ALBUM – Review – My Gift Pick of the Year!

I have a fabulous gift idea for you today – this is my gift pick of the year! Yes, I did receive this product to review, but I truly love it and everyone I have shown it to loves it. It is ALBUM – in a quick nutshell it is a portable digital photo album, but read on for why this is unique and fantastic!

I quit using a regular camera over 10 years ago, I only use digital cameras now. That means I have tons of digital images, but I haven’t had an effective way to share them with friends and family when I am in person with them. If someone has a laptop with them and you happen to have your digital pictures with you on a thumb drive or DVD, sure you could do it that way – but not everyone always has a laptop with them. Sure, some folks have a desktop computer in their home, but most folks I know have it in their home office and that is the “messy room” that guests don’t go into. You can view them on the small screen on the back of your digital camera too, but honestly that is just too small to use to share pictures. You can share the images online, but not everyone has a computer. I have a very inexpensive digital photo frame that I could put a memory card in and take with me and plug in, but this isn’t really practical either since you have to remember it.

Enter ALBUM! You can easily view all your digital images on it and easily share those pictures with family and friends anywhere you go since it is small enough to fit in most purses. Perfect! You do NOT even need a computer to use this, you can easily just insert a memory card or plug in a digital camera right to it. While it is small enough to fit in your purse, that does not mean the viewing area is small – the actual viewing area is about 3.5″ x 6″! The whole ALBUM is only 7.7″ x 4.45″ x 0.55″ and weighs about the same as a fresh apple (0.9 lbs). There is an internal memory of 4GB and you can increase to 20GB by inserting an SD memory card – this means more than 40,000 digital photographs! The battery lasts for 3 hours of continuous run time – you could easily pass the around to everyone at a get together and they would all be able to view your images on that battery life. To protect your album it has a very nice leather cover, this part also has a little flap so that you can use it to stand up the ALBUM as well.

Even if you are not technically savvy, you can still operated the ALBUM. It is one of the most user friendly items I have seen. You turn it on and then there are just 3 buttons on the front to help guide you through the menus and photos. It is not a touch screen since you don’t want to smear up the viewing area with fingerprints. The ALBUM was really designed to be just for sharing your digital images in a simple, but beautiful way, whenever and wherever you want.
If you are a little more savvy with these types of items, you can easily connect it via USB to your computer and organize the photos into different folders as you would like. I have thousands of images on my computer and CDs that I am in the process of sorting out and then will be downloading them all to my album in folders so that I can easily share any moment or occasion.
I took this to my aunt’s the other night for a birthday party and everyone was so impressed with the quality of the images on the screen. Just amazing! I had new images from my Kodak Z915 camera, plus images I had downloaded from other family members online, plus some scanned in old photographs, as well as some cell phone images – the cell phone images (from older phones) were the only ones that were a bit pixilated – the rest, including old scanned images – were gorgeous and bright and clear. It does not flip vertical images to horizontal – but I like that since the image remains full size, I can easily just turn the album for those pictures also.

When I first heard of the ALBUM I thought it would be really expensive, then when I received the ALBUM I knew it must be expensive because of the quality of it – but honestly I was shocked when I saw the price. It is only $149! I really would have expected this to cost more and I think it is a fantastic value for what you are getting for that price. I have seen other portable digital things – like key chains and cubes that are fairly cheap – but they are made of cheap materials and the pictures are horrible and they break quickly. The ALBUM is very well made and you can just tell it is a quality item when you hold it and see it.

For the holiday season think of who this would be great for – for me my aunt is the photo hound in our family, but she doesn’t have a computer – she does have a digital camera though. At every event she has those envelopes full of photos to pass around, with the ALBUM she could easily just insert her memory card into it or connect her camera directly and download all of her images to share. This way no fingerprints on her pictures, she could save money by not having to pay for prints she doesn’t really want or that turned out badly, and no more boxes full of images to store. I also think for any mom who loves taking snapshots of the family – this is a perfect gift so she can easily share those photos with everyone. How about Grandma who doesn’t have a computer, but all the kids and grandkids use digital cameras? Every time you go to visit Grandma just take your memory card or cable and hook into her ALBUM and download your images for her. Now she can always have everyone’s pictures to look at and share with others.