Digital Picture Frames

For a very long time, just about as long as I've been using a digital camera, the idea of having a digital photo frame has always been appealing to me. There always have been commercial products that serve this purpose and there are even ways to do-it-yourself. I finally ended up with one solution that I'm pretty happy with, function and price-wise which I will review for you, but I'm also going to discuss a bit about the alternatives that I uncovered a long the way.

In my research for digital photo frames, even very recently, the number of affordable options was very low and among those affordable units, the image quality was very lackluster. Then there were the units like the Ceiva "Digital Photo Receiver" which requires a phone line and a monthly subscription. Definiately not where I wanted to go.

Another inspiration struck me a few years back.. why not turn an old notebook computer into a digital photo frame? I could see several obstacles for this type of implementation, some of which I could solve, others I could not. Old pentium notebooks are pretty cheap these days, old units with 14" screens are around a hundred bucks if you know where to look. It would be very easy to install linux and hack up a slideshow application and a practical way to upload files to it.

So here were some of my do-it-myself notebook requirements and goals:

• Runs linux
• Practical way up manage photos
• Could be fit into a standard wood frame (albeit thicker)
• 24bit color

I acquired an old HP Omnibook 4150 from my employer's surplus which I thought might work: it was fairly thin and had a nice angular form factor.

Unfortunately this specific notebook has severe issues with Linux and auto power management so it wasn't a viable candidate. Other people have their - own - digital frames so I won't go into details here. With the prospect of doing it myself, I was concerned about how to properly "break the spine" of the notebook to position the display and whether or not there would be enough play in the ribbon cable that typically connects it. Without a viable notebook alternative I shelved the idea, but continued the search for a prebuilt product.

The Ceiva is the most popular of the frames from what I can see but the subscription model is right out. Pacific Digital USB Digital Photo Frame was affordable in refurbished condition but reviews for the quality were not good and the 5x7 site wasn't very appealing. So the search went on.

This Thanksgiving, while perusing the Black Friday ads, I noticed a particular unit in the Radio Shack article that caught my eye. It was called the Axion LCD-801C 8" LCD TV. I was originally scanning the ads for my dad who was looking for a 15" LCD TV for his kitchen, but this one caught my eye, particularly the part where is said it has an "integrated media card reader so you can view your digital photographs on a larger screen than your digital camera." The price, $129 after rebates, was certainly appealing. So how would the quality be? I couldn't find any literature that listed the resolution of the LCD when displaying pictures, so I was a little unsure that it would work.

After some soul searching, I decided to bite the bullet and buy the unit. I was lucky as it was already around 9:30am on Black Friday and I got the last one in the store! After unpacking it, I was happy to see that the base actually includes rechargeable batteries, so the unit can actually power itself. Bonus! It included a thin remote control as well.

I filled an extra 32GB CF card I had with random images from my gallery and popped it in. I switched the input to "Card" and viola, there they were. But the 6.3MP photos appeared to load fairly slowly, which wasn't too surprising. The image quality was OK, though it wasn't as sharp as I had hoped. The color was acceptable, however, and by adjusting the Sharpness of the display, the quality improved.

The slow image loading was a bit bothersome so I figured it would be simple to just scale the images to the native resolution of the LCD. I found in the manual that the native resolution is 704x480 pixels. 480 makes sense, that's the vertical lines of standard television. So I wrote a little script that will convert the images to the size that best fit, essentially this, sing ImageMagick's convert:

convert -quality 90 -geometry 704x480 input.jpg /mnt/cf/output.jpg

The slideshow feature of the frame allows configurable delay and toggleable fancy "wipes" between images. With the scaled images the image loads were much faster and the CF read LED was on for only a flicker rather than almost constantly with the full-res images.

An added benefit of the Axion is that its also a TV, with a built-in NTSC tuner, so when its not in frame mode, it works as a decent TV. I originally intended to take the unit to work for my desk, but with the lack of a notebook locking cable mount, it wasn't something I was comfortable leaving on my desk after hours. So its now in our den acting as a TV/digital photo frame, which is actually a great place for it. We recently re-orged our den and eliminated the CRT TV in there due to lack of space, and this little thing fit the bill perfectly!

So if you're looking for a decent, low-priced digital picture frame, I'd take a look at the Axion. It s not large, but the built-in features are quite nice.