Pandigital Offers Kitchen Photoframe/HDTV

Pandigital's forthcoming Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame offers a 15-inch view of your photos, your recipes...and lets you watch high-def TV.

Pandigital has been making LCD photo frames for a while, but now the company is expanding out into multifunction devices, announcing its Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame (PDF) that combines a digital photo frame with HD television capability…and the ability to display your recipes as you cook.

"As the hub of today’s busy home, the kitchen is now incorporating new technologies that have already been embraced in other areas of the home and office," said Pandigital CEO Dean Finnegan, in a statement. "The Pandigital Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame addresses this new demand with the convergence of three key technologies into a single product."

The 15-inch, 1,280 by 720-pixel resolution panel supports ATSC and NTSC, and can be hooked up to video feeds using composite, S-Video, YPbPr, or HDMI connections. As a digital photo frame, the unit can display images loaded into its 512 MB of onboard memory via a card reader or downloaded from Google’s Picassa photo-sharing service. And—if you’re one of those increasingly unusual people who use a kitchen for cooking—you can keep sauces and stains out of your cookbooks by loading recipes onto the display via memory cards. The unit also comes with a selection of ready-to-use recipes pre-loaded.

The Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame features a sealed glass design to protect it fromm moisture, oils, and splatters, and the unit is designed to be mounted under a cabinet, on a wall, or set up as a freestanding display so users can put it wherever they need it most. The frame features interchangeable bezels to match kitchen decors. The unit also features clock, alarm, and calendar functions, an integrated 6-in-1 media card reader, and support for a range of image, video, and audio formats including MPEG6, AVI, and JPEG.

Pandigital says the Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame should be available in June at a suggested retail price of $399.99.