We absolutely love the amazing evolution, along with the sudden impressive emergence, of the digital frame category. What can’t these things do today? Stills, video, music, wireless sharing capability, changeable frames, increasing internal memory – incredible.
Seeing as these units have added such a wide variety of functionality, several manufacturers have begun offering this product in unique sizes. Digital Foci recently announce a keychain model to their one featuring a 1.5-inch LCD screen and 8MB of internal memory . An included Li-on battery offers up 9 hours of battery life.
PhotoVu has gone in the other direction, recently announcing a 22-inch widescreen display model. The PV2265W lists for $1,299 and features a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 1,680×1,050 res screen. This model also features built-in Wi-Fi for networking and can stream images directly from photo Web sites via RSS.
Continuing on the On the Wi-Fi front for a moment, Sungale, Digital Spectrum and MediaStreet have all recently come to market with wireless frames in a variety of sizes, so a product that screamed for wireless now has plenty of models to choose from, all offering a variety of features within the Wi-Fi set-up.
Lastly, and again on the decidedly high-end, comes Ceiva’s new 8-inch Wi-Fi model that can actually dock with Whirilpool’s new centralpark Connection refrigerators – the idea here being to enable consumers to display hundreds of images without using hundreds of magnets. The eventual marriage of digital photography and the kitchen fridge is finally here.
We just have one thing to ask of these manufacturers – please remember to offer one, relatively inexpensive model that simply displays pictures, in slideshow form, when you stick a card in it. Don’t forget the non-techies among us that will jump at that product. We understand from chatting with a few of the manufacturers in this market that the cost of LCD along makes hitting a really low price point a challenge. Hopefully those costs come inline a bit more as the popularity of the device continues to grow and perhaps a $50 4-5-inch unit will someday soon be possible.
