Greg Chaffins 
Prints are a great way to share moments captured with your phone’s camera, and they can also be fun to pass around or stick on a fridge. They even look great propped up on a desk or stuck on the vehicle visor – do people still do this? – so as to give you a quick look at a cherished moment.
Previously the only way to get this look was to buy a small printer and film. The film tends to be rather pricey, so you had to choose your prints with a little discretion. But with the continued innovation of e-paper, you can now buy Polaroid style prints that remove the need for the printer. And it looks good doing it.
The Vidabay Snap looks like a print from us a printer, and holds the display in a plastic housing. The good news is that it uses no power once the image is set on its E-Ink Spectra 3100 display. This let you stick them anywhere without worrying about the charge or battery life. That’s the cool thing about E-Ink displays.
But if you get tired of looking at granny and the gang – no judgement here – you can easily change it. You can also update the display to change the image as often as you wish using your favorite smart device.
The update process is simple, you just load the app onto your phone and position the Snap display close to your device. Hold still for a few seconds, and the image is updated from your selection. Super easy. There are no other buttons or controls on the device, so it’s hard to imagine that this process could go too awfully wrong.
The companion app can be downloaded from your favorite App Store for your device. The app is handy in that you can apply filters, add overlays, and do other special effects. Once you have your mini masterpiece ready to go it uses NFC to communicate with the picture frame. A few seconds later the frame display is updated, ready for you to put it wherever you’d like to see it, no charge or power cord required.
It’s cool to see that technology is fitting into our life in order to make things actually easier, not harder. Even TVs are incorporating displays to better fit a pleasant living experience. I’m excited to see where lifestyle technology leads, but it’s getting better all the time. Having small picture frames that require no power and yet can be updated is a great example of this.
The e-paper picture frame comes in a variety of colors for its plastic part, namely red, yellow, white, and black. The VidaBay Snap sells individually for $30.99 and in a three pack for $89. You can find it on the VidaBay website.
.
