We've looked at digital photo frames before, and discarded them as being either too pricey or not good enough quality. However, because my husband runs his own business, when he recently had a stand booked, we wanted some new and innovative ways of displaying his disco/karaoke business on the stand.

Obviously we wanted people to be able to see the sort of lighting he can supply, and how much fun people have at his events, so as well as running a few video clips on his laptop there, and some static photos, we decided that a couple of digital photo frames that we could set to display lots of pictures might be a good idea.

The business is still in its infancy really, so when we spend big money it tends to go on his rig to improve things for the disco's themselves. Advertising however has to be a major part of any business and we figured that these digital photo frames would be useable over and over again so were quite a good investment.

Looks:
The frame on these is quite simple and stylish, a clear back frame with a simple silver inner frame to give a band of plain silver around your photos. With this frame, despite the pictures only being 7", it brings the overall size of the frame to around 9"x6.5" which is quite a good size to put on a sideboard (or in our case a display stand). The product is a little over an inch deep making it fairly compact overall.

The Photo frame has been designed so that it can stand either in portrait or landscape mode, and has a sort of rotatable stand (bracket) on the back that lets you turn it. We found it most advisable to select all landscape for one frame and all portrait for the other so that images were as clear as possible because if you mix the two then whichever setting you do NOT have the frame set in the images will be incredibly small (i.e. if you have it in landscape mode, and then display some portrait pictures on it you get a big gape either side of the image).

Technical details:
The device comes with 8mb built in memory, but also supports SD memory cards (mini and micro), MMC cards and Memory sticks as well as USB for flash drives so that you can increase the quantity of pictures you can display. This was one of the important factors for us as obviously we wanted it to be able to display a good number of pictures one after the other. It can also support JPEG image files up to I believe 10megapixels in size.

This is a mains powered digital photo frame, so it doesn't need to be plugged into another medium such as a laptop.

Picture Quality:
Obviously the biggest and most important factor once you've bought this is the quality of the display and I have to say we think it's pretty good. Obviously the quality of the pictures is a big factor here, but the display itself is a TFT LCD display and gives a really good clear image that is quite impressive.

You can crop or stretch images using the photo frame - not something we did as we had already cropped etc. pictures in readiness for use - but it was nice to know we could have done it with this if we'd wanted to.

Pictures can be set to display in slideshow mode in a variety of ways. You can have the images fading out and new ones coming in, sliding in from one side or above, and various other options. It's possible to select just one method of picture change, or to have it set to randomise this which is what we did. You can also change the length of time each picture is on the screen, although this is a little limited. You can choose fast, normal or slow. Fast flicks through the pictures about one every 5 seconds, normal is about every 10 seconds and slow every 60 seconds. It would have been nice if there had been some intervals between 10 and 60 seconds as a minute is a very long time, but 10 seconds is perhaps a little faster than we'd have liked.

You also have contrast and colour adjustment for the images too, but we actually found that the factory settings were pretty much bang on for us.

Other Thoughts
We both found this a very easy digital frame to use, and the time it took to insert the card, plug the device in, turn it on and get it going was very quick. The menu is fairly easy to use and pretty intuitive but for anything you're unsure of the manual is reasonably comprehensive and tells you how to do whatever you're trying to do.

I like that the control buttons allow you to pause the slideshow at any time. This meant that if someone wanted to look at something specific, or if my husband wanted to point out a particular feature of a picture to someone, he could pause the display at the touch of a button to do so. He was also able to zoom in on certain features by using the zoom option which gives you 2, 4 and 8x zoom.

You do have the option of sound too on this - we didn't use it as obviously we were using hubby's own laptop and speakers for sound because we wanted a very much higher quality of sound than something like this could produce.

We paid just under £50 for the pair of these - a special offer due to being trade customers. However they normally retail at not that much more than this (around £28ish)and I've just found them on Amazon at £26.50 so a pretty good price for a digital photo frame that can compete pretty well with bigger brands that command much higher prices.