DOS PCMCIA drivers.
FTFA: The Wallflower incorporates a laptop-like screen (1024 by 768 pixels), the Linux operating system and a 40-gigabyte hard drive (which is, unfortunately, not completely silent).
Redesign these in such a way that they do NOT require electricity for displaying the image. The only thing that ought to require electricity is actually changing the image.
And if the goal is displaying still images, there're number of ways to create cheaper displays if you're willing to sacrifice the ability to change the image(s) rapidly...
But the Ceiva...cool. Whenever I download pics onto my computer I can upload them to my parents. No printing, no mail, no burning a CD. My Mom checks the Ceiva practically as soon as she gets up. She loves it, it's near instant gratification.
So until you can comprehend the intended market for the product, your great wisdom on how you can build one cheaper from a laptop, or print out your pictures, or heaven forbid move out of your parents' house and breed - your concept of the value of these is pretty obviously way off base.
For any of you that can relate to my situation, I highly recommend Ceiva.
I mod down all the "free iPod"-sig losers.
Wasn't this in the movie AntiTrust?
My Gawd WTF...
Where are the e-ink picture frames?
I notice that it's running Windows XP, which I'm sure is not the OS that came on it.
I guess the reason he couldn't afford $15-$45 for the custom matte was because he'd already shelled out $100 for the Windows XP upgrade, right?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The commercial products are slick but expensive. If you use DamnSmallLinux it becomes trivial and cheap to recycle an old laptop that you have lying around. You can pick up one on eBay with decent specs for less than $75 that will hold thousands of pictures and is even networkable. A 100MHz pentium, 64MB RAM, and 800MB HD will hold thousands of pictures, is networkable, and will consume less than 40 watts.
There's a good explanation of this sort of thing here with a program that will reduce resolution and quality of a batch of pictures so that the pictureframe laptop doesn't need much CPU power. The same program can also be used to display a slideshow, or you can use any number of script/program methods.
Good explanations elsewhere in internet on removing the keyboard and making it look less like a laptop and more like a pictureframe... or leave it mostly intact and use it to surf the web when desired.
At $110 the ceiva seems to be bargain, if you wouldn't need that expensive subscription. If you could emulate the ceiva server or exchange the Ceiva firmware to something more useful it could be a really nice device.
Jan
Someone already figured out how to get linux running on it and made a page about it on sourceforge
Jan
You load Linux.
You run gthumbs.
No article needed.
Digital pciture frames are exactly the market that eInk is looking for. Using electronic ink based paper displays means that you can change the picture when you like, but have no cost for keeping the image displayed. I'm sure there are a lot of people working on this same idea already, as you were hinting at it already.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley