Recommendations for Digital Frames

[Stravo]

Well, my long awaited summer vacation is coming up and its time for me to sit down with all the pictures I have accumulated since my son has been born and get them organized. I usually send them out to get processed and printed out into hard copy photos to put in frames and albums. One of my tech people recommended I get a Digital Frame to save the hassle. I have purchased a digital frame or two in the past and was never impressed with the quality of how the pictures look.

Does anyone have any recommendations for one that I might use to display pics in my office? If you don't recommend them at all I'd like to hear that too. Personal experience makes me a bit skeptical.

[aerius]

If you don't recommend them at all I'd like to hear that too.

That'll be me. I've seen a lot of digital frames and they all look wrong to me, as soon as I'm closer than 10' they start looking like crap. They just don't have enough resolution to display pictures with the expected amount of detail, but worse than that is the colours. If you have nothing but tropical beach photos such as this or something where all the colours are bright and saturated, it's not too bad, but once you get some portraits or people pictures with skintones where you need more subtlety they crap out. They make skin look all plasticky & fake like the airbrushed models on women's magazine covers.

The other thing is you're in NYC, you guys got all the best camera & photo stores in North America, hell, I've sent my digital photos there to get them printed since sometimes there's no stores in my area that can do what I need at a reasonable price. Adorama did an awesome job printing out the photos I sent them, I highly recommend them, and you're supporting your local economy.

[Mr Bean]

Go with printing your photos with the right digital printing setup. Digital Frames have not yet advanced technologically to the point where they are a viable option. This is entirely a cost issue at this point. For 1000$ I could for sure get you a outstanding photo frame that can display pictures in photo-realism. However the price point on digital frames is sub 100$ at the moment so it's going to be another decade before high quality screens are that cheap.

[Ford Prefect]

I'm not convinced there's such a thing as a 'good' digital photoframe. We sell them at work, and I've seen my fair share, but even the most recent ones are totally awful. Admittedly we're not exactly specialists or anything.

[Stark]

The cost complaint is a joke. They're just niche, cheap products; it'd be trivial to build one around a decent 10" panel for $100: but the shit ones sell fine, especially to people used to regular horrible photos. I bet they're amazingly profitable products.

I mean, my 24" monitor cost $200 and displays photos fine. Obviously, it's a tech problem, and not a product design problem! Amusingly many frames add value through other functions (like playing music or whatever) and cost more than a monitor of larger size (like $250 HP/Sony/Insignia frames). Does anyone think the proliferation of god-awful media docks is also driven by technology, instead of everyone just aiming for the biggest margins?

[aerius]

The cost complaint is a joke. They're just niche, cheap products; it'd be trivial to build one around a decent 10" panel for $100: but the shit ones sell fine, especially to people used to regular horrible photos.

Actually it would be a lot harder than you think. Your average hardcopy photo gets printed out at 300dpi, meaning a dinky little 4"x6" print has about as much detail in it as my 23" 1920x1080 monitor. Print out a 5x7 and it'll have more detail than anything other than the jumbo size Apple Cinema Displays or other such monitors used in professional photo & graphics editing. An 8x10 will kill any monitor you can buy, nevermind an 11x14 or 16x20. The new Noritsu machines can print out photos at 640dpi so even a 4x6 will have more detail than pretty much any monitor.

But more important than the details is the colours, you need a very good panel which is properly setup and calibrated to get smooth accurate colours. I can't setup any of my LCD monitors to do this, you need a higher end IPS panel for that. It's why I still keep a couple high-end CRT monitors around to do all my photo editing.

[Stark]

'Decent 10" panel' != '300 dpi like a photo omg what you said'. Take your ridiculous false dilemma away.

The idea that the image quality is tech or cost restricted is pretty extraordinary. Since most people have no idea about colours (and don't adjust their TVs or monitors) that is also irrelevant to the market beyond any actual problems (like the actual panels they use having horrible contrast, colour bleed all over the place, etc). The market for these things is not you. It's people's parents, or office desks, or people impulse buying largely useless shit. These are not people who white balance their cameras or complain about their panel type when using a monitor.

That's just you.

[aerius]

The market for these things is not you. It's people's parents, or office desks, or people impulse buying largely useless shit. These are not people who white balance their cameras or complain about their panel type when using a monitor.

That's just you.

Sure, but that's because they haven't seen anything better yet or they just don't care. That can change. Had a friend who didn't give much thought to his pictures looked until he got a MacBook and saw how good they can look and realized what he was missing out on. Once you've seen the good stuff it's harder to settle for junk. Same thing happened with another friend who got an iPad, she chucked her digital frame not long afterwards and went back to printed photos.

Will a good 10" panel be good enough? If it's about the same quality as Apple's displays then most likely it is. Still not as good as an actual photo but good enough for nearly everyone. Will someone ever make one? I don't know, wouldn't want to bet on it though.

[Stark]

No matter how many times you repost 'I know a lot of things about photos', it won't be more relevant to why they don't use slightly less awful panels and better embedded hardware to take the standard from 'abysmal' to 'tolerable'.

I don't think the demand for 'good' ones is very large; my parents and coworkers own a few of them, and they all look like dogshit. You'd think seeing it on their phone looking fine and then seeing it on the frame looking awful would bother them, but it doesn't seem to. Some of the more expensive ones still have such terrible embedded hardware that displaying common photo images (half a dozen meg per, etc) is a serious strain and takes a while. That shoudln't really be acceptable.