Sony DPP-F700 Digital Frame with Photo Printer Announced
Written on Oct 22, 2009 by Brian and filed under News, Sony
In late September Sony released the Sony DPP-F700 in Japan. Sony has announced today that we’ll be seeing the digital frame, photo printer combo unit in the US come January. For $200 user will get a high resolution 7″ frame with a printer in the back that can create 4×6 prints in 45 seconds.
The concept of a printer embedded in a digital frame isn’t new. Smartparts had one on the market for a few years, but it suffered from less than stellar performance. The idea is simple, friends and family will be over at your house, see a fantastic shot on your digital frame and want a copy for themselves. Rather than give them a digital file or wait for one of the online services to print and deliver the image, users of the Sony DPP-F700 can press a button and in 45 seconds have a high quality 4×6 print.
On the hardware side, the frame features a widescreen 7″ display with 800×480 pixel resolution. There’s 1GB of internal storage, which is good for at least 2,000 images when resized for the frame’s resolution. Additionally the DPP-F700 has a USB port and card readers that support CF, SD, MS and xD cards.
The frame handles playback of JPEG, TIFF and BMP image file formats in either single image mode, or slideshow with ten different transitions. There’s also an orientation sensor, that lets the frame be viewed in portrait or landscape mode, rotating the images displayed accordingly.
When it comes to printing, Sony has included a few extras that they hope entice buyers. In addition to printing the photo files, the frame has a few onboard editing options including: enlarge, reduce, crop, date stamp on/off, border/borderless (for single prints), and brightness, contrast, hue, and sharpness adjustment. There’s also a creative print mode with over 30 templates that lets users make things like ID photos, calendars and proof sheets.
Whether or not users will commit to the $200 price tag and likely pricey ink refills remains to be seen. The printer/frame combination hasn’t proven to be successful in the past, though Sony must expect there’s a reasonable sized market opportunity out there.
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