Photo Wallet

Gadgeteer Hands On Review by Julie

January 03, 2001

Most people tend to carry a photo or two of their families or pets in their wallet. But how would you like to carry 100's or 1000's of photos in your wallet? You can with the Photo Wallet by VideoChip Technologies. The Photo Wallet is a dedicated image displaying device. It reads images from a Compact Flash card and displays them on a color screen.

Hardware Specs:

Backlit 1/4 VGA AMTFT display with 110 degrees viewing range (4" diagonal display)
320 x 240 Resolution, 24 bit color (16.3 million colors)

Compact Flash Type 1 Slot

 5.00" (H) x 3.75" (W) x .81" (D), 10.5 oz.

Powered by 2 DL-123A 3 Volt Lithium Batteries yielding approximately 3 hrs of use.
AC Adapter input: 110V, 60Hz AC, 20W / output: 6-7V DC, 1.5A

The Photo Wallet is a plastic handheld unit that is similar in size to a Pocket PC. The sole purpose of the Photo Wallet is to display images stored on a Compact Flash (CF) card. 

The unit itself feels solid and sturdy in your hand although it is pretty wide. It has 4 buttons. A power button on the left side of the unit and 3 command buttons on the face of the unit. On the right side of the unit is the CF slot.

The screen on the Photo Wallet is outstanding. It is a 24bit display and really looks great. The colors are very vivid and bright. The images I have here don't do it justice. They look darker here than in real life. As you can see below, I have shown the Casio E-115 next to it in comparison. Both units are displaying the exact same picture. The Casio's image isn't rotated, but you get the idea.

I didn't get the chance to test the Photo Wallet display outdoors on a sunny day. I've not seen the sun around here for any length of time in weeks. I'm assuming that like most non-reflective displays, this one will also wash out in the direct sunlight. I did however test it outdoors on a gloomy day and it looked fine. 

The images on the CF card have to be in JPEG format. The instructions that come with the Photo Wallet state that the unit views sequential JPEG format instead of progressive JPEG images. I've never known that there was a difference... I was able to view any .JPG image that I copied to the card. I also was able to snap a few pictures with my digital camera and then take the CF card directly from the camera, insert it into the Photo Wallet and immediately view the images. The Photo Wallet didn't care that my digital camera created its own folder to store the images in. It found them just fine. According to the information included with the unit, it is capable of displaying up to 3.3 megapixel sized images. It resizes the images to fit the display.

As far as viewing the pictures, you have a couple options. You can view them one at a time by manually cycling thru them forwards or backwards. You can display thumbnails of the images and by using the forward and back buttons, select the specific image to view. You also have two presentation (slideshow) modes. By double clicking the forward button, the pictures display one after the other with a few seconds pause. By double clicking the Back button, the pictures display one after the other with a nifty fade transition. Either way, the images load quickly and the transitions are fluid.

There are supposed to be some other features to the Photo Wallet that I wasn't able to test. A special menu is supposed to be available that allows you to set the idle time, time to power off, transition time between photos, grouping of photos and a pan and zoom of photos. Unfortunately, I could not get this menu to come up. I finally realized that I didn't have the latest firmware loaded into the device so I downloaded the update and followed the directions on the website for installing the update. To sum it up, it didn't work. I kept getting a software mismatch error... So your mileage may vary...

The Photo Wallet doesn't come with any type of case. But the unit comes with a stand/screen cover that can easily be slipped on or off the device.

It also comes with an AC adapter which can plug into the back of the device. The AC adapter is huge! It's about as big as the Photo Wallet. When I first saw it, I thought it was a combo AC Adapter and battery charger... But no, the Photo Wallet runs on 2 3V DL- 123A Lithium batteries. This is a big gotcha as far as I'm concerned. I like rechargeable... I don't want to go to the store every other day for new batts. Being able to just plug it in and recharge when needed is essential as far as I'm concerned. Maybe there are such things as rechargeable 3V batteries but I'm currently not aware of them.

The Photo Wallet is nice gadget, but for the price I think it should do A LOT more than it does. If it were able to read both CF and Smart Media cards directly, had rechargeable batteries, was able to show MPEG or AVI movies, and record sound bites for each picture, I'd be more inclined to feel favorable towards it.  As it stands, I think you'd be better off just getting double pictures from your next roll of film at Wal-Mart and carrying them around instead.

Price: $349

Pros:
Great screen, vivid colors
No computer needed
Easy to use

Cons:
Expensive
Batteries not rechargeable
Needs more features to justify price