Global News

Sunday September 05, 2010

PCB Picture Frames - 1.jpg

If you've been itching to get a digital picture frame but haven't found anything that's big enough for you, then feast your eyes on the Smartparts SP3200 and its staggering 32 inches of LCD glory. It's certainly difficult to find adequate adjectives to describe this titanic digital picture frame, but it is possible to succinctly sum up its feature set as the offspring of a union between a fairly run-of-the-mill digital picture frame and a big screen television.

When the bright boffins over at Smartparts were supersizing the digital picture frame as we know it, they also decided to throw in a few extra MB of memory. It's not like space constraints are going to be a major factor with a behemoth like the Smartparts SP3200. The result is an above average 256MB of onboard memory that users can store anything from pictures to sounds and even videos. Supported video formats include MPEG1, 2 and 4 as well as WMA and AVI files. All this video support might have you hankering for a remote control, and Smartparts doesn't disappoint. How many people can control their digital picture frames over 30 metres, much less watch videos on them?

Like most digital picture frames the Smartparts SP3200 packs a plethora of ports which virtually guarantees compatibility with whatever memory standards your other digital devices use. Supported standards include Memory Stick (MS), Memory Stick Duo (MS Duo), Memory Stick Pro (MS Pro), Memory Stick PRo Duo (MS Pro Duo), Secure Digital (SD), and Compact Flash (CF).

Like most digital picture frames, the Smartparts SP3200 comes with a slideshow function and various settings to personalise your display. Also included but not mandatory is the Optipix Pro software which has an intuitive walk-through based user interface that makes sure your pictures are looking their best before you display them for the world to see.

All of this talk of about videos and pictures brings us to (pardon the pun) big question: how does it look? To be completely honest the 16:9 ratio widescreen LCD panel with its 1366×768 resolution isn't nearly as sharp or crisp as smaller screens that pack more pixels per square centimetre. Still, the image isn't distorted or blurry, but it will never be mistaken for an actual photo except perhaps at great distance. Perhaps the the Smartparts SP3200 digital picture frame had to make some sacrifice in order to be available at a price point that wouldn't induce heart attack levels of sticker shock.

As things stand the projected sticker price for the Smartparts SP3200 digital picture frame is approximately £550, which wouldn't be so bad if it could pull double duty as a HDTV set, or even a place to plug in your game consoles.