Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

The Consumer Electronics Show (affectionately known as “CES”) is an annual gala event where manufacturers show off the best gadgets in the world. Held in Las Vegas right on the heels of the New Year’s holidays, more than 100,000 people are said to have attended CES in 2009. I was one of them.

One of the most intriguing products I saw at this year’s show was a digital picture frame. Yeah—that’s what I said. I know that there are more digital picture frames on the market than there are coffee tables in the world to set them on, but the Lite-on Skyla Memoir truly offers something new. It has an 8-inch display, 1GB of internal storage, 5-in-1 card reader and two USB ports, and it can play MP3 music files and most MPEG video files.

But what really sets it apart from the pack is its ability to SCAN photos up to 4x6 inches.

You may think that it would be great to own one of these so you could scan some of the photos that you accumulated before you began shooting digital. That’s only a tiny part of what you can do. The best use for this clever device is to take it with you when you visit family and friends and scan THEIR photos—the ones they won’t trust you with outside of their living room. You can store up to 200 4x6-inch prints at 600 dpi, and you can dump the scanned image files to a USB thumbdrive or directly to a PC for further sharing.

The point is this: one of your relatives is the unofficial curator of your family’s photo collection—but they don’t know how to share them because they don’t know how to get the prints digitized efficiently. Take one of these to your next family reunion and you’ll go home a hero.