I finally broke down and bought a digital camera this year. After looking over all the options I decided I wanted a camera that could take LOTS of pictures withouth
expensive memory cards. I decided on the PanasonicSD model which has a super-disk drive. It has been a great joy to own this camera since I can now look at pictures instead of the
pile of rolls of film I had collected. After thinking about this for a while I looked into the digital-pictureframes that are available and was pretty dissappointed. They
were real expensive (some $900) and did not have a very large viewing area. I thought maybe I could do better. So this idea popped into my head about using a modified laptop computer
mounted in a real picture frame. I could run any number of picture screen savers, and even a small HD would hold hundreds of pictures. There are plenty of auctions online that sell
used laptops, the is key to to define the specs of the machine I wanted. Originally they were:1) 24 bit graphics
2) minimum 12" Active Matrix I needed the ActiveMatrix so the
picture would be visible on a wide degree of angles. Later I dropped the 24bit spec. because there were just not any laptops within a reasonable price with a 12" screen or bigger, also I
evaluated the difference on my CRT (showing pictures) of 16bit vs/ 24bit and did not percieve a noticeable difference. This would be "still images" so it appears that 16bit would
work great. I finally broke down and bought an IBM Thinkpad 770 which has a 13.3" TFT screen and can display images at 1024x768 at 16bit color. I purchased it on UBID for around
$500.00 (significantly less than Sonys CyberFrame, and it has a much larger viewing area!).Now that I had bought the laptop I was committed to making this project happen. Many friends
joked I would be auctioning off a broken laptop in a couple weeks. Click the next to see the steps I went through. |
