I am re-decorating my home office. Instead of hanging a digital print / art, I am thinking about buying a 55inch TV at Costco and using it as a display where I can swap out images over time. I would also like to use it as a wireless display for my macbook occasionally. Anyone have experience doing this in the real world and have any lessons they would share before I start this mini-project?
Not an Apple guy at all so I can’t offer much about the logical aspect. But for the display have you seen Samsung’s picture-frame styled set? https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-frame/highlights/
The MacBook has be to be on, otherwise no picture.
Most TVs have a USB port and allow you to run a slide show based on a USB stick. That is the simpler and easier method and it doesn’t disturb your use of the MacBook. We used this method with our foyer TV at a previous company, we had a 20 minute branding video which ran in a constant loop over a USB stick (originally it ran over a NUC on the other side of the wall, but with the 2nd generation TV, we switched to a stick.
The other thing is, LCDs can suffer from a burn-in effect, if the same image is shown for a long time. It doesn’t seem as prevalent as it used to be (my old LG 21" and my iMac 24" both suffered badly from burn in, but my current displays don’t seem to be as badly affected). It isn’t true burn-in, a few hours after changing the image and the residual image fades (on the PC, it was a game I played, where the inventory window would be open for hours on end, going back to Windows, the inventory panel would still be visible as a dirty smudge for a couple of hours. On the Mac, it was the menu bar and the dock, watch a film full-screen and the menu bar was clearly visible across the top of the film).
Therefore a slideshow is probably a better option.
Just get a ChromeCast with Google TV and put your image(s) into Google Photos and it will do the rest for you in “Ambient Mode”. There is a downside however. Such a setup is probably going to use at least 60W of power. If it’s on 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s 60w x 10hrs x 5 days x 52 weeks = 156,000w = 156kw x $0.20/kw = $31.20/year
I’ve been eyeing this company for a few years; really nice product designed explicitly for digital art.
https://meural.netgear.com/
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Very cool…looks much cheaper than a full TV solution. I will investigate. Thank you for sharing!