I recent­ly dealt with an elec­tron­ic pho­to frame. The rea­son is that I gave one to my wife for her birth­day. This is an unof­fi­cial review about a device that I bought and which, there­fore, I want to report about.

The first ques­tion is how you choose one to begin with. If you look for pho­to frames on the inter­net, you will find dozens of them. My buy­ing deci­sion is about two months back. And I did­n’t have pre­cise selec­tion cri­te­ria. I guess I chose using price and (adver­tised) func­tion­al­i­ty. I final­ly bought a Dig­i­tal Pho­to Frame DPF080 by Sap­phire, and I bought it from Brack. Brack is a decent com­put­er shop, who deliv­ered com­put­er equip­ment a few times in the past depend­ably, and which so far did­n’t give me any trou­ble with billing.

The pho­to frame was deliv­ered to my home prompt­ly after a few days. Nat­u­ral­ly, I unwrapped it imme­di­ate­ly and hooked it up right away. Which was­n’t very dif­fi­cult — no need to open the man­u­al so far.

Unwrapping and getting up to speed

Step 1: Plug the pow­er sup­ply into a wall pow­er plug, plug the oth­er end of the cable into the pho­to frame. This is the first time that I felt a slight dis­ap­point­ment. I would have expect­ed the frame to at least be able to oper­ate on bat­tery, whether rechar­gable or not, in order to place it any­where you want with­out the need for exten­sive cabling. But it looks like even nor­mal oper­a­tion if the frame requires a wall plug to be nearby.

Step 2: Use the sup­plied USB cable to con­nect the pho­to frame to your com­put­er. This works flaw­less­ly. The pho­to frame is rec­og­nized by the com­put­er right away and sev­er­al dri­ve let­ters are assigned to the numer­ous card read­er slots.

Sev­er­al dri­ves? Wait a minute! Why this? Only now do I exam­ine the frame more pre­cise­ly and notice the many card read­er slots. Could this mean that the frame does­n’t have any built-in mem­o­ry? That was­n’t indi­cat­ed in the advertisement!?!

Step 3: Copy the fotos to the frame. In fact, none of the new dri­ves can be accessed, they all com­plain about miss­ing media. Shit! I did­n’t con­sid­er that. It looks like one is meant to put the SD card from the cam­era straight into the frame in order to dis­play the pho­tos just tak­en. Which isn’t a bad idea in and of itself. My only prob­lem is that the only cam­era I own is the one built in to the cell phone, whose pic­tures are now, unreach­able for the pho­to frame, safe­ly stored on the com­put­ers hard disk.

To be able to see some pic­tures right away, I plugged in my 2GB USB stick and bought anoth­er one lat­er on. Lo and behold! Now I could eas­i­ly copy pic­tures or any kind of file between the com­put­er and the pho­to frame. The thing is this: Fill­ing the USB stick with data is faster when I plug it direct­ly into the com­put­er, and then plug it into the frame once it’s full. The USB cable between com­put­er and frame thus does­n’t real­ly make sense, except if your com­put­er does­n’t have any card readers.

Step 4: Set­ting the con­fig­u­ra­tion para­me­ters in the pho­to frame device. The frame has a few but­tons which help you set a few con­fig­u­ra­tion para­me­ters and that let you page through your images. You can’t do that through the com­put­er, though, but the remote con­trol lets you do the same things. The but­tons are a lit­tle shaky, the user inter­face not always intu­itive, but if you try a lit­tle, you will find your way.

Normal operation

Once you have every­thing set up, you can turn your pho­to frame on with plugged in mem­o­ry card or USB stick, and a few moments lat­er it will dis­play each foto, one after the oth­er. For my per­son­al taste, the pho­tos are not dis­played long enough before the next one comes up, and that time can’t be changed.

The dis­play itself is impec­ca­ble. The col­ors are bright and shiny. With some pho­tographs, I was even under the impres­sion to be able to dive into the depths of them. An almost-3D-effect, so to speak. It is a plea­sure to look at pic­tures on the screen of that pho­to frame.

How­ev­er, as is the case with all LCD screens: The pic­ture los­es some bright­ness when you don’t look at it straight but from the sides or from above. But this is an inher­ent flaw of the LCD technology.

You can use the but­tons on the device, or the remote con­trol, to inter­rupt the steady flow of pic­tures and then man­u­al­ly step for­wards and back­wards. Since the but­tons are a bit shaky, this way of look­ing through pho­tographs is a lit­tle uncom­fort­able and needs get­ting used to.

I did­n’t try it out, but the man­u­al says the device is capa­ble of show­ing movies and play­ing music. It can also play a back­ground music while show­ing pic­tures. There is a stereo plug for ear­phones or to con­nect to your hifi equip­ment. The frame does­n’t have its own speak­ers, though.

Technical facts

The elec­tron­ic pho­to frame DPF080 by Sap­phire has a 800x600 pix­el dis­play, the screen size is 8″ or 20cm at 4:3. It has card read­ers built in for CF1, CFII, SD, XD, MS, MMC and USB mem­o­ry sticks. It can dis­play pic­tures in the for­mats JPEG and M‑JPEG, as well as play movies in the for­mats MPEG, DAT, AVI. It can also play music in MP3 for­mat. For that pur­pose, it fea­tures an audio stereo jack. It has a remote con­trol in cred­it card for­mat. Five dif­fer­ent­ly col­ored frames are avail­able for your enjoyment.