The days of carrying around your family photos in your wallet seem to be over. Now when we want to show someone a picture of our new baby, puppy or house, we whip out our mobile phone or laptop. But, not everyone has a mobile phone or laptop. That’s where the Insignia Digital Picture Keychain can help keep your snapshots ready for viewing.
Hardware Specifications
Display: 160 x 128 pixels
Screen size: 1.8 inches (45.7 mm)
Capacity for up to 40 photos
File format: .jpg
Package Contents
Photo keychain
USB cable
User Guide
The Insignia keychain is a non-symmetrically shaped 2.3 x 1.7 x 0.4 inch plastic module that is available in Red, Blue and Black.
The metal keychain can be easily detached from the viewer. This makes it more convenient to let people view your photos without having your keys or other items hanging from the chain. It’s also nice to be able to detach the viewer when you need to charge its internal batteries with the USB cable.
Along the top edge there are four control buttons for the viewer that allow you to toggle power and cycle through your photos.
On the Left side, is a mini USB connector that is used for charging and transferring photos to the viewer from your PC.
click thumbnail to see full sized screenshot
Putting your images on the keychain is an easy task. Just plug one end of the included USB cable into the keychain and the other into your Windows PC. Sorry Mac users, you’re out of luck. You can’t drag and drop photos to this device as you would a USB drive. The keychain contains software that will automatically run when you plug in the keychain to your computer.
The software allows you to see or delete the photos currently installed on the viewer and add new photos.
With a resolution of only 160 x 128 pixels, the image quailty for this little viewer is pretty ummm… how can I be kind here… crappy. I mean you can’t really expect to see much with that small of a photo, so don’t use the viewer for landscape type pictures. The images are also sort of fuzzy and I thought maybe it had to do with the way their software was resizing the original image before transferring it to the viewer. So I used Photoshop to resize some images down to 160 x 128 before copying them to the viewer. It didn’t make any difference in the image quality though.
It does a better job of displaying close up face pictures.
When it’s all said and done, I would really only recommend the Insignia Digital Picture Keychain for someone that does not already carry a cellphone or a PDA and has a Windows based PC.
What do you use to display your personal photos?
Manufacturer: Insignia
Retailer: Best Buy
Price: $19.99
Pros:
Easy to use
Charges via USB
Software for copying images is stored on the viewer
Cons:
Low resolution
Can only hold up to 40 images
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I have one of these (received it as an xmas gift). While I agree, the resolution isn’t great, I think it displays the pics I’ve chosen to put it on nicely. It’s only a two inch screen, so I wouldn’t expect it to display landscapes in any meaningful way. Just face shots.
I think $20 is a bit much for this, but if you could find it under $15, you may want to consider it for your [grand]mother/father.
I’ve got mine running through a cycle of my kids pics — velcro’d to my work monitor.
John:
I was also going to suggest that it was a good choice for grandma or grandpa, but then they would need a computer to switch pics
I like your idea of sticking it to your monitor!
Hello and Happy New Year!
1) Love your new Wordpress Blog layout.
2) Love your reviews (especially your very detailed close up pictures.. the BEST!)
3) Not loving the advertising links via keywords though. Will readers activate these without knowing so?
4) computer, pda, software, cable, mobile phone, code, picture, image quality, etc. If these links show up for me in my comment, I’ll gladly take 10% of the click-throughs
Is it “Mac users”… or “Mac OS users” who are out of luck with this product? In other words, if you’re in Windows, running it through Bootcamp/Parallels/VMware, does this device work?
Q:
I don’t have Bootcamp or anything similar set up on any of my Macs right now, but my best guess is that the keychain would work just fine. It’s only that they have somehow blocked you from seeing the contents of the flash memory under OS X. And the fact that you have to use their application to copy files to the keychain.
Geakz:
Sorry, but a girl has to make some money to keep a site like this going. I’m sure you understand.
Those double underlined link ads have been on The Gadgeteer for years and years now
I just bought a insignia picture key chain. When I connect it, I get the message (USB peripheric unknown) I get that same message either when working on my PC using XP or my new one using Vista.
doesnt work with vista
I have this keychain (christmas present) and loaded a couple of pics on it and now I’m getting this message TENX_ERR_WRITE_READ and it won’t do a thing. What do you think is wrong?
@Kody: Did you try reformatting the memory?
I can’t get the unit that I bought for my wife to work. I was able to charge it using her laptop which runs Vista but all of our pictures are on my laptop that runs XP. When I plug the unit into my laptop it just says, “Connecting….” on the screen. The software that is supposed to start automatically doesn’t start for me. I tried unsuccessfully to drag/drop a picture. I’m going to try to take it and the one that I bought for my daughter back. Looks like it’s another piece of chinese junk. Too bad, it’s a nice concept.
I had the same problem, I was getting the following message: TENX_ERR_WRITE_READ
It wouldn’t download my photo’s. I found out that if I open the Image Viewer 4 program, then, under My Computer Browser, I open the file that my photo’s are in and wait a few moments, until the green blocks in the long, narrow box between the Computer Browser and the Preview box fills up or stops, then I was able to download, edit and fill the photo keychain. Be patient, it seems to need to upload changes to the keychain every couple of pictures… If I continued to work during this upload, it would shut the whole program down.
Hope this helps!
My wife got one of these as a gift, and I was discouraged after reading here and in other sites that it doesn’t work on Macs (no Windows PCs at home). Happily, the manufacturer has just recently released a Mac driver. You can download it here: http://www.insignia-products.com/t-Digital_Keychains_Mac_Driver.aspx
I just tried it, and it works fine. The only problem is that when you click on a photo for previewing it (before uploading), it may fail if the path has uppercase characters, since it seems it assumes a case-insensitive file system. However, the actual upload of the photos to the device works fine.
With respect to my previous comment - I should clarify that the problem I mentioned happens only if you have your disk formatted as case-sensitive. The default is to format it as case-insensitive, in which case this problem wouldn’t occur.
is a fradue. I bought it for grandpa but doesn’t work. I loaded some pics and when we connected to my pc in order to update the pics I got the following message:
ITenxDevice Opt. Fail! errmsg(TENX_ERR_FATFAIL).
Does somebody knows what that means?
As Mike saiys: ‘ Looks like it’s another piece of chinese junk. Too bad, it’s a nice concept’
thanks