The Digital Picture Frame: All Grown Up

Smartpants is offering a 15-inch LCD picture frame to do your photos justice.

If the novelty of watching a slideshow of family photos on a tiny digital photo frame just isn’t doing it for you anymore, it may be time for an upgrade. Forget four by six inches, these things are into monitor territory now. Smartpants, maker of a full line of digital frames, announced their 15-inch model on Friday.

The frame features an XGA (1024 x 768) LCD screen trimmed in birch wood, capable of displaying 16.7 million colors in all their 24-bit glory. Besides the huge display, the it also comes with 256MB of internal memory  to store photos, and support for just about every memory card out there, so photos can go straight from camera to frame with no computer involved. Smartpants’ OptiPix software is built in, and takes care of finding, optimizing and transferring photos. Since no slideshow is complete without music, the frame can also play MP3s through its built-in speakers.

It may be built for the living room, but it also has some serious features that would fit right in at the conference room, including the ability to play PowerPoint presentations and display PDFs. "Our new 15-inch frame is among the largest and most versatile digital frames available," said Stefan Guelpen, Smartparts co-founder and president, in a statement.

The frame should be appearing in stores immediately for around $299.