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NYT Reviews Digital Picture Frames 107

Posted by michael from the so-you-think-you're-a-photographer dept.
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."
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NYT Reviews Digital Picture Frames More

NYT Reviews Digital Picture Frames

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  • WHY? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lotharjade ( 750874 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:07AM (#11176104) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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.

  • Dead market beaten a bit more (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) * on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:07AM (#11176105) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Read the article. One of the best is the Ceiva, which you can give to your technophobic parents or grandparents and send them photos regularly. Yes, you pay a subscription, but it's worth it to be able to let my mom see pictures of her grandson--she can't use dad's computer because she has too much tremor in her hand to use a mouse and doesn't want to be bothered with having someone set up accessability for her.
      • His point was that this doesn't offer much over normal pictures. Sure, you can pay for a subscription so that a grandmother can get updated pictures in her frame. But she'd probably like it better if you just mailed her some photographs. Or gave them to her, you know, in person.
        • When grandma lives many hours away "in person" is nice, but not very frequent. The post loses things, and my mother has plenty of clutter to fill her house anyway. A Ceiva is one thing, if she wants a particular photo in "real life" dad can order it from the website.
        • That would require developing or printing all the photos.

          Some people don't want to do this, or never ever will. I am one of them. If my grandparents want to see pictures, they will HAVE to be digital.

          It's certainly not a dead market, nor should it be.

  • Family fights (Score:2, Funny)

    by bugbeak ( 711163 )
    And if in a fit of rage you get in a fight with your spouse...

  • Building your own... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by martinde ( 137088 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:12AM (#11176131) Homepage
    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 [ethernut.de] 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?

    • Re:Building your own... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:45AM (#11176253) Homepage Journal
      Laptop hard drives don't consume much, but I think you can save some power by booting from a flash chip in a PCMCIA adaptor. Good laptops have clock reduction modes to save power. The 125dpi screens are only a couple years old, so that's still spending money. The nicer 150ppi resolution laptop screans have only been available for maybe six months.

      Desktop flat panels seem to consume quite a lot more power, maybe more than an entire laptop.
    • I used a ThinkPad in the picture frame I built [paunix.org]. They're plentiful on eBay and worth the price (~$50) for the size screen you can get (12"). Power consumption is somewhere around 50W.

      Processing power (100-200MHz) does seem like overkill, but when you realize that a nice web app could be used for uploading pics over a network, or that resizing each 1600x1200 pic takes 20 secs, it's really just about right. A PII is too much, especially since they tend to have cooling fans on them.

      • Thanks for posting your website. I've got a place around here that sells the 600x for about 400 bucks. Which is cheaper than the most expensive frames listed in the article. And while it may seem overkill for most, I could use the 30 gigs of space that come with it, and most of my photos are pretty large so the storage will come in handy. I look forward to a bit of cutting in a month or two once I get money saved to pick one up.
  • 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?

    • Re:Can I install Linux on it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DoraLives ( 622001 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @10:43AM (#11176498)
      Such devices look very interesting the day they launch but get oudated in six months or so

      Concur.

      But a reasonable extrapolation of "outdated" every six months takes us to some pretty interesting country in fairly short order.

      Consider, if you will, a roll of wallpaper with a ribbon cable coming off of one edge. Or perhaps small antennae along the back side, every meter or so. Trimmable, ten feet in width, coming in rolls up into the hundreds of meters in length, they soon colonize interior and exterior wallspace everywhere you look.

      They work just as well for folks interested in proportion and harmony, as they do for large corporations and folks with an agenda.

      We will love our new vistas and will wonder how people got along without them for so long.

    • 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).

  • DYI digital picture frames (Score:4, Informative)

    by igrp ( 732252 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:20AM (#11176163)
    I've been toying with the idea of building a digital picture frame myself for some time now. We had a /. article [slashdot.org] on that very subject earlier this year (it appears the 'Popular Science' article referenced in the story is now gone, but it was all very similar to this step-by-step guide [interruptx.com]).

    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 [avtechsolutions.com] and similar models have. And having a WiFi picture frame would be neat, I guess (remind me to adjust the firewall rules ;).

    • There's a few of these self-build projects around.

      Mini-ITX had a nice looking one (from the front at least) almost 2 years ago:
      http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/pictureframepc/ [mini-itx.com]

      Didn't Mr. Gates put something similar in MSXanadu?

    • I built one for $50 plus a cheap Wifi card, that can be bough for $12:
      http://www.agol.dk/elgaard/picframe.html
    • Firewall rules ... an outfit that shall reman nameless was demoing a product like this to my boss a while ago. I was asked to give their product the "once over".
      I mentioned the absolute lack of security as one of my main concerns. Both my boss and the people doind the demo dismissed my cocerns.
      Needless to say I swapped a "few" of the images in the middle of their demonstration. Hilarity ensued, and the boss man saw the light.
      In a way I felt sorry for the people doing the demo, as they were just sales drones
    • The one I built. [epiacenter.com]

      Expensive, but very professional looking and a blast to build. I started off with the "I'll do it cheap" mentality, but it started going so well that I threw out the idea of being frugile. Now it is literally a centerpiece of my living room and something every guest raves about, instead of an old frame that has some burnt out components in it that only geeks will appreciate.

      A note to those interested: your display will absolutely make or break this project. I lucked out- got a samsu

  • It is a sad day... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Paiway ( 842782 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:22AM (#11176168)
    ... when picture frames have their own IP adresses.
    • Are you kidding me? This is a step in the right direction - I'm looking forward to the day when my *underwear* have an IP address (maybe their own subnet - I have a lot of underwear).

      And, c'mon... don't tell me you wouldn't chuckle, running tcpdump on your underwear... That's not just me, is it? Oh, no.


    • 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.
      • It would be cooler if someone actually started breaking in to people's houses and replacing their framed photos with pictures of goatse while leaving everything else undisturbed. That would be a fun project for when I have some free time, actually.
    • mine does [odul.com]
      But I agree with some other poeple. I have mine hanging on a wall and I actually turn it on only when I have guests.
      The nice thing on mine is that I have a 802.11b card and it's getting it's pictures on my webserver, kind of an automatic update. It's also caching pictures localy in case the file server is unavailaable.

  • portable DVD = picture frame (Score:5, Informative)

    by rakerman ( 409507 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:23AM (#11176177) Homepage Journal

    Another option is to get a cheapo portable DVD, in Canada RadioShack has a Nexxtech [radioshack.ca] for C$149. Burn your photos to disc and away you go.

    I have a table comparing various digital picture frames [akerman.ca].

  • Windows based digital frames (Score:5, Informative)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:25AM (#11176183) Homepage Journal
    There have been some public trials [comcast.net] of these [robmaeder.com] already. [geocities.com] Very good, if you like blue. :-)
    • IIRC, BLOD and "illegal operation" screens used to happen quite a lot in airports back in the days of Windows 95 (XP is nearly stable in comparison; 95 wasn't even funny).

      I also once saw an airport display showing an (arabic) win95 desktop and the start menu. I sat there waiting for someone to forget it was connected to a display screen and play Solitaire, but no luck.
      • It's not a 'past' phenomenon, unfortuately. Walking through Cardiff town centre a number of times - as recently as two days ago - the large animated screen in the main pedestrian area has, quite often, the top-left corner of a Windows error box appearing within it.

        Not the sort of thing you'd want, either advertising various companies in public areas, or showing off photos of your nearest and dearest on the living room wall ...

  • I want one, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CrackedButter ( 646746 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:26AM (#11176185) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • There's no substitute for... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ControlFreal ( 661231 ) * <niek@@@bergboer...net> on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:34AM (#11176209) Journal

    ... 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?

    • > ... cubic inches

      I always liked "there's no replacement for displacement"

    • Let me guess. You look at every 4x6 photo through a loupe so you can see every detail? Most photos aren't works of art and don't need to be seen at native resolution. If you want huge prints where you can see every single detail output them to analog via 20x30 prints. Most people will be just as happy see them on a low resolution TV where you can view it from 10 feet away.
    • Come to think of it; where are our 4 megapixel monitors?

      Well, the the Apple 30" Cinema display [apple.com] comes in at 4096000 pixels at optimal resolution. Is that good enough for you? A bit pricy at $3200, but if you really need the resolution...

    • Actually, medical imaging displays are at least 4 megapixels. The cost is high, but doctors demand LCD displays >= 5 megapixels for CT, MRI, and x-ray diagnostic work. Lots of times they are grayscale since that's all they need, but for an artistic, high-megapixel picture display that would look very nice.

      = jombee

  • Mini-ITX Picture Frame (Score:4, Informative)

    by superid ( 46543 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:34AM (#11176211) Homepage
    I built one for my wife last year (mothers day). I was lucky enough to get a very very cheap 17" LCD. I used a Mini-ITX board and a used laptop hard drive . It's running a very trimmed down version of fedora with no X. I use fbv [freshmeat.net] to view the pictures, a wireless usb to load them and a simple php program to manage how the photos are displayed (yes, it's running apache)

    Wife factor is very high, especially because I had it professionally framed, which cost more than the motherboard!

  • been there done that (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheoMurpse ( 729043 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:40AM (#11176232) Homepage
    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
    • Yes, but will you come out and change it every five minutes, with neat transition effects?

      ReplayTV (and presumably TiVo) has the ability to store a number of photos, and switch between them as a "screensaver." If I get a big LCD flat-screen, I may set up something like this, as the screen becomes a picture frame when not in use.
    • A print is great if you have only a few pictures. My husband and I took 3000 pictures on our last trip. We would like to share some of these with our parents, who either don't have a fast internet connection, or don't use their computer much (if ever). A digital picture frame was a great solution; we crammed a bunch of pictures onto a spare memory card, sent it back East, and that was it, pictures shared.
    • You mean doing something technically difficult and not necessary in any way at all - just for the sake of it?

      Ah...you must be new here.
    • Absolutely right!

      God knows how your post was modded 'Troll'.

      If you're serious about your photographs then the best way to view them is a high-resolution prints using quality inks/dyes on quality paper.

      These things are gimmick and a waste of power and materials IMO.
    • We got a Ceiva for my parents last Christmas. It's great that so many of you have space on your desk/table for a laptop. And maybe you all live right next door to your parents (ok, this is slashdot, most of you live _with_ your parents!). But I live 300 miles away from mine. I have two kids, my sisters each have two kids and live at least as far away. We've tried email, but the parents really aren't into it.

      But the Ceiva...cool. Whenever I download pics onto my computer I can upload them to my parents. No

    • Perhaps they haven't been expressed well. I can imagine a digital picture frame that can tell you about the picture in the display, as if the photographer was there next to you explaining it. The idea picture frame like device is probably one of ATMELs cheap ARM processors and bluetooth etched right on the glass with the drivers for the TFT. If you provided an LED backlight you could run the thing for very little power and send it updates from a local machine that has the network stuff. You could also do

  • More power! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OwlWhacker ( 758974 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:46AM (#11176257) Journal
    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 [enquirer.com].

    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.
    • Reminds me of reading Ringworld; when the power failed they were so dependant on a particular kind of superconductor (which was eaten by a alien bacteria) that the entire civilization fell. It was to the point that buildings required power to stand up (well, float above the ground, but the drop kinda sucked)

    • Re:More power! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by multipartmixed ( 163409 )
      Out of curiosity, which do you think takes more -- the power to drive an LCD screen for 10 years, or the power to chop down a tree, process it into paper, create developing/fixing fluid, and run the photomat machine?

      • Re:More power! (Score:3, Informative)

        by iBod ( 534920 )
        You're forgetting the power needed to manufacture the LCD screen (and obtain and process all the raw materials that go to make it).
        • Semiconductor production is also highly wasteful, IIRC, one small plant takes as much power as a mid-sized city. I forget, but someone made a report on how much water and other chemicals to make a single DRAM chip, which was quite an eye-opener.
    • What is the environmental trade-off with digital frames vs. paper photos?

      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 t

    • Damn Gillette. With the prices for their "shaving systems" complete epilation of facial hair for ~500-1000$ starts to look like a bargain.

  • Tablet PC (Score:2, Informative)

    by MtlDty ( 711230 )
    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 sitt
  • How long is backlight expected to last without changing its spectral characteristics?
  • I have a 2.5yr old and a 4month old. Last week I was down my parents house, and saw the new office my dad built. One wall contained nothing but pictures of my kids - printed on his regular inkjet printer. Such walls are the perfect use of a digital picture frame, assuming that it meets some key requirements:
    • 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 b
  • 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 $ o
  • Wasn't this in the movie AntiTrust?

  • E Ink (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bbc ( 126005 )
    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?

  • The commercial products are slick but expensive. If you use DamnSmallLinux [damnsmalllinux.org] 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 [medcosm.com] with a program that will reduce resolution

  • Ceiva hacking? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tempmpi ( 233132 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @06:52PM (#11178898)
    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.

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