LiteOn has launched its first product under the new 'Skyla' consumer technology brand at CeBit 2009, a nifty little scanning digital photo frame, set to launch in the UK in the very near future.
Sometimes all it takes is the clever combination of two well-established consumer technology products to make you exclaim, "damn, why didn't we think of that?"
After all, digi photo frames are ten a penny. And decent scanners can be picked up for next to nothing these days from your local PC World.
But then, who wants to mess around with an unwieldy A4-sized flatbed scanner for scanning in all those hundreds of photos you have stuffed away in a bottom drawer from years gone by? Which is exactly where Skyla's Memoir Scanning Digital Photo Frame is going to come in handy.
Dig out those shoe-boxes
"Now is the time to dig out your photos kept safe in shoe boxes or in the closet and transform them into digital photos with the Sklya," reads the company's marketing blurb.
The Memoir scanning frame has 1GB of internal memory so you can instantly playback slideshows of your old snapshot library on the device's 8-inch display, storing up to 200 4-by-6-inch photos or 400 3-by-5-inch prints.
The screen is 800 by 600 resolution, and you can scan up to 600-dpi resolution. There are two USB ports so you can hook up your PC or pull images off a USB stick.
The only snag? The price looks like it is going to be in excess of £150 when it launches later this spring, which might well just push it outside the 'impulse buy' category for many amateur snappers.
