By popular demand… Digital photo frames!

For those of you living in the dark ages (wink), here’s a little primer about digital photo frames.  A digital photo frame is a small monitor/display screen which looks like a picture frame, and which stores photos on a memory card.  You copy your photos onto a memory card, insert the card into the frame, and then the frame displays the pictures.  The frame is complete independent from your computer, but it does require electricity to power, so it needs to be plugged in.  Flippy and I bought frames for all our family members, and preloaded them with family pictures that we either already had on our computer or that we scanned, and it made our Moms really happy (Moms like photos).  The frames usually ship with small remote controls, and they can be set to display photo sequentially, randomly, or to just display a single picture for an indefinite period of time.  Most frames also will play video files and music files, so they’re really versatile.  Storage is just limited to the size of the memory card you use.  I bought a 512MB card for my parent’s frame, but because the image on the screen is tiny, the image files can be tiny as well.  I calculated that I could fit about 3600 photos onto my memory card!

Pros of the frames are things like a) they’re cool, b) Moms like them.  Cons of the frames are that each brand seems to have its own quirks, and right now, they’re expensive.  I gave my family the Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame MF-575 5.6-Inch Digital Picture Frame, and while it’s a nice frame, the image quality isn’t great.  It’s acceptable, but the resolution won’t knock your socks off.  The frame was really easy to use, however.

Amazon ran out of the frames I bought for my family members, so for Flippy’s family we bought the TAO 5.6-Inch Classic Digital Picture Frame.  It was substantially more expensive, but the image quality is better than that of the Digital Spectrum frames.  Also, the Tao frames can be easily swapped out for different styles and colours, so you’re not stuck with just one colour of frame.  Unfortunately, the Tao frame was a bit of a technological puzzle, and Flippy literally spent 10 hours trying to get it to work!  What the manual won’t tell you is that the frame will only display jpg images which are “baseline” quality (lossless), and it turns out that the best way to convert your photos to that format is to open them all in Windows Paint and then to save them.  It took Flippy hours and hours of searching and tinkering to get all her images to show up, so it was a big headache.  Like the Digital Spectrum manual, the Tao manual seems to have been written in Mandarin and then electronically translated into English, so parts of it make no sense whatsoever.

In summation, digital frames are great if you get one as a gift (easy for me to say).  I don’t think I’d buy one for myself right now, if only because I can’t afford it, but also because I think prices will come down quickly.  By next Christmas, these frames may be half the price they are now, and I’m sure the resolution will improve dramatically.  If you plan to buy one in the near future, buy the most expensive one you can afford, because you seem to get what you pay for.  Here’s a link to one of the best-rated frames for sale on Amazon right now, but it was out of our price-range (especially because we had to buy four of them):

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/28 at 01:36 AM

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