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January 31, 2005
Digital Photo Frame -- Cooler Than I Expected
On a whim, I bought a cheap digital photo frame from Woot!, intending to load it up with photos and give it to an inlaw as a geeky gift. Once it arrived and I showed it to my wife, she suggested that unless I wanted to get tech support calls on a weekly basis, I just keep it and put it in my office at work. She's wise, my wife.
So, I dumped about 100 photos onto a spare CompactFlash card I had (THAT'S why I keep pieces of kit around for years in drawers) and put it in my office. I set it up to cycle through the images, displaying each for 30 seconds. Since the screen is only about 3" on the diagonal, I expected it to be an idle curiosity of which I'd soon tire and forget. I was wrong.
It's been in my office for a while, now, and I catch myself, every so often, glancing over to see an image that makes me smile. It's not a long, doting study -- just a quick dart of the eyes -- but it's enough to evoke a fond memory or a brief chuckle at some funny moment long since past.
Would I have spent the $100+ that most of these things run for? Probably not, but for what I paid, it's been a pleasant surprise. It also makes me realize that it'd be cool to get a discarded 14" or 15" low-res LCD monitor that somebody no longer wants, craft up a little box that would just feed images to the monitor, and hang it on a wall as a decent-sized digital photo frame. Or, better yet, the little box would just tap into my PC using Bluetooth and grab the images off my HDD -- no sense duplicating the data if you don't hafta. It'll happen...probably sooner than I expect, too.
Posted by Craig in Technology