I have long been intrigued by the idea of setting up an LCD monitor on a wall and use it like a picture frame to display pictures and short movie clips. I would set it up so that the cables do not show, and maybe even build a frame to hide the plastic edge of the monitor, so just the screen shows.
I know this is currently possible, but I do not want to dedicate a computer to the monitor because of cost (I want to keep the total cost under $500), and because it would be hard to hide the computer. I have considered hooking up a high definition DVD player to monitor as they only cost about $100, and would be easier to hide. I am not sure if monitors that have HDCP (whatever that is) will play the input from a high res DVD that has HDMI. Is HDCP compatible with HDMI? I like that some of these DVD players have USB ports to accept flash drives as this is the easiest way to move pictures and movies from my main computer to the monitor.
What I would really like is a monitor that does it all. One that would directly accept a USB flash memory and play pictures at full resolution using simple slideshow software. This should not be such a bizarre idea. Does anything like that exist now, or in the near future?
I don’t know about movie clips, but they definitely sell picture frames that display pictures. Some allow you to set up a site online where you store your albums and then the frame plays the pics off of there. That way you can give your parents one, and then send them various pictures from your house. Just google "digital picture frame"and you’ll get a bunch of hits.
They already exist. They’re called Digital Picture Frames and they’re available at just about any consumer electronics store.
If you want to do DVD movies, then it’s as simple as using an LCD computer monitor (as you note) with a DVI input. They can easily be had for under $200.
When you say hi-def DVD, do you mean HD-DVD? Or Blu-Ray? Players are being released for both (more for HD-DVD than Blu-Ray I think), but I’d wait on those for the time being. People are forecasting another Betamax/VHS war, but I doubt it’ll be quite that big. Either way, the technology is pretty new and it’s usually best to wait.
It’s not a bizarre idea, but you need to be careful what you feed it.
Scaling of small images to fill the screen will result in unpleasantly blocky and fuzzy images as the panel needs to be run at its native or physical resolution, probably something along the lines of 1280x1024 pixels.
One of the reasons digital picture frames are relatively small is that smallness means little, if any, image scaling is needed.
Yeah, I would like to display pictures at the LCD’s native resolution so a DVD player is not ideal as I would have to accept 720 lines of resolution or so.
Most of my piks are larger than 1280 X 1024. Using the suggestions given in this thread I did find an ideal display here. But at $1,500 Canadian it is about 3 times larger than my budget.
I was referring to DVD players that play normal resolution DVDs, but have the ability to upscale to Hi Def Tv standards. These can also play jpegs at higher resolution than 640 x 480. As you say, I will probably wait.
My Sony has such a slot, and it does indeed have a mode for displaying pictures or video from the card. I doubt, however, that there are any TVs at $500 (Canadian) that offer that feature.