Peripherals

Promoted as the ‘Best brag book for sharing treasured memories', the Digital Foci 8-inch Portable Digital Photo Book (Model PBK-080) promises to be useful to both amateur and professional photographers as well as business users. A development of the ubiquitous digital photo frame, this device takes a standard LCD screen and houses it in attractive leather-like covers. Digital photos, videos and business presentations can be displayed on the screen.

You might wonder why you would pay almost $500 for a device whose screen size and resolution are the same as digi-frames costing between $100 and $300. However, although we feel the price of the Photo Book is relatively high, it offers a lot more to users than similarly-sized photo frames and its presentation is much more polished and attractive than any digi-frame we've seen to date.

Critical features that separate the Photo Book from a standard digital photo frame include its display raw files from most manufacturers' cameras and its support for a wider range of file formats than most digi-frames (although some file types - particularly for video - are unsupported). In addition, its lithium polymer battery offers a generous 2.5 hours of viewing time (but requires an initial 8-hour charge).

Design and Operation
Roughly the size and thickness of a typical photo album and similar in appearance, the Photo Book has a smart, black, leather-like cover that closes with an overlapping magnetic catch. When you open the cover, you find a plastic ‘box' measuring 245 x 163 mm that has rounded corners and is roughly 15 mm thick. It's fixed to the back cover of the ‘book'. The 8-inch LCD screen occupies roughly three quarters of its surface.


The Digital Foci Photo Book with the cover turned back to show the LCD screen and control panel.

The top, bottom and left side ‘spine' of the box are ridged, presumably to simulate pages. The power switch is located on the narrow bottom panel, which also houses an AC adapter jack, reset button and indicator lights for power and battery status. The battery can be charged through the AC adaptor or directly from a computer via a USB cable (both supplied).

Connection ports are located in the right side panel under lift-up dust covers. Interfaces are provided for CF cards, a USB-to-computer port (which also accepts USB flash drives via a supplied interface cable) and SD/xD/MS multi-cards.  The location of these features is shown in the diagram below.



When you connect the Photo Book to a computer via the supplied USB mini-B cable, a ‘Computer Connect' message appears on the screen for confirmation. In this mode, the Photo Book behaves like a removable drive with the default icon labelled ‘PhotoBook' on the My Computer screen. Clicking on this icon accesses the contents of the Photo Book, showing each of the folders it contains.


The folders in the Photo Book can be seen when you connect it to a computer.

All operations are driven from the computer itself, as long as the device remains computer-linked. The controls on the Photo Book are effectively locked, which means you can't run slideshows of stored picture albums unless you unplug it.

If a memory card is inserted into the Photo Book when it is connected to a PC, it also shows up on the computer as a removable drive and you can transfer files between the two devices and rename or delete files and folders. Each Photo Book is set up with two folders: PHOTO and MUSIC and files can only be played if they are copied to the correct folder.

When using the Photo Book as a stand-alone device, the control panel is located right of the screen and carries Menu and Escape buttons, an arrow pad and buttons for adjusting sound levels. The grille for a built-in speaker for audio playback sits at the top of this panel. The diagram below shows the control structure.


Powering-up the device displays thumbnail images representing each file stored in the PHOTO  folder.  Pressing the Menu button reveals icons covering album display, file transfer, delete and set-up functions.
Setup options are pretty limited. You can choose between two built-in ‘Theme Style' templates: Self Style (the default) and Beautiful Life (shown below). Neither of these templates does much for the pictures you display but they're not actually unattractive so most users should find them acceptable. There appears to be no way of loading your own templates (perhaps this feature could be offered via a firmware update) or customising either theme.


The default Self Style theme.


The Beautiful Life theme.

The only other setup options are for adjusting screen brightness and setting the interface language (10 options provided), the date and time and the auto shutdown timer. The latter can range from five to 55 minutes and you can turn this function off. Selecting the Status icon in the setup menu lets you access technical information about the total size of the internal memory, how much free space remains, the hardware and firmware versions and the battery status. But that, as they say, is your lot.


The status display.

In stand-alone mode, you can view files directly from a memory card or connected USB drive. The latter must be connected via the supplied USB OTG cable, which plugs into the mini USB slot on the side panel. In both cases, the menu options for the input device should display automatically (pressing the Menu button brings them up if they don't). An indicator on the lower right corner of the display identifies the device that is being accessed.

Copying Files
You can use the icon-based menu system to upload files to the Photo Book, where they will be stored in a new album. Newly uploaded image files will be stored in the default PHOTO folder in a sub-folder tagged with the type of memory card or flash drive and sequential numbers according to the order in which folders were created. Audio files are stored in the MUSIC folder, using a similar system.


The icon-based menu system.

Selecting the Copy icon transfers the files to the designated folder and at the same time displays a confirmation window showing where the files will go and how much free space remains in the internal memory. All supported image, video and audio files on the connected device will be copied to the internal memory.

Once the files are copied across a Backup Summary screen is displayed showing the number of files copied, copy speed, total size of the backup and remaining free space on the internal memory. From this screen you can select three actions:

- Compare, which let you verify that each file on the card of USB drive matches the file copied to the Photo Book;

- View, which takes you to the main viewing screen;

- close, which closes the option screen.

Viewing Images
The main viewing screen displays all the ‘photo album' folders in the internal memory, each with its folder name and thumbnail of the first image in the collection. You can navigate to a specific folder by pressing the arrow pad buttons and select it with the OK button. Selecting an album opens it and displays a thumbnail view of the images it contains in a 4 x 3 matrix. From this screen, you can view single images on the screen.


Thumbnails of all folders are shown on the main viewing screen.

Two viewing options are provided: Photo Book and Full-screen. The former presents the images in book-like surroundings, based on the theme template you've chosen, with an attractive ‘page-turning' effect between shots. Full-screen playback simply presents the image on the screen with the file name shown just above the bottom of the screen. (If you elect to play background audio with either mode, you can only adjust the volume of the sound in Photo book mode.)

Because the aspect ratio of the screen is 4:3, only images with these proportions will fill the screen. Shots taken in other aspect ratios - and also shots in portrait format - will run from edge-to-edge in one dimension and have black bars in the other. Portrait shots with EXIF orientation data from the camera are automatically rotated for viewing; untagged shots can be rotated manually. (Manual rotation only changes the display orientation and has no affect on the image.) Raw files from most camera manufacturers will display as readily as JPEGs.


Raw and JPEG files are displayed together when a card containing RAW+JPEG images is uploaded.

You can scroll through your shots manually with the arrow pad buttons. Pressing the Menu button toggles the file name and counter information on and off, while pressing the + button lets you zoom in on the image and the - button zooms out. In zoom mode you can use the arrow pad buttons to move the enlarged section of the image. Pressing the OK button rotates the image through 90 degrees counter-clockwise.


The zoom display.

The next step is to display a slideshow. Pressing the Menu button lets you choose between Photo Book slideshow and full-screen slideshow, while the setup menu is used to adjust the intervals between images. Photo Book slideshows have borders around the images, based on the chosen theme.  Full-screen slideshows simply display the pictures at full-screen size (and we think it's infinitely preferable).
A random selection of transition effects is used to move between pictures, selected from Fly In, Blocking, Erase and No Effect. If you've uploaded background music or voiceover files to the MUSIC folder, all the files in this folder will be played in random order. While the slideshow is playing you can increase or decrease the display time for images by pressing the up/down arrow buttons and scroll to the adjacent picture with the left/right buttons. The audio volume is controlled with the +/- buttons.

Performance
When we demonstrated the Photo Book to a number of people who were neither imaging nor technology enthusiasts, their initial reaction was very enthusiastic. All praised the overall presentation of the device and felt it provided a more intimate and attractive way to display digital pictures. It was also considered significantly better than a standard digital photo frame.

Some viewers were able to recognise specific business applications, particularly as presentation albums for wedding photos and coverage of other special occasions. Its value for making presentations in one-on-one situations was also recognised spontaneously. However, all agreed the asking price of almost $500 was very high for the product itself, given that 8-inch photo frames can be had for less than half that price.

One of the major positive aspects for serious photographers is the support the Photo Book provides for displaying raw files, which even includes recently-released cameras like the Olympus Pen E-P1 and Panasonic GH1. Unfortunately, with these cameras, the display appears to use the embedded, low-resolution thumbnail in the raw image file. This produces a very blurry and slightly pixellated (as shown below), which has no relationship to the quality of the file itself. Older raw files appeared to fare much better in our tests and raw files from Canon and Nikon cameras appeared sharp and detailed.


JPEG and ORF.RAW files from the Olympus Pen E-P1 as displayed on the Photo Book. Note the loss of resolution in the ORF.RAW file on the right.

Having worked with the Photo Book over several weeks, we believe it to be an excellent start on what is likely to be the photo album of the near future. However, although the current product may meet the requirements of snapshooters with relatively low resolution digicams, it has a few weaknesses for serious photo enthusiasts and professional photographers:

1. The screen resolution is too low for the device's price tag. This tends to reduce the tonal range it can display and most images appear too contrasty. Highlight and shadow details are often lost. Photographers who have invested more than $1000 in a DSLR will expect to see all the detail and tonal nuances in their shots reproduced with high fidelity - and they are likely to be disappointed.

2. The overall colour balance of the Photo Book we had was also slightly cool - the least desirable colour bias for displaying portrait shots. (This may be a one-off situation but it's a shame there's no way to tweak colour reproduction or even calibrate the screen with an external device.)

3. 4GB of memory won't be enough for anyone who owns a high-resolution DSLR - or even a 12-megapixel digicam. We had to create small copies of shots from our EOS 5D Mark II in order to upload enough of them to produce a slideshow covering one day of a recent trip. With memory cards currently offering 8GB, 16GB and even 32GB of capacity, only 4GB in a ‘storage device' looks paltry and will be inadequate for photographers who want to use the Photo Book as an image storage device. (Higher storage capacity would have gone some way towards justifying the $500 price tag.)

4. You can't scroll across panorama images. With most cameras supporting panorama capture - and many serious photographers shooting and stitching panoramas - many potential users will see this as a significant deficiency.

5. Audio playback is uninspiring and volume control is limited. In addition, there's no way to connect the device to an external speaker to improve audio playback.

6. Support for HD video is limited, with new formats like AVCHD unsupported and limited MPEG-4 support (we couldn't play H.264-compressed video clips). With HD video being offered in an increasing number of cameras, this situation will need to be rectified quickly.

The main reason we've nominated the Digital Foci 8-inch Portable Digital Photo Book (Model PBK-080) for an Editor's Choice is because the company has got the overall presentation right and created an album that looks and feels genuinely engaging. It's also excellent to see recognition of the importance of raw files to photographers.

However, this album is the first product of its type and few first products are ever perfect. The Photo Book represents an excellent start and will certainly appeal to many people, although we suspect the main buyers will be snapshooters and  business users more than serious photographers. We look forward to seeing future products in which the problems we've identified are rectified.

Display: 8-inch colour TFT LCD screen with resolution of 800 x 600 pixels; 4:3 aspect ratio
Internal memory: 4GB
Input support: CF, SD/HC card, MMC, xD-Picture Card, MS/MS PRO (Supports mini-SD, RS-MMC, MS Duo with adapter); USB flash drives
File format support: Stills - JPEG (Baseline Standard only), BMP, TIFF, GIF, RAW image files from a wide selection of DSLR cameras; Video -  MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 SP; Audio - MP3, AAC, WMA; Text (*.txt)
Built-in speaker: 1 channel, 1.4W speaker
Power supply: Rechargeable Lithium polymer battery with 2.5 hours of battery life
Dimensions: 266.7 x 177.8 x 25.4 mm
Weight: 1.0 kilogram