Framed. Everybody and everything that gets clicked by a digital camera wants to get framed. You could get a computer printout of your picture and display it in a fancy photo frame. But you’ll inevitably have two problems staring back at you. Colour printouts never look as crisp and colourful as the photos on your computer monitor. And with one photo framed, you’ve still got thousands more pouring out of your camera and computer.
Digital photography offers quite a few, and equally awkward, alternatives. You could run a slide show on that tiny LCD back screen of your digital camera until the battery runs out. Or, you could lug your laptop around to present your photo gallery. For a grander impression, you could hook it up to a TV at home. But presentations last for just a few minutes. Emailing and web-publishing your photos only help you reach out to your net-savvy colleagues. Frustrated for a more elegant solution, you may even wish you could rip apart your laptop so you could nail the LCD monitor to the wall.
Well, you’re in luck. A digital photo frame is an LCD monitor inside a wooden or other faceplate, so it may easily blend in with your interiors. A digital photo frame (DPF) usually has a contrast ratio much higher than that of a laptop screen.
Future flashback
DPFs bring you instant gratification. Thankfully, you may never need computers to use one. Just pull the memory card out from your digital camera, stick it into one of the ports of a DPF, and the frame will automatically run a slide show of all your photos. Yes, that’s correct. The digital photo frame can display a sequence of photos, and not just one static image. You could have it automatically change the photo every morning, or every few minutes, complete with transition effects such as fade or dissolve. You could display a mosaic of several photos as it automatically resizes the images to fit. You can embed your pictures into the built-in megabytes of storage.
Will it work?
You may, however, find a few things in your new digital lifestyle require a rethink. If you keep the frame switched on all the time, you may have a bedroom or an office cubicle glowing eerily in the dark. Switch it off, and you wake up to a wall or a desk with a black, empty frame. It does take a few seconds to boot and run your slide show, especially if you load it to the brim. If you constantly display the same image, you may “burn-in” the LCD screen. Hence, it is safer to run a slide show.
Then, there’s the power cable problem. How do you hide the power cable and the small brick-sized power adaptor, all in black, when most walls are whitish or light in colour? All DPFs with an embedded battery need the power adaptor for recharging.
A thousand clicks