Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"NIX has launched a range of Motion-Sensing Digital Picture Frames that automatically turn on when you’re there, and off when you’re not. Available in 8” and 12” sizes, these Hu-Motion (Human Motion) frames require no operation beyond the set up."

Despite the general sense that no one really wants them (my own personal take is that they are the horseless carriages of digital photography, a relic of a different medium), there are still companies out there making these things. NIX has added a twist by making them motion sensing, so they only activate when someone is around. Still, not quite enough to entice me into getting one of them.

"ViewSonic® Corp., a leading global provider of visual display, computing and digital content solutions, today added seven new multimedia enhanced digital photo frames in a range of sizes that bring plug and play ease and style to any environment."

Holy jpegs, Viewsonic! I know that digital picture frames are becoming hot (especially now that their prices are dropping) but seven new picture frames? Way to create customer confusion. Going over the various models, most are similar in features and functionality, but it looks like there isn't a scale where it goes from "economy model" to "money is no object". Picture frames are fun, and they are also getting more sensible features like playback of audio and video, but I really wonder who Viewsonic is trying to target here. Most people will just want one frame that does it all for a reasonable price! Now if they can only start offering picture frames that come close to matching the extreme resolutions our digicams offer.

"ACDSee Picture Frame Manager software for Mac and PC allows you to conveniently manage images for any type of display device. Whether it's a photo frame or a large screen 1080p TV, this application will optimize your images to the resolution of your frame so you can fit many more images into the frame's memory with ease."

I think you can file this under the "for n00bs" only category, but if you know someone that has a digital photo frame and they struggle with getting their images re-sized, this might be a good solution - albeit an expensive one at $39.99 USD. There's not a lot of descriptive text, so maybe it's smarter than I'm giving it credit for. If it could detect (or be told) the aspect ratio and resolution of your frame, it would be slick to have it not only resize the images but also automatically crop them to the right aspect ratio. Point and shoot digital cameras typically take pictures in a 4:3 aspect ratio, while most DSLR cameras capture images in a 3:2 aspect ratio. Nobody likes to see black bars on their digital picture frame, so this might be a solution.