HP's DreamScreen is not Your Typical Photo Frame

Since the first time a photographer decided to compliment one of his pictures by adding a border, the art of photo-framing has come a long way. Now, with the release of Hewlett-Packard’s revolutionary DreamScreen, the next generation of photo frames has finally arrived.

Gone are the days when your family snapshots were relegated to dark corners of your home. In fact, with all of its multimedia ad-ons, the DreamScreen 100 ($249) puts your photos right alongside your flashy home entertainment system. It offers a 10.2 inch monitor (or a 13 inch monitor from the 300 model) that can stream photos from your home computer, display photos from a photo sharing account and show updates from all your friends on Facebook. It can even play music, either from Pandora Internet radio or your pick of 10,000 other radio stations.

The device runs with two gigabytes of memory, plus is able to accommodate standard flash memory cards or USB drives in case you want to increase its capacity. This also allows you to do a quick photo show directly from your digital camera. The controls are located on the lower right (the part that used to be called the frame).

Though the number of websites available will be quite limited at first, the DreamScreen marks HP’s efforts to bring back the idea of placing smartscreens throughout households. “What we’re really trying to do is bring a simple, user-intuitive device that’s always on, always connected to the Internet, to bring Web applications that don’t require PCs,” said Ameer Karim, director of worldwide marketing with HP’s futures and innovations group.

As for the device’s impact on photography itself, one can only imagine it will be yet another encouragement for consumers to bring their cameras everywhere with them. After all, when you can display all your favorite photos around the house, and access them with such ease, why not snap as many pictures as you can?