Anyone using HDTV as digital picture frame?

[VirtualRain]

I've been considering buying a cheap 37-40" 1080P LCD TV with a USB input to mount over my fireplace strictly for displaying photos. My thinking is that rather than run a distracting slide show, I would display a photo for a week at a time. In a sense, visitors would see a new picture every time they drop by and I could enjoy my favorite photo of the week for a week.

Anyone else done this or considered this?

At $500 for a cheap HDTV, the ROI vs. smaller dedicated digital picture frames or even printing and framing regularly would seem worth it.

 

[JDDavis]

Seems like an expensive picture frame but if you think about making numerous large prints and swapping them out weekly would probably be more expensive in the long run. I'd be careful with going too cheap on the TV though. We use a lot of large LCDs at work to display slide shows and other material and sometimes they look pretty crappy. The source material can have a lot to do with that though.

I did have a friend who owned a gallery for a while and she used a few HDTVs just to display photos. These were mostly the low cost prints you find in bins and people sort through or the smaller prints of the displayed works. It looked nice in the gallery though and people always stopped to look. This was before TVs had USB so they were driven by an iPhoto slideshow.

At home we often have the living room TV running through pics on Flickr via the Apple TV.

 

[mtbdudex]

At home we often have the living room TV running through pics on Flickr via the Apple TV.

+1, using AppleTV for music, pictures that I have sync show up there, kids love looking at the pictures.....though not a dedicated one like you are proposing....

 

[Ruahrc]

I guess it would work if you're willing to pay for the TV. Cheap LCDs and good image quality don't really go together though, so I would suggest at least getting a decent quality one and then calibrating it (a must).

Seems like a lot of wasted energy though to just display a picture. Printed photos are nice not only when you look specifically at them, but they are also always there in the background. To get the same effect with an HDTV you'd need to run it all the time, thus using up a lot of energy. If you wanted to save on energy and turn it on/off a lot, it would just introduce a lot of hassle.

Another possibility would be to put up some kind of slow moving art. Like film a video of an entire day from a mountain viewpoint, then play it back at 1/4 speed so it takes almost a week to get through. The picture would not really move as you looked at it, but as the time passed the image would slowly change with cloud formations, eventually a sunset, etc.

Ruahrc