Digital Photo Frame Display Quality and Screen Characteristics
When Chosing Your Digital Frame Get The Best Display
When it comes to displaying your favourite images or photos then screen quality is really what you need to be focus on and although it's often hard to actually evaluate this without really seeing digital frames side by side in a store, it is still possible to check the specifications to get a good idea of what you are getting.
You will also find that frame screen styles will vary widely, but you will find that in most cases they all are designed to look somewhat more or less like older traditional photo frames, but many now come with a very modern and sleek look to match your in house décor.
Digital frame designs will range from elegant models through to those that seem a bit less professional. And sometimes some of the manufacturers will try to make a device more appealing by installing a screen in a much wider frame. Some people like this, but not everyone!
The following are the main items to consider when comparing or selecting the display for your digital photo frame:
Screen Size and Resolution
These are two most important criteria when considering the quality of your displayed digital image or photograph and they both will affect the price you pay for a digital frame.
Actual specifications are sometimes not always available from manufacturers and this can make useful comparisons a but difficult. However the relationship between these two criteria is critical to the quality of the display.
Typical resolutions are very much like those found on other digital devices and range from 640 x 480 pixels, through 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 and even up to 1280 x 1024 pixels.
For each one of these different resolutions your image quality will actually decrease as the display screen area gets bigger because the same number of pixels will be spread over a larger area.
This is a very important point to remember and often buyers fail to grasp this point thinking that bigger is better and often it is not!
Pixel Density
If you want to calculate the pixel density of a screen you like you should first calculate the screen's actual real viewing area as well as the screen's resolution.
So for example if your screen area measures 4 x 6 inches and the screen resolution is specified as 640 x 480 pixels then this equates to a total number of 307200 pixels in 24 square inches.
From this you can then divide the total number of pixels by the square inches to give you a value for the pixels per square inch, which in this case is 12800. Finally by taking the square root of this pixels per square inch value number you will be able to calculate the pixels per inch value, which here works out to be about 113. Sorry about the maths but if you want the best you have to get a little technical sometimes!
Without doubt a higher value for pixels per inch is better but you should only really make comparisons of screens that are about the same size.
Pixel Pitch
This is the actual distance measured between neighbouring pixels form the center of one to the center of another and here it is the smaller values that are better.
This pixel pitch number will give you a good idea of the density of the pixels on a digital frame display and you need to know that this value will be larger on a large screen that has a low resolution.
Number of Colours
The number of colours that your digital frame screen can display will have a great impact on exactly how good your digital images and photos will look to you.
In general your should note that lower quality frame display screens will only have thousands, such as 256000 whereas all high quality screen displays will literally have a figure in the millions!
Display Technology
The technology used for displaying the images on the screen can also have a huge effect on just how good your images are going to appear to you. Currently the best screen technologies are TFT which stands for thin film transistor and LCD which means liquid crystal display.
Adjustable Brightness
Being able to adjust the brightness of you digital photo frame is very important as it helps you control and improve the display of all your images when the ambient light changes in the room or digital frame location. If this feature has an automatic facility it can be much more useful as you won't have to do anything and your images will always look good.
Viewing Angles
This is an important value as it indicates the angles from which your images will be able to be viewed both horizontally and also vertically. In both cases the higher numbers indicate a wider and therefore better angle of view.
Contrast Ratio
Contrast is the difference between the brightness of a pure white image and black image on the screen. In this case look for higher numbers as they are better and will give a clearer picture.
Display Mounting
Today many manufacture's digital photo frames offer both the standard table top display as well as a wall mounting option. The only downside to wall mounted frames is that they will need some electrical power and if they are not battery powered a connection cord down the wall might be necessary and you might not want to have unsightly wire running up to you digital frame.
Image Orientation
It is now possible on some frames to change from portrait to a landscape orientation and back again and with some frames this is automatic so that when you rotate the digital frame the photos or images will also rotate to match.
This is a great feature because normally when a digital picture frame is in landscape mode any portrait photos and images will appear much smaller, and conversely when the your frame is set in portrait mode any landscape photographs will be displayed smaller. Lots of things to think about!
Screen Aspect Ratio
This is another important criteria and will determine how your photo images are displayed as often it will determine whether or not your image is cropped before it is displayed.
Ideally you want a digital photo frame that does not crop your images or at least one that will give you the option for a full image display.
If your digital photos or images have an aspect ratio different than the screen's aspect ratio then you will find that two sides of your image will be cropped so that the screen is filled up by a central cropped area of your image.
However you can control this process, but you will have to crop your images yourself first using photo-editing software before you load them up for display in the digital photo the frame.
Today there are now some digital frames that can display your images in a typical HDTV aspect ratio such as 16:9, but you will also find many that use the old standard TV aspect ratio of 4:3 instead.
So be very careful when you are considering and checking out aspect ratios for the digital photo frames you are looking at.
HDTV shaped frames will always look great but be warned that if you display some portrait oriented images on this type of digital frame then your images will either be very small on the screen or alternatively then may be heavily cropped. These are both effects you probably do not want!
Conclusion
Hope the above information was helpful and not too technical, but it just goes to show how many different things you need to consider, especially if you are going to be spending a lot of money on a top of the range digital photo frame.
NOTE: If you have Questions use the Contact Form and we'll get straight back to you!
