Review: Digital Photo Keychain Takes Pictures Really, Really Mobile

Posted by: weiganla on Jun 30 2008

The biggest problem with digital cameras is showing your photos off, especially to people who aren’t very tech savvy. Do you email them? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve physically had to go up to my grandparents’ house to help them access pictures I’ve emailed.  Upload them to a photo sharing site? You have to have an online computer handy to look at  them. Print them out? Only if you want to spend a mint in paper and ink. Digital photo frames are becoming more popular, but they’re still expensive and not exactly portable.

A new solution is a digital photo keychain. They’re small, lightweight, and typically hold more than 60 shots. Considering they’re tinier than a lot of the other things most people have dangling from their keychains — a friend used to carry a 6-inch rubber chicken — they’re  definitely mobile technology. Very mobile. So when the nice folks at WholesaleKeychain.com offered me a chance to take a look at their product, I was excited to check it out.

Hit the jump for more!

Overview

The keychain that arrived on my door is the black version and sells for $19.99; the same model also comes in silver and pink. The casing is matte black plastic with a shiny layer over the silver mat and LCD display. Screen dimensions are 1"x1", which shows up in the specs as 1.5 inch for the diagonal. Most of the weight is in the metal chain and clip, and the photo viewer itself is very light. Overall it’s a fairly good-looking piece that sits reasonably well in the hand.

Included with the photo viewer and chain are a mini-USB-to-USB adapter for transferring pictures and chargers, along with a remarkably useless instruction manual that seems to have been translated from Chinese by a cut-rate version of Babelfish. Fortunately, using the keychain is pretty self-explanatory.

The back of the keychain has Up, Down, and Menu buttons and a Reset hole. Holding down the Menu button turns the screen on and off. Another press brings up the Menu, where you can set slideshow speed, contrast, and other options. The arrows move through pictures and menu options (although since you use them with the back turned away from you, left and right feel reversed). Before you do much of that, though, you’ll probably want to load some pictures.

Loading Pictures

Getting pictures on the keychain is mostly but not entirely intuitive. The trickiest part is having to tell the keychain that you want it to connect to the computer. Once that’s done, the software loads automatically (at least, on Windows XP — I can’t verify for other OSes) without having to install anything. This is a problem area for some other brands, but I had no trouble.

After the clunky process of navigating down through the file tree, you simply select the BMP, JPG, PNG, or GIF you want, drag the square box to determine how the picture will be cropped for the keychain, and hit Add to add it to the preview album on the right. The software tells me I have room for 107 pictures. Oddly, the Save/SaveAll buttons have nothing to do with putting pictures on the keychain — they export the resized and cropped image files generated by the software. The important button is Download, which starts a transfer monitored by the progress bar in the bottom right. My 20 pictures were added to the keychain in less than a minute.

Display

The 128×128 pixel LCD display won’t win awards for sharpness, but it gets the job done. Colors were true at the default settings, and when I held the viewer at a natural reading distance of about 15 inches from my nose the pixellation was almost  unnoticeable. Given the tiny screen I was surprised by how good my pictures looked.

These images are the best I can do at showing you how the keychain looks in use. In real life the colors are much truer — the pictures make the display look over-blue, which it isn’t. The right-hand image, which is close to actual size, gives a fairly good representation of sharpness and is closer on color.

Conclusion

The digital photo keychain from WholesaleKeychain.com is an excellent value at $20 (a comparable one at Best Buy is $29.99), and while the display and build quality might not measure up to the pricey brand names they will probably make most users happy. I can definitely see this product being a hit with families and others looking for a compact, convenient way to carry photographs that leaves their wallets’ picture sleeves flat and bill compartments thick.

Specs and Vitals

1.5 inch 128×128 LCD display;

4.8 MB internal memory which can store about 72 pictures;

Auto / manual picture slide show, slide time adjustable.

Manual switch between picture and time display

Time display including date, week, hours, minutes and seconds.

Time manual adjustable or sync with computer via software.

Picture format: JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF;

Picture size automatically cut by software.

Input / output picture via photo View software

Built-in rechargeable battery

Charged / data downloaded via 5 pins USB cable

Dimension: 5.5×4.1×1.2cm

Weight: 85g

Optional engraving: 3 lines, $5.99

$19.99 in silver, black, or pink from WholesaleKeychain.com

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