So, having just got married, we have a ton of digital pictures that we want to print/display. Instead of that, the wife and I started looking at digital photo frames at the local best buy. They only had 2 Westinghouse ones, the biggest size being 8". And it was $200.
Since there are already monitors coming out with media readers built into them (the 24" dell has one for $799), how much effort would it take for the makers of these monitors to allow stand alone display capability?
I don't want to shell out $200 for 8" of tiny tiny glory. I can buy a second hand computer for that price and fish up a cheap 15" LCD to display onto, but I want a more elegant solution.
I have a Ceiva. I wouldn't recommend it. I don't really know why other than it is rather lame. I don't have mine turned on. You have to update a website with the photos and then it sends 10 random photos to the frame. The frame dials a phone number once a day to get the photos.
There are a couple things you could do. Dealdump.com has the top 10 offers from about 10-20 different deal sites on one page.
A) Buy a cheap Dell. I see a 3Ghz w/ a 19 inch LCD for $495 right now. You could probably get one w/ a 19" for $350. The problem with this is the big ass case.
B) Buy a cheap 19 inch LCD and a Shuttle PC. I just picked up a Hannspree 19in HC-194D lcd Monitor with DVI for $99.95 (I have to send in rebates to get that though). You wouldn't need a hard drive as you could boot a Linux Live CD.
C) Buy a cheap 19 inch LCD and a portable DVD player. Burn your photos on the DVD and just have it play them over and over. I don't know how long the DVD player would last.
D) Buy a Viewsonic 27'' High Definition lcdTV for $599.99 (buy.com found on techbargains.net) and a cheap PC or dvd player same as above.
E) Just get a portable DVD player w/ an 7 inch screen and leave it at that. They are around $100 (I either paid $120 or $79 for mine). Use a repeating Photo CD or whatever. Same as above.
F) Buy an old 15" laptop and just run that. Again the HD on it doesn't matter as you can boot w/ a CD. I think a laptop only draws something like 35 watts?
G) I saw a LCD picture frame thing (not a Ceiva) on eBay for $50.
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