Cameras

Show Off Your Photos With a Digital Frame

Products Reviewed

Show Off Your Photos With a Digital FrameDigi-Frame's DF-560 electronic photo frame is a great way to exhibit your digital pics. You don't even need a PC to use it.Frank Thorsberg

WHAT'S HOT: What the world needs now is a $400 picture frame, right? But if you or your relatives and friends would enjoy a passing parade of digital pictures, Digi-Frame's got the goods. The $429 DF-560 is the company's entry-level electronic picture frame, which lets you display your digital images and cycle through them in slide-show style.

Photograph by: Rick RiznerDigi-Frame DF-560

The DF-560 comes with a decent 3.5-by-4.5-inch active-matrix LCD, and it offers a nice spread of features. The manual controls are easy to use. They're similar to how you operate a VCR--with forward, play/pause, and back buttons, along with a light contrast wheel. Most of the settings are controlled by a clickable menu wheel. That takes a little getting used to, but I was clicking and spinning like a pro by the second hour of testing. I also like the DF-560's ability to automatically switch to the correct perspective to display photos oriented in the horizontal position versus the vertical mode.

Unlike some competing products, such as Ceiva's $150 Digital Photo Receiver (actual service costs $8 a month), the DF-650 operates as a stand-alone unit; you don't need to deal with ongoing subscription charges. You don't need a PC to use the DF-560 either, but you can connect the unit to your PC or Mac via serial port. That way you can move JPEG files back and forth, for instance, or download images from the Internet.

Setup is a snap. Plug in the 2-pound unit to a standard electrical outlet, pop in a CompactFlash or SmartMedia card containing digital pictures, flip the On switch, and you're in business: The DF-650 automatically starts cycling through the card's images. You can also create up to ten slide shows, using the device's built-in transition effects and the images on your card. I finally went with the random transition setting, which cycles through multiple styles--including black stripes, fadeout, bouncing thumbnails, rotating thumbnails, scattered slides, and dissolve--and I didn't have to futz with any special set up.

The DF-560 comes with three snap-on outer frames: silver (shown here), translucent blue, and wood grain. These can add some color, depending on your taste, and they help stabilize the desktop device.

In addition to full color, the DF-560 can display images in black and white or sepia tones. You can also get some amazing effects using infra-red and starlight, which makes pictures appear as they might be seen through light-intensifier lenses.

WHAT'S NOT: For starters, at $429, the DF-560 is pricey. Picture clarity was acceptable for front-on viewing, but like many TFT (thin film transistor) LCD panels used on notebooks, it was harder to see clearly from just about any other angle.

The company recommends displaying pictures at 640 by 480 pixels, a step down in quality for most of today's megapixel cameras. If you try to display large images, be prepared for them to take longer to "draw." Larger images can be downsized using just about any photo-editing software, of course, but that just adds another step to the process. Want a shortcut? Download a shareware program called Resize that can convert an entire folder of images to a different size in one fell swoop.

Transferring pictures to or from your computer with the DF-560 is slow, thanks to the turtle-like speed of the unit's serial cable connection. Digi-Frame says it has addressed that shortcoming in its newest and biggest frame, the 17-inch DF-1710, which has scads of additional features built in, including both a 10GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive. The bad news is the price: The DF1710 costs $2500. (Ouch!)

WHAT ELSE: I tested the DF-560 using images from Fujifilm's FinePix A303, the company's new 3.2-megapixel camera, which uses the newer XD media card. The Digi-Frame, however, doesn't work with XD media, so I had to load my pictures into my computer via USB cable and then transfer the images to the picture frame using the included software (which can handle up to ten different slide shows) and serial cable.

Unfortunately, there is no USB port on the DF-560, so direct transfer wasn't an option. And that's a real shortcoming in a $429 device. The company recommends a universal USB card reader (figure on spending another $20 to $30) for owners using incompatible media cards, like the XD and Sony Memory Stick.

UPSHOT: Digi-Frame offers a digital twist on an old standard--the desktop picture frame. If you're looking for more ways to use your digital images--and you don't mind coughing up $429--the DF-560 could be a great gift for loved ones (or yourself).