Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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For the longest time I've wanted to get a digital picture frame. Well, they are finally big enough and affordable enough that I took the plunge and purchased one. Now that we have a little one, I wanted something at work that I can keep on my desk at work and keep the pictures fresh. Right now I have a bunch of ancient analog pictures that are really dusty.
So, with that in mind I was in Costco the other day and saw the Digital Spectrum NV700 for like $120. Since I was thinking of getting the Philips 9 inch frame which is twice that price I jumped at the chance to get a frame almost as big for cheaper. Well big mistake. That thing is a piece of junk. For one thing, it's got some bizarre resolution (I could not actually figure out the resolution from a bunch of test images I tried) and it will always scale your images using it's cheap horrible scaler which will make any good looking picture look distorted. Their web site claims the resolution is 480 x 234 pixels. Just so you know how weird that looks, most digital cameras shoot pictures in 4:3 or 3:2 ratio of horizontal to vertical pixels. Consumer point and shoot are generally are 4:3 while SLRs are 3:2.
Here are some examples of what that translates to.
The Digital Spectrum would be effectively 2:1
Who wants to look a a frame that makes people either look extra skinny or extra fat?
Anyway, back to Costco it went (within 2 hours). Next I took advantage of our Microsoft Employee Purchase Discount at Philips and got the frame I should have gotten in the first place. The quality of the Philips frame is amazing, and it also has a built in battery allowing you to unplug it from it's location, move it to your PC so you can upload some new pics over USB. The viewing angle is great and I'm really pleased with the frame.
The Philips frame comes in two sizes, 9 inch and 7 inch. Each is available in a number of finishes. I got the 9 inch milk frame. Note that Amazon and Philips are using different metrics to size the frame. I have no idea what's going on there. The Native Resolution of the Philips 9 inch or 8 inch (depending on who you believe) is 720 x 480 which is good old 3:2 (thanks for pointing out my mistake Tommy).