Digital Photo Printing

Digital Photo Picture Frames

March 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

One of the futurist forecasts back in the 1950s was that we would soon have thin television sets hanging on the walls and that they will be thin just like paintings. For decades nothing happened and TVs got bigger and fatter every year. It’s just within the past few years that the first hints of the future began to appear, and digital photo picture frames also.

One of these hints is the digital picture frame that displays slide shows and movies, with or without audio, at the user’s disposal. These are thin, but they are not cheap. However, if you want to have an ever-changing slide show of your digital photo picture frames, you might want to check into these devices. Some even let you, or others you invite, change the images from anywhere in the world.

The following are some things to think about when considering digital photo frames.

Screen quality is really important and that is what it’s all about and it’s hard to evaluate without actually seeing digital photo picture frames side by side.

This requires a walk to a store and it won’t be easy to find a store that displays even one of these frames. You’ll find that styles vary widely, but all are designed to look more or less like traditional photo frames, and some even incorporate traditional mats. Designs range from elegant to those that look like they were produced in a high-school woodworking shop.

There also seems to be a feeling on the part of some manufacturers that they can make the device more appealing by adding a wide frame to a small screen, to look like digital photo picture frames.

Size and resolution are two of the key determinants of the quality of the displayed image and the price of the frame. Specs are hard to come by so comparisons are almost impossible, but the relation between these two features is critical. To calculate the pixel density of a screen, you first calculate the screen’s viewing area and resolution. For example, if the screen is 4 x 6 inches and the resolution is 640 x 480, 4 x 6 = 24 square inches and 640 x 480 equals 307,200 total pixels. You then divide the total pixels by the square inches to find the pixels per square inch—307200/24= 12,800 pixels per inch. The square root of this number will give you the pixels per inch, in this case about 113.

Higher numbers are better, but exact comparisons can only be made between screens of roughly the same size.