Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Digital Picture Frame broken

My digital picture frame died today. I had it on my desk, and watched it flip through hundreds of my pictures over time. This was not a high quality frame. My shots that look so nice elsewhere, looked crappy here. Plus this frame did not maintain the aspect ratio, it typically made people look fat as it expanded their girth to match the width of the frame.

I had noticed that I had to constantly change the contrast and tweak the brightness settings. This was done in one degree increments in tedious steps. There was no way to easily compare the settings looked on an actual picture. Little did I know, these adjustments were the beginning of the slow death of the digital device as there came to be a scattered flickering which became quite annoying.

It's just as well that it broke, I really need to get a wireless picture frame. Most of the newer model frames have a built-in wi-fi chip that allows photos to be downloaded from the web. As a matter of fact, a company started by a former boss of mine, FrameChannel.com, is making a business of this. You can manage a feed from the web of various photographic or news channels. This is similar to how feeds are provided within some elevators in high rises.

I was asked to provide a channel for the launch last year for people around the globe to download my pictures to their own frames. Now there are somewhere around 70 people subscribing to the "Photographer - John Fraissinet" channel. However, my old, now broken, digital frame can't get it, since that frame is not on the web.

FrameChannel is banking on the holidays to sell a lot of the frames this year. They sell advertising that is embedded into the content they provide. Right now, 1% of all the content are downloads of my photos. I'm not quite sure how it is displayed (outside of the preview on the site) but it's a cool concept. They do embed ads somewhere along the line, and if they are ever profitable I would get a cut. So, I think its time to get a wireless frame.

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