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 800×600 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.