September 23rd, 2008
Giant 32-inch wireless photo frame introduced
There’s been quite a pissing match going on lately in the world of Wi-Fi enabled digital photo frames. First, Samsung and Sony jumped into the game with new offerings, then Kodak did them one better by unleashing the first frame using OLED display technology (albeit for several hundred dollars more than other wireless frames). Now a company called Smartparts has released a—get this—32-inch Wi-Fi frame. The SP3200WF dwarfs the 8- or 10-inch frames that are the most common sizes currently available.
While a digital frame that size has some obvious commercial applications, Smartparts isn’t shying away from pitching the SP3200WF to consumers who like really, really big photos of themselves and their families. It’s wall mountable and comes with a dark wood frame, instead of the black frame design many competitors possess. Aside from its massive size, the SP3200WF has the usual features you’d expect from a digital photo frame, including video playback support, 256MB of internal memory, multi-format memory-card slot, built-in speakers, and Windows Live Photo Gallery support for grabbing photos from an online account. Of course, if you have a fairly recent HDTV with full 1080p resolution and a memory-card slot or USB port, you can display higher-resolution images on your TV instead (the SP3200WF’s resolution is 1,366×768) and probably save yourself a few hundred bucks.
Pricing for the SP3200WF has not been finalized, nor has a shipping date been confirmed. Smartparts says the frame will be sold at “photo specialty dealers,” so don’t go looking for it at Best Buy or Costco.
I’m getting a little burned out on all this wireless photo frame coverage, so unless we start seeing such unlikely combos as a Wi-Fi frame/router or Wi-Fi frame/network storage drive, we may have gone as far as we can with the latest and greatest tech in this emerging niche. Are any of the new Wi-Fi frames enticing to you? Would you ever think of buying a 32-inch version? Let me know in Talkback.
Sean Portnoy spent several years as an editor at Computer Shopper magazine, most recently serving as online executive editor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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