Advantages of Wireless Digital Frames Such as the Kodak EASYSHARE W820 and Kodak EASYSHARE W1020

Digital frame popularity is growing fast as consumers realize their benefits over traditional frames and as manufacturers add features and lower prices. Digital picture frames enable consumers to get the significant amount of digital pictures they have buried computers hard drives and out on display in our homes and offices. Just as improved LCD technology has made digital TVs clearer and more popular, consumers now can display slide shows of pictures in their digital LCD frames with the same quality as prints, and get the benefits of dynamically changing pictures. Many even support other medial such as music and video.

Of course with the benefits of digital frames are new aspects to deal with, such as power supply, memory, and the transfer of pictures from their source to the digital photo frame. Most models of digital frames allow you to transfer your photos either straight from your camera or from your computer by providing memory card slots. These usually support a variety of types of memory devices: Secure Digital (SD), Multimedia Card (MMC), Memory Stick (MS), or Compact Flash (CF) - generally the same type of memory cards that go in your camera.

This means you can take pictures in your digital camera, pop out the memory card, and then stick it straight into your digital frame to start viewing pictures. Many digital frames lack their own internal memory, which means you have to permanently use a memory card whenever displaying pictures in your digital frame. Digital photo frames with internal memory allows you transfer the picture files from the memory card to the frame's internal memory (and store the pictures permanently on the frame). Another common practice is first transferring pictures from you camera to your computer, and using a picture management application to enhance them, group them, and prepare them for transfer to your digital frame. Many digital frames have USB port for this reason since transferring picture files from a computer is often done via a USB flash drive.

A more recently offered feature in digital frames involves the use of Wi-Fi technology. This allows for pictures and other information to be transferred to the frame wirelessly, greatly simplifying the picture transfer process. A wireless digital picture frame means that consumer can change the pictures displayed on their frame much more frequently, which really is what digital frames are all about - dynamic display of digital content that never gets old. By eliminating the need to put pictures on a memory device and going through the processes of transferring them from camera to computer to frame, wireless digital picture frames promise to be the preferred type of digital picture frames in the future.

Two leading wireless digital photo frames are the Kodak EASYSHARE W820, and the larger Kodak EASYSHARE W1020 digital frame. The Kodak wireless 8-inch W820 and 10-inch W1020 come with many great features, but their wireless capabilities differentiate them from other Kodak digital frames. Best application of these frames is with a Flickr account, a popular online photo sharing website, which enables you to configure the frame to automatically transfer photos from your Flickr account to your W820 or W1020 wirelessly using a feature called ‘Photostream'. This means as you add pictures to various albums in your Flickr account, you easily pick and chose those you want to show up on your Kodak wireless digital frame, and let Photostream take over. Since Flickr is a great application for downloading and storing new pictures as you add them to your collection, this makes it easy to keep fresh pictures on your Kodak digital photo frame.

Wireless digital frames bring promise for even more applications for these devices as the ability to transfer information to them freely creates even more possibilities. The Kodak W820 and W1020 models for example both offer a wireless enabled service called FRAMECHANNEL, which can stream information such as news and weather to the frame using something similar to RSS feeds. This means your digital photo album is not long just for photos, but instead an information portal, also great for businesses and service industries who want to put digital displays in places such as lobbies or use as advertising portals.

Kodak is not the only manufacture of wireless digital picture frames, Samsung, Ceiva, and others have all made similar models with similar features. But the Kodak EASYSHARE W820 and W1020 deserve strong consideration.

Regardless of what brand you choose, if you are getting ready to buy a digital frame, you'd be wise to consider a wireless digital picture frame.