So, which digital photo frame is the best?

If you are in the market to look for Digital photo frames this note will hopefully save you some time. It's really frustrating to buy one of this when selection is so large. This is very nice Christmas gift to your loved ones. I take lots of photographs but rarely have time to actually see them. So they are excellent gadget even if you want to buy for yourself!

One of the coolest feature in new frames is wireless connectivity to Internet. You can throw RSS feed from flickr or other photo sharing websites and the frame will download the new photos automatically. Some frames would even allow you to specify tags in Flickr for the photos you want to see in frame. So imagine your parents or grandpa suddenly see your trip photos in their photo frame as it is occurring! This the way photo sharing is supposed to be.

There are two major services that most of these digital frames supports: Windows Live FrameIt and FrameChannel. These services helps deliver even more stuff like weather and news in your frame.

There are quite a few vendors offering these types of frame. Some of the current models (11/2008) are:

• Digital Spectrum MemoryVue
• Memory Frame by Earth Tech
• Momento Live
• Digital Frame by Edge Tech
• D-Link Internet Photo Frame
• PixStar Photo Frames
• eStarling WiFi Photo Frame
• iGala Photo Frame
• PhotoVu Widescreen Wireless Frames
• Samsung Wireless Internet Frames
• Kodak EasyShare Frames

Lots of choices! To make filtering easier I would suggest to eliminate anything below 15" size. Those sizes (8" and 10") are typically only useful if you want to put frame on the desk just couple of fit away from you. Also frames below 15" will have resolution of 800X600 at best which is not all that good. Even the low end laptops have 15" screen and run at 1028X768 so you can put your laptop where you want to place frame and see how it looks.

In above bunch so far only two frames are 15" or bigger. One from Digital Spectrum and another from PhotoVu. The PhotoVu ones are actually even larger and really expensive ($700+) so for most people only descent choice may be Digital Spectrum MemoryVue MF-8115. There you go, that's the best value frame as of Thanksgiving 2008!

What about the future? Actually if you look at of lot of deals around you will see that LCD displays as big as 22" can now be bought for under $170. So I would predict that bigger frames especially in 15" to 19" range would be under $200 by Thanksgiving 2009. Most of above manufacturers who still don't have 15" models would probably have them pretty soon. Another important note is that life space of LCD frames is not very huge. Most manufacturers aren't releasing this data but depending on brightness levels it can be as low as 20,000 hours. Now that comes out to just above 2 years. So don't consider these frames as your long term investments.

Do you really need 1080i or 1080p or 1440p?

This study basically says that if you have 50" TV and you are watching it at about 9' of distance then 720p has all the resolution human eye with 20/20 vision can ever see!

Currently we use 80X40 screen through our Panasonic projector PT-AX100U. Now that's equal to almost 4 of your tiny 50" screens so certainly 720p won't be enough at our current viewing distance of 10' (our current screen size is limited because of wall size and I think the projector is perfectly capable of going up to 100" diagonal). Actually at that size looks like even 1080p won't be enough. The 1080 runs out its steam at just 76" screen.

For now we will probably stick with our 720p projector though. The 1080p projectors are still super expensive right now($2500+)! Whoever said current HD technology is "enough"...