The urn can handle up to 75 pounds of pet remains—if you have one giant dog or many smaller ones that you mix together—has a 7-inch screen and 256MB of storage for your photos and audio recordings. Yes, we said audio recordings, which can play back your pet's various noises for you to enjoy from the comfort of your couch. Who can put a price on loving your pet after he/she's gone? Pet-Urns can, and they're $249. [Pet-Urns via Picture Snob]

When the machines can no longer keep the patient alive, the stats on the frame flatline, just like you see on TV. However, the death of the patient does not bring with it the death of the frame; everything has been recorded on a black box, which rewinds to the beginning and plays the patient's life, on a loop. Now your family can sit around the fireplace, stare at the frame, and recount the good old days. "Oh look! That's when Timmy's blood pressure was 120 over 80! And he was still breathing! I miss that day."

Cohen has made a video of some of these patients describing what their machine-assisted life is like, and you can see a clip below. Just remember, before you complain that a minute of your time was wasted, these people are on freakin' life support.[Interactions via WMMNA]

Unfortunately, like lots of inexpensive digital photo frames, its 7-inch LCD panel has a 16x9 aspect ratio with a low-rez 480x234 screen. That's not going to look too good, but hey, it's cheap at $129.99, and you can watch MPEG 4, XviD and motion-JPEG movies on it.

Mustek helpfully tosses in a couple of stereo speakers with a headphone jack, but still, most digital cameras shoot in 4x3, so this 16x9 frame will usually give you black bands on either side of your pictures. Look for it in March. Bah, humbug. [Mustek]

• Setup is relatively simple, and requires a download of a configuration application. All went smoothly when Wi-Fi reception was possible.

• Its Wi-Fi receiver still isn't strong enough. Even though it could pick up our powerful Wi-Fi network in some areas of our Midwest Test Facility, it couldn't in others, even when sitting in locations where other Wi-Fi devices were able to receive the signal with ease.

• It receives photos via an email address, which is a real kick. It works, too, and the pictures look especially good in the eStarling's 800x600 display. It claims to be the only picture frame to which you can directly email photos, no registration required. Go ahead, surprise us with your best photos—email them to tempamatica AT seeframe.com.

• The eStarling also receives RSS feeds from Flickr, Picasa, AOL, Smugmug, Photobucket or any other RSS feed. That also works quite well.

• The 8" frame looks pretty swank. It has a shiny black finish, although there was an annoying piece of lint pressed between its clear plastic front and the LCD display on our demo unit.

• We like the way the frame's display has a 4x3 aspect ratio, which fits most of the pictures we take around here. No black bars on the top or bottom, or on the sides, either. Nice.

• At $249.95, it's more expensive than most 8-inch picture frames, but with its Wi-Fi capabilities, email accessibility and sharp resolution, it's worth it. [eStarling]

Since it holds low-res 128x128 pixel images, its 8MB of built-in flash memory might go a long way if you're one who doesn't mind cropping, resizing and editing pictures. When you get tired of looking at those postage-stamp-sized pics, you can always use this thing as a clock. No price was attached to this egg-shaped picture player just yet.

Just feel lucky I didn't use the puns that initially popped into my head for use in this post's headline, having something to do with the words exactly and excellent. [Cool Sources, via 7 Gadgets]

Created by the same designer who conceived the roller printer we told you about yesterday, this combination camera/picture frame has one attribute we've wanted for a long time: a relatively gigantic display on the back of a point-and-shoot camera. There's no indication about the exact size of this display, but it's probably bigger than the largest 3-inch point-and-shoot displays available now.

Point-and-shoot digital cameras and digital picture frames are both getting to be such copycats lately, it's refreshing to see a truly original idea, one that might just become practical as prices for these low-end camera and screen components continue their freefall. [Yanko Design]

At first we were startled to see a picture of the new eStarling picture frame on the front of the box, again showing that ugly eStarling logo that so marred the first iteration of the frame, except now it was on the bottom middle of the frame instead of the top right as it was before. But once we got it out of the box, it there was nary a logo to be found. In fact, it looks great. It has an attractive piano black finish that looks simple, elegant and nearly perfect. Come on over to the next page, and we'll tell you what else we noticed about this eStarling 2.0.

Also gone was that horrendous Wi-Fi antenna that stuck out the top like a stupid-looking sore thumb. Its 480x234 screen, measuring 7 inches diagonally, looked sufficiently big to be seen from a distance. Aside from the fact that there was no documentation or CD included in the package whatsoever, it was a promising out-of-box experience.

But wait a second here. That screen has almost a 16x9 aspect ratio, and it's not 4x3 either. It's neither one nor the other, and that gave us pause. It won't fit 4x3 photos which are the shape of most shots taken by consumers these days, nor will it fit 16x9 pics. There are going to be black bars on the screen somewhere in most cases. Uh-oh.

We loaded up some photos on a CompactFlash card and took a look at them in the frame, and were immediately disappointed with its low resolution. Not only were the pixels easily visible, the viewing angle of the screen was severely narrow. As we moved more than 45 degrees off-axis, the picture got significantly dimmer. Not good. Even looking at it straight on, the pictures looked noticeably dim.

Eager to set up the eStarling and explore its Wi-Fi and RSS feed capabilities, we went to the seeframe.com website, which serves as the repository for eStarling photos as well as the coordination point for RSS feed and emailed pictures that go directly to the frame. We set up the frame by downloading a small application from this website, and then connected the frame to a PC via its USB port. After noting our Wi-Fi network's ID, in choosing an email address, the eStarling congratulated us, telling us that "your frame is get connected and ready to use." Great, now we have set up us the bomb, and all your base are belong to us.

We entered the address of our Flickr RSS feed on this website, and also emailed a few pictures to our brand-new email address given to us by eStarling's seeframe.com site, and then it was time to sit back and wait for the pictures to appear on the frame that was connected to our Wi-Fi network. A few minutes later, there were a couple of the pictures from our Flickr RSS feed. The photos that we had emailed hadn't yet appeared, though. Anyway, it appeared that the Wi-Fi reception and connectivity problems of the ill-fated first version of the eStarling pitcher frame had been solved.

However, never mind that. The piss-poor image quality of this LCD panel made all that completely unimportant. The eStarling's screen is absolutely unacceptable. We tried displaying digital pictures of all different resolutions and aspect ratios on it, and all of them looked like we were viewing them on a cheap TV set. Yes, the images were in color, but that's about it. The display was just downright dim, blurry, and you could see scanlines and jaggies all through images that are normally tack-sharp. This display was so bad that it almost hurt our eyes to look at it.

The eStarling has improved since its first version, but until its manufacturer sees fit to put a display on board that has higher resolution than what you might find on a disposable kid's toy, we'd say you'd be making a big mistake to buy this eStarling picture frame. It has the worst LCD display we've ever seen—bad enough to make you want to send it back immediately. And that's just what we're going to do, again. – Charlie White

Product Page [eStarling]

Like Pandigital's other frames, it has 256MB of internal memory, 6-in-1 card reader, and it functions as a USB host where you can plug in your camera and play back pictures directly from the frame. We were impressed with its thinness, a mere 3/8 of an inch out the back of the frame, making it suitable for hanging on the wall without taking up too much depth. It will be available in cherry or black in May for $299. Not a bad price for a 15-inch screen.

There are even better features in store for this 15-incher; Pandigital tips us off to their future plans for this frame, after the jump.

Pandigital reps teased us with a promise of Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities by June with a firmware update, where you'll be able to transfer photos to the frame wirelessly. The kicker? They told us the frame would have Internet capabilities where you'll be able to download RSS feeds from photo sites such as Flickr by Q4 of this year. That we can't wait to see. – Charlie White

Momento will also be able to stream picture galleries (such as Flickr) via RSS, forward pictures from your inbox to other Momento Live users, and you can also send photos to the frame from your camera phone. If this really works, it'll slam-dunk that ill-fated eStarling. Both the 10.2-inch Momento100 and the 7-inch Momento70 will be available February 1. No word on the pricing of that Momento Live service, but you get your first month free. – Charlie White

Product Page [Momento Live, via Newlaunches]

What the Duck Comic Strips

But wait, there's more to our sordid tale:

So far, we've gotten the eStarling to communicate with a PC, after which it let us enter its special secret code that allows it to communicate with the eStarling website via Wi-Fi. Then, we entered our RSS feed URL from our Flickr site into the form on the eStarling site.

By the way, see that uploading email "addess" in the pic above?. That's where you can send us your finest pics and they might show up on the eStarling someday. No goatses, please.

Anyway, that's as far as we've gotten, because we've already been waiting for nearly an hour for the eStarling to download pictures from our Flickr feed, to no avail thus far. But since this is a continuing saga, there will be more to come. Stay tuned. – Charlie White

eStarling Hands-On Update: Buyer Beware [Part one of our continuing saga]

Support Site [eStarling]

I plugged in its AC adapter and connected it to a PC via its USB cable and it simply won't communicate with the Wi-Fi network. Even after configuring the Wi-Fi network to be completely open, still, no dice. There's more bad news, too:

When I had no luck hooking up the eStarling picture frame to Wi-Fi, nothing else would work. You can't even plug in a flash memory card and look at pictures unless you're connected to the Internet.

So I followed the documentation's directions to a URL that was not working (http://www.estarling.com/support). No, the actual support address is http://www.estarling.com/support.html. Sure, I figured that out easily, but many consumers will be stumped by that, especially grandma.

Then more bad news: this is a 16x9 picture frame that's packing a mere 480x234 pixels. Besides being a resolution that's way too low for its 7-inch screen, its aspect ratio isn't going to work out too well with 4x3 pictures (think either black bars on each side or stretched photos), and it'll fare especially poorly with vertically-oriented pics that will turn out to be just slim shots with expansive black bars on either side.

But wait, couldn't you just orient the frame vertically? Well yes, but then that horrible logo across the top will be running up the side, standing on end and looking even dumber.

We'll get some tech support Tuesday (between 9am and 7pm Eastern) and see if this thing will work at all, but so far, my assessment is that the eStarling is a highly undesirable product. It's cheaply made, is in an non-standard 16:9 aspect ratio with a relatively low-rez screen, and it's ugly as shit and can't be covered up with a conventional frame because of its odd size and permanent construction. It has a so-far nonworking USB dongle that's starting to develop an odd smell as it heats up.

And finally, its cheap screen makes a whining noise as you dim it, but it's quiet at its full brightness. I can only wonder what the guy we linked to yesterday at Gizgadg was thinking.

It's not looking good, and certainly not worth any heroic last-minute attempts to get one under your tree in time for Christmas. Caveat emptor. – Charlie White

It looks like an overall positive experience, where the photos look great and the build is solid. But our hearts sank when we saw that the gigantic logo plastered across the top looks just as obnoxiously intrusive as the catalog photography. Maybe there's a way to remove it. We'll be receiving our eStarling in the next few days, and will give you an update. – Charlie White

eStarling [Gizgadg]

Its claim to fame is its ability to subscribe to an RSS feed on the Flickr photo site, letting anyone with that account's password insert photos into the frame via the Interwebs. Could be ripe for pranksters. Plus, it can accept photos via email without needing to be hooked up to a computer.

Anyway, even though we've heard rumblings about it not working too well in its first iteration, we're hoping those difficulties have been ironed out. It's selling now for $250, and one is on the way here so we'll let you know how it works. – Charlie White

Product Page [PF Digital Inc.]

Here's why you should care, numb skull: Most photo frames these days are big on bells and whistles, but the LCDs look like ass. Color accuracy is important for video, but when it comes to still images, if the color ain't right, grandma's tan is going to make skin look the hue of Tang. Not pretty. This is an update of their last 7-inch frame, and its cheaper at $199, holds about 50% more photos, and has interchangeable borders, like the striking red you see above.

Philips LCDs aren't the biggest, and unlike others, they don't have WiFi. But this 7-inch model is bright, at 200 nits, which is less than a big old computer LCD, but it still holds up in daylight. The LCD runs at 800 by 480, which is a pretty tight res for such a small screen. And what else can I say about it? The shit looks good.

Read on for the gallery, info on the luscious borders, brilliant features, and a bug or two...

It comes with 4 different borders that click into its plexiglass frame. The colors? Red, White, Silver, and Black. It reads SD and CF memory cards, or can be accessed as a mass storage device by PC, so you can load photos direct by wire. The frame copies photos to its internal memory, resizing them to its native res first, so the frame can hold up to 150 images. Some problems? Some portrait photos I uploaded didn't rotate properly, and the slideshow tech are kind. A really smart feature is that the frame has about 45 minutes of battery life, so you can unplug it, and pass it around to friends and family without it dropping dead. And speaking of power, there's a timer that'll shut the LCD off at certain times of day, so you're not wasting juice. Also, its pretty efficient, soaking up only 12 watts.

In a sentence, it's pretty, the screen is gorgeous, although it lacks the features of other net enabled photo frames.–Brian Lam

Philips [Philips]

Too bad there's not a WiFi connection going into the frame such as the one offered with the eStarling picture frame we mentioned back in January. That frame promised the ability to link with online photo hosting service Flickr, updating pictures as you add them to the Flickr account. However, we noticed that the eStarling currently can't be bought anywhere for any price right now. Not sure why that's happening, because it seemed like a good product.

As far as availability for this Samsung SDP-07, it's said to be currently only offered in Korea, selling for $310. No word on US availability yet. – Charlie White

Samsung SDP-07 Photo frame with Audio / Video playback [Newlaunches]

Looks like my wait is over, and mom is finally going to get a digital picture frame—but not the one from Ceiva. The eStarling is a 5.6-inch WiFi-enabled picture frame. Photos can be e-mailed directly to the frame, or loaded from an MMC/SD card. Better yet, the eStarling will pick up my flickr RSS feed and display that. It's a lot more expensive than the Ceiva ($249.99 versus $99.99), and I have yet to see details on the resolution of that color TFT screen. But the price is well worth the freedom from wires and forced use of photo-sharing services.

Starling WiFi picture frame [Niall Kennedy's Photo Stream]
eStarling Wi-Fi Gmail / Flickr Enabled LCD Frame

Options and pricing for digital photo frames [Amazon]