Hi-tech frame for digital photographs

Digital photography has made taking pictures cheap and fun, all it needed was the perfect frame.

For consumers and photographers alike, the digital revolution in photography has been a positive one - without film and processing fees to worry about, the cost of shooting pictures has gone down dramatically.

Software and digitilisation have improved the quality of photos, as well as what you can do with them. All this has made photography a more accessible hobby.

However, the change has ushered in one unfortunate by-product. In the good old days of film-to-paper photos, we'd proudly display our shots in a photo album or picture frame. Some of us would even blow up our best pics into larger formats and stick them on our wall.

But in the digital age, where shooting is free and plentiful, many of those photos end up wallowing in the depths of our PC's hard drive, never to see the light of day.

It's thus good to see devices that seek to solve this problem - such as Philips' Digital Photo Display - now coming to market.

The DPD is essentially a hi -tech picture frame or a small monitor, depending on your perspective. It looks exactly like a picture frame and is designed to sit on a mantle or side table, with an adjustable stand to position it horizontally or vertically.

The display area itself is 14cm by 9cm, roughly the size of a standard photograph, and the high-resolution colour screen makes photos look sharp.

The DPD can be set to display a single photo, but a niftier feature is its slideshow mode. Various options can be set here - all photos loaded on to the device can be included, or the user can choose to omit some.

The slideshow can be set in this way to skip vertical photos and display only horizontals, for example. Time between photos can also be set, as can the effect that accompanies a photo switch, such as fade, scroll and others.

The end result is a dynamic picture frame that changes its content automatically. It's sure to impress the guests when they come over.

The DPD does have some problems. First up is the fact that it only has a 45-minute battery life, which means it needs to be plugged in most of the time. If you're like me, you're desperately searching for a way to eliminate wires from your living room, so this is unfortunate.

Another problem is the device's limited memory size. Publicity material for the DPD boasts the ability to store up to 70 photos, but if this were to true the pictures would have to be of very low resolution.

Using the highest-resolution setting on my 6.1 megapixel camera, I was able to fit only 16 pictures. I also copied some low-resolution pics over and was only able to fit 30.

The DPD has two slots for a variety of memory cards - Compact Flash, SD, MMC and MS are all accommodated. Copying pics from a card or straight from the camera is easy, but getting them off a PC through a USB connection is tricky.

If you're like me and generally fiddle with your photos with some sort of software, you'll need to re-copy those pics back on to a memory card and then on to the DPD in order to get good compression.

That's because the device can only really store a handful of uncompressed photos from the PC.

Philips has also tried to keep the DPD's operation simple by including only four command buttons which change function depending on what mode the device is in, which makes navigating confusing.

If you're someone who likes to pull something out of the box and start using it immediately, you're out of luck - you'll have to read the instructions here.

While the DPD is a nice device once you figure it out, and the problems aren't really that annoying, its price tag of $399 is certainly discouraging. Given that the DPD isn't flawless, it's hard to imagine paying that much for a glorified picture frame.

Philips Digital Picture Display

Pros: Nice screen; great way to display digital pictures.
Cons: High price; copying photos can be tricky.
Price: $399.
Herald Rating: 5/10