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It may not be obvious yet but digital entertainment may end up on your walls replacing the conventional picture hanging in your home. Driven by systems that enable taking digital pictures with downloading and displaying content easily and following the growth of digital and wireless phone cameras, the digital photo frame market is starting to expand rapidly. With continuing lower prices of LCD displays and the growing expectation of a visual media experience and you can see the potential.
Entertainment is becoming more video based and with a large amount of digital content ready to be displayed, this is more evolutionary than revolutionary. (As a side note, many consumers currently have 500G " a half a TERAbyte! " in the home.) And instead of just storing these digital snapshots of life, people are looking to display them " even publicly (i.e. YouTube). For the home that means not just as screen savers but as stand alone units, either on the coffee table or as large wall dispays. The vision of ever-changing personal pictures or scenes is a true reality and quickly becoming mainstream.
And it is not only digital video and pictures but the audio as well. The ability to put your playlists into these same devices will forever change the way entertainment is dispersed around the home. This expansion is seen by a number of new products being released to meet the needs of consumers looking to bring a richer multimedia experience to all areas of the home. To continue expanding these digital capabilities manufacturers must advance the features of components that drive these consumer products. To better understand how these features might be implemented, we'll look at a the inner workings of these digital picture frames and the technologies involved.
Figure 1 shows an example of a digital photo frame block diagram, where many chipsets are used to implement functions such as LCD Bias power, LCD BLU, Audio features and DC/DC performance (in this example products are from National Semiconductor). The display size of digital photo frames is generally 5.6", 7" and 8", with 7" and 8" being the most popular today. They are mostly adapted for use in advertising areas but the key technical aspects are the same for all. The backlighting implementation is very critical and product specific but can be easily understood.
Figure 1. Digital Photo Frame Block Diagram
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