Digital Photo Frames
I’m thinking about buying one of these for my mother-in-law. Does anyone care to share their experiences with the products since I know nothing about them?
tons of them are widescreen, which makes no goddamn sense for photos (most digital photos are a 3:2 ratio). But hey, slap WIDSCREEN all over the box and it will probably sell better. I would love to see a 3:2 digital photo frame, but such a speciality LCD would likely cost a good deal more.
I was shopping for these last Christmas; what I did was load up a memory card with some sample photos and actually tried out the frames on display at Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. Best Buy had the greatest variety of frames on display and running. I had some full-size (10 megapixels in my case), resized, portrait, and landscape photos on the memory card. A lot of frames render large photos very slowly, but this can be remedied by only putting resized photos on the frame. Be sure to put some photos on that will test the color fidelity of these frames, as you don’t want a nice sunset photo to be ruined by harsh color banding.
Be sure to look at what transition effects are available, randomization (some frames can only display photos sequentially!), and cropping options (black bars or blow up the photo to fill the frame, which cuts off edges).
The new Sony frames are awesome. We’re carrying them where I work, and they blow the only other decent one’s - Kodak’s - completely out of the water. It may sound silly, but they just seem…better. Even the build on them is nicer - the Sony logo gently glows white, and the frame has a nice hefty weight to it. I know the 7″ has a resolution of 800×600.