| Digital Foci Photo Book is a portable digital photo album with an 8-inch 800 x 600 pixel LCD screen supported by LED backlight and 4GB internal flash memory. Featuring a slim design encased in a soft leather-like case for a convenient, elegant photo presentation, Photo Book is a great way to carry collections of digital photos for enjoying and sharing in a variety of settings. Photo Book has a battery life of over 2.5 hours. It’s an ideal family brag book and presentation tool. To use, simply load photos to Photo Book’s internal memory directly from a memory card or USB flash drive. Supported cards include CF, SD, SDHC, MMC, xD, Memory Stick, and MSPRO. You can also transfer photos, videos, and music from the computer via USB connection.Photo Book lets you organize photos into different albums and choose a specific album to view. “Photo Album View” displays each folder as a separate album, showing its folder name and a preview image of the first photo in the album. “Photo Thumbnail View” lets you browse through the thumbnails of the photos in a selected album. In addition to running a full screen photo slideshow with adjustable time intervals, you can also run a slideshow with an elegant page-turning effect, just as if you were flipping through an actual photo album. Music can also be added to play in the background along with your slideshow.Perfect for professional photographers to display photos in an elegant portfolio, Photo Book supports RAW images from a wide selection of DSLRs.Photo Book users can organize photos into different collections, and choose a specific collection to show depending on their audience. Photos are automatically rotated to their correct orientation based on the EXIF data captured by the camera, and can also be zoomed, panned, and rotated. Photo Book comes with soft leather-like case, AC power adapter, Standard USB cable (to computer), USB OTG cable (to USB flash drive), and Quick Start Guide. |
|
 Great digital replacement for your paper prints |
| Review Date: January 22, 2010 |
| Reviewer: SergeiS, Indiana, USA |
What I needed: a digital photoalbum to replace paper photo albums and stop printing hundreds of photos a year.
What I did not need: a traditional digital picture frame. I have one and no one notices if it is ON or OFF.
The Digital Foci is probably the ONLY product on the market today that has all the "must have" features for photo album:
1) Cordless (just take it and pass around as a regular photo album)
2) Front control buttons (easy to flip pages etc)
3) Folder structure to keep different photo albums in separate folders for easy access
4) Large display (>regular 6x4 print), sharp 800x600 pixels and bright LED lit 4:3 display.
5) No oversized frame around, you can hold it in hands and pass around as a regular photo album.
6) SD (SDHC) flash memory support up to 32GB - just one SD to keep 10 years of photos
I went through 100+ frame models and found just few that are cordless and have decent size comparable to 6x4 photos, but all except Foci Digital lacked in one "must" feature or another. For example 8" NIX did not support folders, i.e. all photos come in one pile, very hard to navigate to a specific event if you have 16,000 pics!
Digital Foci in more details:
1) Rechargable battery provides more than enough viewing time. The album can be charged while closed and standing on a shelf among other albums and books.
2) Front buttons are very convenient, you do not need the manual to figure them out. Responsivity is reasonable, takes less than a second to flip to the next slide after you press forward. You can also rapidly flip "album pages" with 12 photos per page. You can zoom in and out any photo by just pressing (+) and (-) buttons and chose the zoomed area using 4 arrow buttons. I have 500 photos in one of the folders - flips as fast as smaller folders.
3) It will show folders (about 10 per page?), but only one level. But even as it is it works fine. When you highlight a folder (using
arrows) its name is shown. I also created one jpeg picture for every folder with name "__folder.jpg" (i.e. first alphabetically in
the folder) that has date-event name written on the picture in large font - the first jpeg is used by album automatically as a folder icon.
4) LCD display is good, large viewing angle in horizontal direction, but in vertical image becomes dimmed if you view it from below the normal to the screen (fine from the above). Makes sense. The screen is sharp and noticeably larger than 4x6 print.
5) It is designed as a book, not as a frame, it is comfortable to hold and when you fold it its front "book" style hard cover
protects the screen, you can pass it around or throw it into you lagguage without any special case.
6) Supports SDHC/SD cards, fast finding files. Once you put SD in the card does not stick out, you can have one in at all times.
Additional features that I find useful:
*) Supports AVI movies, in particular DivX support is great - I convert all my camera taken mjpeg avi movie clips into DivX to save
up to 5 times in space. It even plays internet downloaded full length AVI movies, good picture, one small mono speaker is loud enough
for the purpose. A movie clip has to be selected separately when viewing an album in "page" view.
*) Easy USB connect to main computer - can transfer data to inserted SD card or to internal memory (4GB). The transfer rate is,
however, rather slow - about 500kB/s, so it is better to take SD card out and transfer stuff directly to it.
*) Navigation is very simple and intuitive with front buttons. Their spacial arrangement is very convenient.
*) Zoom - I keep original high res photos, sometimes you wish to zoom into details and that can be done. I must warn, however, that
it takes about 2 seconds per every zoom click to see the response.
Other features I don't care about:
*) Can run slide show as a typical photoframe.
*) 4GB on board memory.
*) Can play mp3 music files while you watch the slide show (never tried, playing music through a small speaker does not make
much sense to me).
*) Can show ASCII text files (*.txt) - English only, I guess, I have some russian books - these show as gibberish even if I select
Russian language in settings (code page mismatch?). The text viewer is too basic to be really useful, no support for DOC, fb2, rtf
etc.
*) Supports some other flash card standards.
The software features that I would like to have:
*) Deeper folder structure
*) Possibility to select folder page style as just folder names (like in explorer)
*) Ability to add text to photos. For example, it would be nice if I could just write a text file with "txt" extension and same name
that could be shown on top of a photo (lower part) when I click a special "contents" button (currently it displays just the file name).
*) Ability to show movie clips and pics in a mixed mode, i.e. concurrently as they are listed,
*) Option to select show in "date" order, not alphabetically - makes sense when pics from various cameras for one event are in one
folder.
Hardware feature that I wish to see:
*) HDMI soundℑ output to HDTV and perhaps a small remote |
Great Great Great
|
| Review Date: August 20, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Ron Budde, Deshler, OH USA |
| This album just blows away everyone who sees it! You can organize your pics by folders, making it easy to find what you want. Clarity is outstanding. I have a Mac and it's compatable. Nice leather bound, giving it a nice feel; and there are magnets in the edges of it so when you open it up and fold the cover around, it stays in place. I would highly recommend this to everyone who wants to put their pics in a digital album. This will be the way of the future, as you can pass it around, the pics are about 5 x 7's, making them very easy on the eyes. |
Very cool toy
|
| Review Date: September 6, 2009 |
| Reviewer: T. Houseworks, NY |
I SCUBA dive all over the world. Most divers are Geeks. So when I showed up with my new toy with our dive pixs and videos, they were blown away. I knew then I had made a good purchase. This is the best way to share digital images. It's very easy to use and good in variuos lighting situations. Seems very well crafted and it just looks cool.
It is well worth the price. |
A Perfect Product!
|
| Review Date: August 13, 2010 |
| Reviewer: S. Heckman, |
I looked for an effective way to share my digital photos for over a year. I primarily looked at digital picture frames, and I eventually bought one, but it didn't work and was returned. Finally, I read a magazine review of this photo album, checked out some user reviews, and bought it. This is a wonderful, wonderful product. It does exactly what I hoped it would do. I restore cars, and I wanted something that would allow me to show the many steps a car had undergone during the restoration process. This album allows me to do this simply and quickly.
The first thing you'll notice is how substantial the album is. It's heavier than many of the flimsy, plastic digital frames on the market. It is very well-made and looks quite elegant. The "cover" protects the album and, when folded back, props the album up for viewing.
The album is easy to use: I load photos directly from my laptop using the USB connector which is supplied with the album, but you can also use a flash drive or memory card. I don't resize my photos, but I suppose some folks might elect to do that. Anyone who has used a computer and has some experience with menus will find this photo album very simple to use, and those folks who haven't used computers will find the Quick Start Instructions clear and easy to follow. The album allows you to organize your photos into folders so you can view the pictures you want to see without having to view all the photos loaded into the album. For example, you can view a folder of vacation photos, or photos of grandchildren, or a wedding album without having to see unrelated images.
The images are bright and crisp, and the 8-inch screen display is large enough for viewers of all ages to enjoy. There is a zoom feature that allows you to zoom in on areas of photos, and the colors are clear and vivid. There is a brightness control in the settings menu, so you can control the brightness of the display. You can view each image separately or look at "album pages" of thumbnails; even the thumbnails are a decent size. You also have the option to manually move from one photo to the next , or you can view each folder as a slide show with adjustable viewing time for the images. A simple wheel control, much like the kind on many mp3 players, allows you to select a specific image within a folder if you don't want to see the entire album.
The album organizes the photos in each album alphabetically by file name. The photos are displayed in this order. I create folders and adjust file names on my laptop BEFORE I load the folder onto the album. If, at a later date, you want to reorganize a folder or add photos, it seems to work best if you just delete the old version of the folder and reload your updated version. This is a very quick process, although the first few times I did this, I made stupid errors in alphabetizing.....a user problem, and not the fault of the album!
Because the sequence of the images is very important to me, I didn't want a product that shuffles the photos. Once the photos in this album are arranged, that's how they're displayed. Most of the digital picture frames I looked at randomly change the order of display, which made them impractical for my needs.
The album also plays music, displays text, and shows videos. I haven't used these features yet only because they weren't the reason I bought the album. I have made some jpg files of text which are interspersed among the photos, and the print is sharp and easy to read.
Battery life seems pretty reasonable. Once the album is charged, it displays for over two hours -- plenty long to share your photos. When you have about 10% of battery life left, you see an icon which warns you the battery is getting low. If you have access to an electrical outlet, you can also run the album via the AC adapter, which is included with the album and used to recharge the unit.
There are many less-expensive options available for viewing digital images, but this album is worth every penny. I can't recommend it highly enough. Everyone who has seen this album wants one!
|
The Digital Foci Photobook is GREAT!
|
| Review Date: March 15, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Dean K., iowa |
I wanted a photo frame originally that had sufficient memory, could be portable, and could showcase separate collections of photos. I bought two digital frames but they just didn't fit the bill. Then I ran across the Digital Foci Photobook. What a great way to showcase my photos. It has a huge memory, the ability to create individual albums, is portable with 2 1/2 hours of viewing time per charge, and the Photobook looks beautiful.
I did have a little trouble downloading the firmware that had updates but a call to their support was actually answered by a patient and competent human being. One small downside to the Photobook is that it only has two choices of frame mats.
All in all this is a great product!!
Digital Foci Photo Book 8-Inch Portable Digital Photo Album (PBK-080) |
|
No video reviews found for this product.
