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From a smart digital picture frame to 'smart art'ĭigital picture frames, digital Wi-Fi photo frames, smart art displays - call them whatever you want, but they've been around for ages. Yet we still have a pile of framed art that we don’t have room to hang - what do you do when you run out of wall space? Enter so-called “smart art,” a series of products designed to connect to your Wi-Fi and within which you can place dozens or thousands of photos and paintings - from the classic and modern art styles to vacation and wedding photos or even weekend adventures. The walls of my house are covered in family photos, paintings, signed art prints and other various decorations. We've updated it to ensure accurate product availability and pricing. If you were on the fence at full price, now’s definitely your opportunity.Editor's note: This article was originally published in August 2021. For that price, my endorsement is a lot heartier. But as of writing, Lenovo is selling the frame for 0 at its own store. That’s just too much money for most people to spend on a novelty like this - and the ones that do, frankly, should be able to expect a better overall experience.
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(One group photo where the frame chopped off half my face comes to mind.)Īt $400, price was far and away my biggest reservation with the Lenovo Smart Frame. That odd design choice means the frame needs to either add padding to show the entire photo or lop some off to make use of its entire display, and while it’s not usually an issue, I did find myself manually cropping some photos to 16:9 so they’d display correctly. Most camera sensors - from Real Cameras™ all the way down to $200 phones - are 4:3, but the Smart Frame is closer to widescreen 16:9. The way it shows those photos can get a little weird thanks to its aspect ratio, though. But on the plus side, if you’re using the Frame like I do, you never really need to interact with it: it shows a new photo every few minutes on its own, and that’s all I expect of it. These controls are objectively bad and you won’t enjoy using them. The motion controls have gotten easier to use with time and practice, but that fluidly swiping between photos requires a multi-week learning curve is patently ridiculous. I’ve shared the album with my fiance, too, so we can both tweak it in a snap.
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And since I use the same album for the Smart Frame as I do for my Nest Hub Max and Chromecast’s photo frame modes, my favorite shots populate across all my screens seamlessly. It’s ridiculously simple to keep the Lenovo Smart Frame up to date with your new photos: just add them to a Google Photos album you’ve linked to it. If you've got the photos and the dough, go for it. Lenovo is apparently kicking around uses for the vestigial hardware, but there are no concrete plans for feature updates, and given how niche a product the Frame is, I'm not holding my breath. The focus here was obviously always highlighting artwork, and it doesn't have a touchscreen, so normal apps wouldn't even function - but if this thing could show me news and weather in an air gesture-friendly interface, that'd be a big bonus. It's a shame that even though the Smart Frame runs Android and has both a microphone and speakers, all it can do is display pictures and the time. But when you consider that having a single printed photo of this size professionally framed could easily run you a hundred bucks, being able to quickly toss any and every picture you've ever taken up on your wall from the comfort of the couch starts to look like pretty valuable. If you want an easy way to get pictures from Google Photos to your wall, sure.Īt an MSRP of $400, there's no denying that the Smart Frame is a luxury product. Should you buy it? Rating 7/10 Lenovo Smart Frame Still, it's only an issue in particularly dark rooms, and a pretty picky one at that.
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The Nest Hub Max in my kitchen, for example, also has an LCD panel, but it's calibrated way better than the Smart Frame, when it comes to both brightness and color temperature. An OLED panel this size would drive the price up even further, but that isn't the only solution. Sure, it'd be worse in most cases for a photo to be too dim than for it to be too bright, but during the evening with the lights off, this thing is very obviously a glowing screen. I say "during the day" because Lenovo's automatic brightness control is just a touch aggressive for my taste. During the day, at a glance, you might not even notice it's not a real picture frame. More importantly, colors are vibrant and viewing angles are solid. It's a 1080p LCD panel, but from the distance you'll normally be looking at the Smart Frame, that's more than enough - if you don't currently have a television that's this resolution, you probably did up until fairly recently.