ViewsonicDPF

Have you ever talked about going paperless? Does your production line have stapled procedures/work instructions?
Fortunately, there's an inexpensive way to eliminate those paper dinosaurs and get your production line into the 21st
century. The funny thing is that this solution has been around for quite some time; it's just that it had never (to my knowledge) been used for this purpose. What's the product? - Digital Picture Frames.
Let's see how they compare to other possibilities and even old fashioned paper:

Feature	DPF	PC/Monitor	Tablet	Paper
Cost	$140	$400	$400	$0
Display Size¹	15"	17"	10"	14"
Versatility²	Excellent	good	good	poor
Compactness³	very good	poor	good	good
Overall value	Excellent	poor	poor	poor
Ease of use	Very good	good	good	excellent

¹ Minimum display size to match that of 8.5" x 11" paper is 14" (diagonal measurement)

² Versatility includes: Remote control operation, Zoom, forward/reverse image, video media display

³ How small is the entire system? Less bench space = more compact

As you can see, digital picture frames are excellent replacements for paper, right out of the box.
Thus far, I have had experience with two brands of DPFs, Viewsonic and a Chinese-made brand that was
selected by someone else. For this reason, I will focus on the Viewsonic VFM1536-11 . Keep in mind that there are plenty of
others, some (like the NIX X15A) having smaller frames/reduced overall size.

Viewsonic VFM1536-11

As I mentioned previously, the real beauty of these DPFs is that they are very reasonably priced, are very versatile
and yet are very simple at the same time. This is essential when keeping the production workers focused is of utmost
importance. By contrast, a computer/monitor/keyboard combination is versatile as well, but its many other (unrelated) features can be distractions for those who need only to view procedures and watch assembly-related videos/animations.
Okay, let's look at some of the Viewsonic features and how they can come in handy.

◊ 15" Multimedia Digital Photo frame, 1024x768 High Resolution with 4:3 aspect ratio; high brightness 250cd/m2 (typ), 600:1 high contrast ratio
High resolution is essential when details of assembly need to be easily seen. Of course, photos need to be taken and stored in high resolution. This is also true of exploded assembly drawings.

◊ 256MB Internal memory, Play photo slideshow with music background
Having internal memory means that no memory cards are required to store one or many procedures/work instructions.

◊ Support wide video format: MPEG1 & 4 and M-JPEG; photo file format: JPEG, Support SD/SDHC/MMC/MS/MS Pro
Videos can be played and memory cards may be used. Word documents may be converted to PDF (as a single file) and then to JPEG. Note: I have encouraged the folks at Viewsonic to configure their digital picture frames to accept PDF files but I guess one voice is not enough. Please, feel free to give this and other manufacturers your suggestions after using their products for this purpose. Hopefully, we will see this feature included, some day.

◊ Brightness and contrast adjustment, Auto on/off feature
These features are common in LCD monitors as well, and do come in handy.

◊ Feature additional calendar/clock/alarm function, Remote Control included
The last part of this line is one of the best features of a DPF, especially when assembler's hands may get a bit messy.
This is one of the reasons why I am not fond of using touch-screen monitors on the shop floor. The other reason is that the display screen must be out of the way of the assembly operations themselves. Having to reach over the "work" to touch a screen is generally not recommended and mounting a touch screen on the side of the operator can impede flow/block view of the production line.
Now, what can the remote control of a DPF do?
Primarily, it offers the assembler control - control to advance or retrieve pages slowly or quickly, depending upon the complexity of the images/text.
Also, having the ability to zoom in and out can be very helpful, especially when (hopefully plenty of ) high resolution photos are included in the procedure/work instruction.

Note: Some DPFs will automatically rotate images when the frame itself is rotated. Fortunately, you can compensate for those that do not have this feature by rotating your pages, manually. I've found that rotating the DPF 90 degrees from what is shown in the picture, above, is best for displaying documents that were created for 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper.