Digital picture frames are so yesterday’s news. Remember how you’d have to load images onto either the frame’s own hard drive or a plug-in thumb drive, to display them in your living room? It probably didn’t seem so cumbersome, a decade ago when they were new. Well there’s a new take on the old technology.
Nixplay’s Iris 8-inch digital frame has a solid yet lightweight feel. Its brushed metal frame is reminiscent of an Apple product, with very clean lines and curves. A white honeycomb backing makes it feel sturdy, for whatever reason. And the display is adjustable for several characteristics, including brightness and vibrancy — with great color and clarity all the way on the 4:3 high-res display. There’s even an RGB color adjustment setting. And it allows you to tune the playback mode — put it in shuffle play at various time increments, for instance, with 12 transition types from photo to photo (random, jump cut, crossfade, circle, wipe, directional wipe, etc.) within eight screen formats (fill the screen, pan and zoom, display it with a black border, etc.). The point is, you can customize it to the utmost extent.
But the real technology here lies in the built-in WiFi that can tap your various social media on online storage folders for images to display. You can connect it directly to your Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Flicker and Google Photos accounts — if you want. Or you can opt to just pick and choose images to display via the online portal or smartphone app, and manually place them into your display album. After a quick sync, the frame is showing your images.
You can also show short Instagram videos through the device, adjusting volume through the on-screen settings menu. By the way, to communicate with the Nixplay device, you use the included remote that has a nice tactile, rubbery feel. It works great — provided you have it extremely close to the frame. Like within a foot, in my testing.
Other than when showing videos, the Iris is completely silent, which you would probably expect. And it’s a subtle, awesome way to showcase your photos. One cool thing that enhances the solid construction is that the thin flexible stand on the rear — I immediately thought that it had the identical workability of those old Gumby figures that can be easily adjusted — doubles as the beginning of the power cord. A very clever design — except that means you cannot hang the frame on a wall. But the stand is very versatile and works great.
You definitely get the sense of sleek quality with this product. At $200, it costs significantly more than most digital frames on the market. But it definitely has a top-end feel and look. I can see getting my parents it for their house across the country, but controlling the photo galleries from my own active photo selection. That way, they can keep up with the latest images from our home. No doubt it can bring families closer together, in this way.
With holiday time around the corner, this makes for an outstanding and thoughtful gift.
