Digital photographs are wonderful for allowing a family to take large amounts of high quality photographs, and discard the ones that haven’t turned out as well as they had hoped. Unfortunately they also tend to sit there on a computer, and unlike old style film photography often won’t be printed. This means that they also don’t get seen and are harder to show off than the previous generation of photographs were.
Framing and displaying your digital photographs is significantly easier with a digital photo frame. This Sony DPF-D8 8 inch SVGA digital photo frame is essentially a small LCD screen that allows you to display your photographs quickly and easily, or else it can display a clock or calendar if you wish to have a change from your photographs.
The frame will take either a USB flash drive or an SD card for input, plugged into the frame. It can display the photographs from the card or flash drive straight away. Importantly the frame will hold photos on its internal memory. This internal memory is most useful if you want to transfer photos directly from your computer to the photo frame, which you can do by using the mini USB port that is included in the frame.
Though it will only hold 150 photos which may be a lot less than on your camera’s memory card, it does mean that you can select your favorite photos to display on the frame without having to leave your card always in there.
Unlike cheaper frames, this one comes with a remote that allows you to control it. This lets you skip or go back to another shot, but importantly it lets you navigate the onscreen menus. The remote is a far easier way to do this than using the buttons on the frame which are hidden round the back and are not easily seen whilst you are reading the menus. Having to turn over the frame every button press to make sure that you are pressing the right thing was time consuming and difficult by comparison.
A number of options are included for the fade between photos, with the slowest giving you a new photo once a day. This refresh rate is nice for normal use so that you don’t feel like you are missing anything, whilst still giving you a fresh image regularly. The manual forward mode and the remote control allow you to go faster through the photographs that you have if you want to show them off to someone.
Unfortunately the frame has no inbuilt battery, and this means that when you turn it off you lose all of your settings. This is particularly troublesome if you want to take the frame elsewhere and use it to show your photographs to someone else.
Needing to keep the frame permanently plugged in and powered up in order for it to display your photographs is a major drawback compared to a printed photo in a photo frame. This of course brings a running cost to it that a print would not have, however the advantages of not having to print your favorite photos in order to display them outweigh this minor detail.