The Digital Photo Frame
Posted November 28th, 2008 @ 10:59am by Erik J. Barzeski
For now, you can spend a thousand bucks and get a 7-inch OLED digital photo frame from Kodak.
I think I first heard about OLED nearly five years ago. The promise was inexpensive "screens" that you could literally roll up. People were talking about rolling out screens for laptops, using large screens instead of projectors in conference rooms, and more.
I guess at $999 and seven inches, we're still a long ways from that.
What do I want? Not a computer display. I want an OLED up to 24 x 36 inches that includes a Wifi chip, 16 GB (or more) memory, and a rechargeable battery that lasts a year. I want to mount the screen inside a frame and hang the thing in my house so that I can display my photographs.
If we all get one wish for Thanksgiving ((I don't think we do, but hey, why not?)), this is mine ((And no, not now or even this year - just "soonish" please.)).
I've considered getting a digital photo frame in the past, but every time I look:
- They're too expensive.
- They're too small.
- Their features are unimpressive.
Some day, the madness will end. It may not even be with OLED. 😛
Donate Life
Posted 28 Nov 2008 at 11:53am #
Well, as long as we're asking for the impossible, I'd like a Pony.
Posted 28 Nov 2008 at 3:55pm #
[quote comment="51061"]Well, as long as we're asking for the impossible, I'd like a Pony.[/quote]
I didn't say this year. 😛 Note added to clarify.
Posted 29 Nov 2008 at 8:57am #
A few years back, I built a digital picture frame out of a PowerBook 540c laptop. At least, I seem to recall that it started its life as a 540c.
Sure it's a tiny screen, and sure there's no wifi, but it was a really fun project. I still update it with pictures periodically - I plug it into my network using an AAUI Ethernet adapter, and I FTP files from my Mac mini.
To make it work faster, I shrink the pictures to 640x480, 8-bit color. Sure, JPEGview can do it, but it's so much better to do it on the mini.
Here's a link to where I documented the project.