Does anyone here have a digital photo frames themselves? Do you know someone who does? The reviews of these are pretty sparse, and I'm not sure there are even any decent ones available at any price range. Has anyone heard of any good ones?

It seems like it would be possible to build one yourself with a little hacking (which I'm sure I'd be terrible at).

I'd love to have one too. I want it to auto download my (and my flickr friends) flickr photos. I haven't seen any that fit that bill very well...

I guess hacking one would be pretty easy for some folks, but not for a clutz like me.

- Jon

Ooo, I could have sworn I read about one that could grab photos from online. I can't remember if flickr was mentioned though...

I spent a very long time researching them for Christmas gifts a few months back, and I came to the conclusion that the technology is just entirely too expensive and unrefined to justify it. For $300, you get about a 7-8" diagonal screen, crappy software, limited organization capabilities, and resolution in the 600-700 pixel wide range, which IMHO doesn't cut it for that price. If it was $50, sure. Or, if it was $300 and you got something like 1024 pixels across.

That being said, Engadget mentioned a few Philips models a couple months ago that seemed to be a little bit better in terms of price:specs ratio. Not sure if those are out yet, but they seemed like the next step in bringing the prices down to reasonable levels.

There was a company a while back that was selling half-decent frames very cheaply, but they were tied to their online monthly service for storing the photos. I don't know if they're still around. You can also find some high end models that have a ton of features and big, high res screens, but the specific brands come and go every year or so, and the prices are out of my range, certainly.

If you have the capability to take apart a notebook and stick its guts behind a store-bought frame, then taht seems to be the way to make the best final product. At least "best" in terms of appealing to the people in this forum.

Starting with an older Mac notebook, you can get a decent screen, wifi and the software built into the OS would be enough to run your image slideshow. Using nothing but the picture screensaver you can have a very nice transitioning slideshow using that panning and zooming Ken Burns effect and easily add images to a shared folder. The other benefit of this otherwise stock system is you can set the energy saver to shut the machine down and turn it back on again at specific times. No need to keep it running during the night when you're asleep or during the day if you're not home. To have a more complicated schedule you'll need third-party software to set up multiple on/off periods.

Theonly reason I haven't done this already is because I haven't been able to find a machine at my sweet spot. $100. It's only going to get easier because the older machines are coming down in price all the time. I'd like to make one for my parents, so maybe I can put something together at the end of the summer and then hold it for Christmas for them.

I bought a couple of the Philips units as Xmas gifts. They work really well for that application - ability to send photos easily to remotely located, low-tech, relatives. I configured the units before sending them, setting them to slideshow mode and to power on/off automatically at certain times. Now every few months I send out an updated CF card, they just swap out the cards and send me back the old one for re-use. Works really well, quality of the screen is perfectly acceptable for this use.

Regards

Mark

After I did my research, I found that there are a ton of them out there, and they are mostly crappy. Like Tony mentioned, I heard that the Philips units were pretty decent. The resolution doesn't bother me so much as the fact that I just don't think they are worth the price. The ones that are around $100 just plain suck as far as resolution goes. Also, IMHO, most of the frames themselves are ugly. For some reason, a lot of them have these huge ugly plastic borders around the actual screen. This makes the screen look even larger and the thing ends up not really looking like a frame at all.

This one that I saw recently on Engadget looks pretty cool.. I like the fact that you can connect over wifi.

I think the frame you guys are after is the eStarling. It can display photos from an RSS feed over WiFi, so that pretty much supports Flickr feeds, Google Picasa, or even something you code yourself.

It says you can 'email photos to it' which is quite interesting. I hope it is smart enough so you can set it to check any POP/IMAP server you like and not just hardcoded to an eStarling proprietary system. I can imagine a situation where a hacker breaks the eStarling mail server and sends out a horrific Internet meme photo to each user...

It has a big ugly plastic frame and an 'eStarling' logo on the front of it. Probably expensive too. Still, its by far the best one I've come across.