Digital Picture Frames

Digital picture frames are a great way to share photos of family, friends, and events or even display business presentations. A variety of sizes and features are available. Let’s look at a few examples:

The Digital Foci Pocket Album OLED 1.5 (www.digitalfoci.com, $49) is a cool example of a small, portable digital picture frame, sometimes referred to as a digital keychain. It features a 1.5 inch OLED (organic light emitting diode) screen in a case that measures 1.8 x 1.8 x 0.7 inches in gray, red or black colors. OLED technology is new and provides more accurate colors, higher contrast and brightness and a wider viewing angle. The Pocket Album OLED 1.5 sports a clip-on keychain that makes it easy to clip it to a purse, backpack or belt loop so it’s ready at any time to show off your favorite photos. The device holds 124 photos, which you can scroll manually or as a running or random slideshow. The frame runs five hours on a lithium battery that can be recharged by using the included AC adapter or from a USB connection (cable included). Included also is simple Photo Manager software to convert, edit, optimize and download photos to the digital keychain.

An example of a simple inexpensive desktop digital picture frame is the Kodak EasyShare P720 (www.kodak.com, $89). The seven-inch diagonal, 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen) LCD display is housed in a frame that can be customized using combinations of the included face plates and decorative mattes. The EasyShare P720 has no internal memory, so you’ll need to insert a memory card or USB flash drive containing the photos you want to display. Or copy photos from your computer using a USB cable (not included) to a memory card inserted in the frame. The frame supports both SD and xD memory cards or a USB flash drive. Control of the frame is via a touch-sensitive strip along the lower margin of the frame. Controls include "next" and "previous" photo in the manual mode or a continuously running slideshow. A delete control lets you remove unwanted photos from the show. Included with the frame is Kodak’s EasyShare software, digital frame edition, that you can use to edit and optimize your photos before downloading them into your frame. The frame features selectable automatic on and off viewing hours.

A more sophisticated digital photo frame is the eStarling Impact V Connected Wireless Digital Photo Frame (www.estarling.com, $199.99). What sets this frame apart is its ability to connect to a wireless network and automatically download pictures using the wireless network. Moreover, each digital photo frame has its own email address, allowing you to send photos directly to the frame via email from across the street or around the world. Email photos from your computer or even from your camera phone. Got an iPhone? Then an eStarling software application gives you one-click "Send-to-Frame."

Subscribe to one or more of the various photo RSS (really simply syndication) Web sites to have pictures automatically sent to your frame from sites such as Flickr, AOL, National Geographic, Time and many others. The photos these sites send out automatically appear on your frame. You can also register your frame to receive Facebook friend’s photos as they put them on their sites. Your frame becomes a piece of social furniture networking with your web-based social contacts. How’s that for cool?

The Impact V has an eight-inch LCD high resolution (800 x 600) screen framed in black with a silver rim. Blue touch controls appear along the right side of the frame at your touch for controlling the various functions of setup and operation. No PC required. A remote control is provided for these operations as well. The unit has 512MB internal memory for local storage and accepts an SD memory card as a source for displaying photos. A USB connection is available to connect to your computer to locally manage your photos in the frame’s internal memory or inserted memory cards.

If you have photos collected on various online photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, or Photobucket, eStarling provides a single Web site that you can log onto to manage all those photos. No longer do you need to log on and off the individual sites. And from the eStarling site you choose which individual photos from any of the sites you’d like to have appear on your frame. The eStarling site also provides photo editing capabilities from which you can add captions or fun elements, such as word balloons, to your photos and then send them to your frame or connected frames of family and friends.

Other types of digital picture frames available include those that will play video clips. These frames allow you to intermix photos with videos adding more interest to the slideshow. Many of the frames will also play background MP3 music, if you want to add even more interest. Digital photo frames are available in a wide variety of sizes, options and features, so it’ll be up to you to decide what best fills your needs.