I’ve blogged about Toshiba digital picture frames before, but Toshiba has introduced another frame that merits a blogpost of its own: the Toshiba Tekbright digital picture frame.
We are a picture-taking society; few of us go anywhere without a digital camera in tow, but what do we do with all of those wonderful pictures once we’ve put them on our computers in a file or photo-sharing website? Most of the time, we forget all about them, that’s what.
This won’t happen if you have a digital picture frame! You’ll be able to see all of your pictures, in rotation in a slideshow, whenever the frame is turned on. If you’re like me, your frame will be turned on all the time; in fact, I never turn mine off! If I have to get up in the night, I really like to see my pictures as I walk past my wireless frame to the kitchen. I think seeing my pictures even influences my dreaming, in a positive way!
The Toshiba Tekbright digital frame has a row of blue LED-light touch-sensitive buttons across the bottom of the frame, which I think gives the frame a futuristic look that I really like. You can load your pictures into this frame with almost any memory card or flash drive, directly from your computer with the included USB cable, or by uploading a LOT of pictures into the 64MB of internal memory. That’s a lot of pictures, folks!
The Toshiba Tekbright digital picture frame not only shows pictures and videos; it also has a clock, calendar, and Mp3 player! The 7-inch LCD touchscreen display makes configurations easy, and lets you view your pictures and videos clearly even from across the room.
This new Toshiba Tekbright frame isn’t available in the States yet, but keep watching this space!
From the April 30 DIGITIMES comes this news about OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) digital photo frame orders:
“In view of the estimated global demand for 20 million digital photo frames in 2008, many makers in southern China have offered lower prices to compete with Taiwan-based makers for OEM orders, but their disadvantages in inferior quality and inability to secure supplies of small-sized TFT-LCD panels renders them unattractive to international brand vendors including Phillips, Sony, Toshiba, and ViewSonic, according to industry sources in Taiwan.
Most makers in southern China used to assemble digital music and/or DVD players and thereby are familiar with image processing and modulating technologies, the sources pointed out. AS the technological barriers for stepping into making digital photo frames are not high, makers have quoted prices 5-8% lower than Taiwan-based makers to compete for OEM orders.
However, compared with leading Taiwan-based competitors such as Lead Data, Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and Qisda, China-based makers are significantly less competitive in terms of quality, production capacity and ability to procure enough TFT-LCD panels (mainly 7- and 8.9-inch) partly due to competition from low-costs notebook PC’s and handheld devices, the sources analyzed.
Consequently, it will be hard for china-based makers to land OEM orders from leading international vendors for the time being, the sources asserted, and so the makers are currently focusing on winning orders from second-tier and small vendors, white-box brands, as well as retail channels, the sources noted.
Currently, leading Taiwan-based makers each ship 200,000 - 300,000 digital photo frames a month while the average monthly shipment volume for China-based competitors is below 100,000 units, the sources indicated. Of the estimated global demand for 20 million digital photo frames in 2008, Taiwan-based makers may collectively account for as much as 90% of shipments with China-based makers making up the remaining 10%, the sources forecast.”
Since the beginning of the year, many new digital picture frames have been announced from companies too numerous to keep track of. Some major names — including Toshiba and Samsung — have entered the market. One commonality of I’ve noticed among many of these new frames, though, is that almost none of them offer built-in WiFi.
Perhaps not surprisingly, at WirelessPictureFrame.com, we believe that WiFi is going to be the foundation upon which the success of the digital picture frame industry is built. So, seeing so many new frames without WiFi has led me to wonder recently, what about WiFi?
In just the past two weeks, there have been two pretty high-profile digital frame announcements, one from Toshiba, the other from PanDigital.
Toshiba’s announcement of its Tekbright frame launched the company into this space. Yet, despite coming into the market years after many of its competitors, the Tekbright frame offers basically the same set of features as many other frames: good resolution, support for removable media cards, some built-in memory.
PanDigital’s new slate of products does feature network options —both WiFi and Bluetooth. Neither option is built into the frames, though. Instead, both are offered as adapters purchased separately from a frame.
What’s making me curious is why frame manufacturers aren’t using WiFi as a selling feature? Especially since WiFi is likely to be the feature that unlocks the true value of digital picture frames.
One argument could be that the cost of adding WiFi to frames would push them out of impulse-buy territory. Perhaps. Frame makers need to maintain their margins to keep growing, of course, but I wonder how much additional cost included WiFi would require. Remember that DIY digital frame article at Popular Science we linked to a few weeks ago? That guy added wireless to his frame using an off-the-shelf WiFi card that cost $30 retail.
I’d expect that manufacturers buying in bulk could get better pricing than that. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that $30 is the increase in cost that a wireless frame requires. Is a $30 price difference for more features a make-or-break change on a frame that already costs $120-$200? I’d expected that most people would be willing to shell out a little extra for Internet connectivity, but I don’t know. Perhaps frame makers have research indicating that the increased cost would mean decreased sales.
Another possible explanation for the lack of WiFi, and the one I put more stock in right now, is the support overhead WiFi could create. I haven’t yet used a wireless frame whose setup process was completely simple. I’m pretty technologically savvy, so I can imagine what kind of challenge it might be for a lay user. A frustrating user experience at set up, and during the life of the frame, would lead to two things that frame makers don’t want: negative perceptions from customers and increased tech-support costs.
If WiFi is hard to set up or maintain, customers are going to be frustrated, which is always bad for sales. On top of that, they’re likely to place more calls to tech support, making that area of the business more costly, which isn’t great either.
Whatever the reason (and if there are other reasons that I haven’t considered, I’d love to hear from readers on them), without WiFi, the advances introduced in these new frames are incremental. With WiFi, they advances are much bigger – turning the frame into a net-connected device that can do much, much more than just show pictures from your digital camera.
The leaps and bounds that this market should grow by seem most likely to come from a really compelling product. I’d wager that that product — whether it’s here already or has yet to be released — is going to have WiFi built in. We’ve got a few months before the holiday shopping season arrives, so new products will still come along. I hope more of these products have built-in WiFi.
Toshiba’s new 7-inch Tekbright digital picture frame truly looks like a classic Parisian designer had a hand in it. It’s simply lovely.
The bezel is silver surrounded by a clear beveled outer frame. There is no stand; the frame is supported by a kickstand.
This digital frame has a 16MP built-in for storing your very favorite pictures, but you will probably want to load it up via your flashdrive or memory card. You can also connect it to your computer via a usb port and send tons of your favorite pictures to the frame. What good are pictures on your hard drive, anyway? Who sees them? Probably, not even YOU, not very often. With a digital picture frame, ALL of your pictures are there in the living room for everybody to see.
This frame has no wireless remote, nor any other wiress capabilities, but it’s a good, solid, very attractive, simple frame. Not everybody wants a picture frame to play music or think for itself. This is the perfect frame for those people.
Did I mention how pretty it is? I did? Well, I’m mentioning it again.
I’ve blogged about Toshiba digital picture frames before, but Toshiba has introduced another frame that merits a blogpost of its own: the Toshiba Tekbright digital picture frame.
