I am very much looking forward to the coming increase in quality and drop in price of digital photo frames.
We currently have five photo frames in our living room (three are curved, four are glass-edged). I wouldn’t mind swapping them out for digital frames provided there were a few criteria:
• they have to be no thicker than our existing frames
• they can’t be plugged into the mains
• the power supply, whatever it is, must last at least two months without intervention
• the photos can rotate on a custom timed interval
wifi would be a plus, as would a remote control and avi/mp4/ogm support but these aren’t necessary.
Testing the Philips Digital Photo frame © mathowie / CC
I have over 4,000 photos on Flickr and a huge stack of analog photos which get put into a box never to be seen again because I’m too lazy to put them into albums. Most are terrible, but there are a lot of friends, family and various events which I’d love to be able to see from time to time without sitting in front of a PC for an hour ploughing through
The power supply appears to be the biggest stumbling block. My boss suggested that inductive charging might be a good solution and someone else suggested a rechargeable Li-On battery built into the frame. An obvious ways of saving power would be to turn off when there’s no-one around to see the pictures you’re displaying – a timer for turning itself on and off would be perfect. Any of these would probably work but I don’t see anything out there that really meets these needs. Then again most of the merchant sites selling them give pretty rubbish technical details anyway.
So, they’re not quite good enough to convince me to buy one yet, but golly they’re getting close, and once they’re good enough and under fifty quid, I’ll probably get one (and if they make curved ones, three!).
