Digital Photo Frames
82.5% of respondents have never owned a digital photo frame, representing the largest untapped market of any of the devices studied, according to a Researchscape survey of 1,000 consumers.
Purchase Interest
Despite the untapped market, only 8.2% of respondents were “very interested” or “extremely interested” in purchasing a digital photo frame. People interested in digital photo frames are most likely to also be interested in portable DVD players (0.526 correlation), handheld game consoles (MP3 players, 0.360 correlation) and digital cameras without video (0.308 correlation).
Nor were digital photo frames a category that benefited from device substitution. Only 0.5% of respondents would replace a broken device from a different category (typically, a handheld game console) with a digital photo frame.
And only 3.8% of respondents without a digital photo frame said it was the device they didn’t own that they were most interested in purchasing. Those who were interested appreciated the ability to display a large library of photos.
- To display many different photos (mentioned by 12 respondents):
- “I need a picture frame, and like that I can display many photos using one device.”
- “I have a bunch of digital photos on my computer that I never get the chance to look at.”
- “We have thousands of pictures we never see because they are stored on a hard drive.”
- “Because I never get my pictures printed. This would be a good way to display them and stay organized!”
- “They seem like a good way to make use of the tons of digital pics I have. It would be nice to see them larger and in a frame. The way pictures used to be!”
- Other noteworthy comments:
- “Haven’t seen one for over 5 years. I would like to see what advances there are in this.”
- “To hack for a hack-a-day conference.”
Current Ownership
Only 11.9% of respondents currently own a digital photo frame, the lowest ownership rate of the 16 devices studied.
Over half the owners of digital photo frames, 51.5%, no longer use the device, giving it the highest rate of lapsed usage (compared to an average of 16.3%). As a result, it had the lowest rate of frequent use: 19.3% of owners reported using their digital photo frame frequently.
When we asked, hypothetically, which devices respondents would purchase if they had lost all of their devices in a robbery and new purchases were covered by insurance, only 22.1% of current owners were “very interested” or “extremely interested” in repurchasing a digital photo frame, the lowest interest level in repurchasing in this separate study, a survey of 400 consumers.
Digital photo frames are the least valued of devices: 32.8% of owners, more than for any other category, said it was the device that they were least interested in replacing if it broke. We had hypothesized that if a digital photo frame broke, people might be interested in replacing it with a tablet computer, which can be used to display digital photo collections, but only 3% of owners who named digital photo frames the device they were least likely to replace said they would substitute it with a tablet computer.
Past Ownership
5.6% of respondents have owned a digital photo frame in the past but no longer do so. This represents 32.2% of the group of current and former owners.