Sharing digital images

[rogerg]

I'm after some way to make sharing of my digital images as easy as sharing of prints used to be with film rolls, without having to have my digital images printed.

For example, a photo album of holiday snaps is easy to throw in the car and take to a friend's place in case they are of interest. Also a photo album of prints is easy to pass around between people at a dinning table or living room. A laptop is not really convenient in many situations, other than plugging in to a tv to show them that way.

Does anyone have ideas or experiences?

I have been considering a digital photo frame that has batteries, there's a Philips one that's a 7" LCD. Costs about US$200. Not cheap! Also I have seen an epson media player that looks nice, but only has about a 3.5" LCD and costs US$499 !! It seems not many of the digital photo frames have batteries, which would be a requirement for passing around a group of people etc.

Ideas?

[janoskiss]

Hmmm.. I think we are still a long way off from having handheld screens that can even get anywhere close to the resolution of photographic prints.

[Omaroo]

Roger - A 7" frame for AU$118 + $20-odd for postage (buy it now):

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Digital-Photo-Frame-7-inch-LCD-Plug-Play-FREE-32MB_W0QQitemZ180070414574QQihZ008Q QcategoryZ106167QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewIte m

[Striker]

I agree with Steve,

These small LCD's screens are such low rez for photo's

480 x 234 pixels..yuck

It would look better on your mobile phone...lol

[Omaroo]

Yes - if you stuck your face six inches from the screen. Sit back a bit and they're actually reasonably visible at arm's length. If Roger wants to pay the dollars (which he indicates he doesn't) then he can obtain much higher resolution units. It's all in the price folks.....

The Sony PSP screen's 480 x 272 delivers stunning continuous tone colour images - but it is only 4" or so, increasing the effective resolution.

OR... you could spend $129.00 +$30 and get 640x480. At least that's VGA. It'd be quite acceptable at 7" I believe.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/BRAND-NEW-BLACK-7-LCD-DIGITAL-PHOTO-FRAME-MP3-MP4_W0QQitemZ180070798287QQihZ008QQ categoryZ106167QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

[rogerg]

Well, I went and had a look at one in Target today which is on special for $99. It's 480 x 727 at 7" size. I was surprised how good the photo looked considering the low resultion, but not good enough to nicely portray the images.

I think the lowest I would settle for is 640 x 480. The next step up, 720 x 480 and according to the reviews that produces perfect looking images. The Philips one still seems the best for what I want, having battery and that higher res. Shame about the price tag.

Omaroo is right, price is an issue and it is tempting to just get a $99 one so I at least have one, I think it would still get used lots. The main negative there even if I compromise on image quality is battery - no battery and you can't hand it around so it's useless to me.

I was hoping someone would pop up and say "oh that's easy, I use one of these! it's cheap and looks great!" but that's not the case, I agree it seems to be early days for this kind of thing.

I will save my pennies for now unless someone comes up with a brilliant idea. Hopefully within the next 6 months I'll find the spare cash to get the philips one or a comparable one as new models are brought out.

In some ways it surprises me there aren't more alternatives - the potential convenience and saving on print costs seems obvious, but in other ways I can see it's a huge outlay even at $100 - $200 so can understand why something hasn't taken off.

Roger.

[Wombat_In_Space]

You could try using one of these type of things just burn you images to DVD or VCD then play them on one of these. :thumbsup:

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/9-2-PORTABLE-DVD-PLAYER-car-TV-USB-MP3-AV-IO-DIVX-Game_W0QQitemZ130064767974QQihZ003Q QcategoryZ109884QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewIte m

[spacezebra]

Cool little unit Darren. Thanks for the link

Cheers Petra

[iceman]

It is an interesting problem, Roger.. and you're right, it's frustrating not to be able to share your images as easily as a printed roll of film.. I guess most people upload them to a gallery and sit around the computer hooked up to the internet, to share them. I guess that's not always convenient.

You could take your laptop and show them on the laptop? But that can be frustrating too because older laptops mean you have to sit at the right angle to see the screen properly..

I like the idea of burning them to DVD and displaying them on a portable DVD player, or on the TV using the DVD player. Most families have DVD players these days, so creating a slideshow on DVD and sitting around the loungeroom looking at the pics on the TV is a good idea. You can also have captions, audio and other stuff with the slideshow.

[rogerg]

I have been using my laptop to share the images until now. Most commonly I'd plug it in to a TV and do a slide show. The difference comes when you just want to take the photo's in case someone wants to see a few (so maybe don't want the added burden of an expensive laptop sitting around), and then having to boot up, plug in, setup the laptop to show someone the prints, vs flipping open a album.

DVD is a good idea, I hadn't really thought of just burning them all to a DVD then taking that around with me. That at least means no expensive laptop and no boot up time and cable hassles. Probably get better quality too than using the laptop through TV via PAL video cable.

Those DVD players are an interesting idea. Certainly portable and would have excellent quality screen I expect. Certainly significantly bigger for the $$ than a digital photo frame or media player! And that one Darren linked to accepts USB, so I could just plug my USB thumb drive straight in it, not having to worry about a DVD. Interesting.

Thanks all for the ideas :), keep'm coming if there are more...

[janoskiss]

LCD display + easy to use zoom, perhaps through a touch screen would be a satisfactory compromise IMO. Often when you are looking at holiday snaps you are looking at photos closely to see detail, see people's faces, architecture/artwork detail etc.

[rogerg]

So, I've been hunting more on this. I'm finding more and more potentially suitable devices but ge I wish I could see them in real life! Just not prepared to spend the $$ when 50% reviews are good and 50% reviews are bad.

It seems there are many portable DVD players that accept all the major cards and play the JPG images on them. But it seems very few of these are by the major brands. eBay has lots of them listed but not major brands. Who knows what they're like in real life, with respect to quality and usability?

An example of a perhaps suitable eBay one:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/9-2-PORTABLE-DVD-PLAYER-car-TV-USB-MP3-DIVX-SD-AV_W0QQitemZ130066152693QQihZ003QQc ategoryZ109884QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

A google on "digital photo album" returns a few hits, like this "PhotoShare" one which is nice and compact, has zoom and navigation, but LCD and resizing issues according to reviews:
http://shopper.cnet.com/Photoco_PhotoShare_7_LCD_Digital_Ph oto_Album/4014-6506_9-32155083.html

And then there's still the Philips photo frame that has battery and the best image quality of all it seems:
http://reviews.cnet.com/Philips_Digital_Photo_Display_7FF1/4505-6506_7-31637882.html?tag=also

I asked in Harvey Norman and Retravision about such devices. Strangely they said flat out that no portable DVD players accept MS thumb drives and no DVD players display JPG images. That came from 3 salesman, and was blatantly wrong going by what I find on the web.

The frustrating thing now seems to be that there's devices out that that do what I want and for a good price (PhotoShare for example), but I really need to see one in person to know how good they are.

The hunt continues....

[rogerg]

I have solved my problem of having a portable player of digital photo's to be able to easily transport and share my photo's.

Yesterday I picked up my Creative Zen Vision W media player. It's a media player with 4.2" screen. It's a comfortable size to hold and pass around, excellent screen size and image quality (perfect image quality). I'm very happy with the result.

It came at a price - $479. If I knew someone in the US I could've bought one from Amazon and ended up with it for about $380 total including tax and currency conversion - so I feel ripped off just because I'm in Australia. But that's the only grudge I have :) Online stores in Australia sell it for as little as $453 and as much as $768 (exactly the same item).

The player holds 30gig.

The only technical downside is that it doesn't support canon's RAW files. Considering my original goal did not include RAW's that's fine - I just wanted something to share processed images, so I'm happy to batch process them to JPG's.

Epson has a similar player that does support RAW but cheapest I could find was AU$899! Not worth it.

[iceman]

4.2"? Is that big enough to show images well?

Not bad for 30gig I spose.

[rogerg]

It is actually, it's a little surprising but it really is quite a good image from arms distance. I've been showing it around and 3 people watching it at the same time has been no problem, all commenting the image is quite large and viewable. Viewing angle is not a problem - looks perfect from almost any angle. It has AV out also, so for larger groups can be plugged in to a TV where it outputs a higher resolution (700 odd pixels wide).

I haven't viewed a 6x4 print side by side with this yet to determine what the difference is visually with respect to resolution/detail.

You can zoom in on the images, but that's a little more cumbersome than I was hoping for (Menu -> zoom in, not just a zoom button).

Oh and not that it makes much difference - but I just checked and it's 4.3 not 4.2, I got it wrong in my earlier email.

[rogerg]

One thing that I considered is that the pictures shown on digital photo frames and dvd players that I tried, looked obviously low resolution and poor quality, typically the screens would be about 7" but the screen resolution still usually 480 x 272.

As compared to the Vision W which is 480 x 272, with a 4.3" screen.

So it is actually a much more pleasing image looking at the Zen than the larger screen of the other devices, and you get 30gig instead of having to have a thumb drive sticking out the side.

There are higher resolution dvd players and picture frames, but their price aproaches that of the zen and yet the zen has other functionality and is more portable (battery life, capacity, media playing capabilities, etc)..

I wouldn't be surprised if in 2 years time other devices with large and high resolution screens are more affordable/applicable. We'll see. :)