I've always admired digital photo frames for a while now thinking they were quite cool despite the obvious need to be permanently plugged into a power socket, and while I never really wanted those first incarnation models that were tiny and very expensive I never got around to buying one.

Luckily for me because my mother-in-law bought my partner and I this Kodak Easyshare M820 for christmas 2010. So because of that I have no idea what she paid for it so I can't comment on the price.

The Device
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The device itself looks really smart to be honest , You have a choice of different coloured frames to boarder your device with and we just stook to the default white as we thought that looked best like the image of the product above. Other than the device itself the pack comes with an AC power cable a very good user guide and KODAK EASYSHARE Software, Digital Frame Edition and the coloured faceplates as previously mentioned.

The size of the photoframe is 10.1 × 7.1 inches and 8 inches from diagonal corner to corner. The display resolution is 800 x 480 which is perfectly adequate for something like this. It supports JPEG images formats with EXIF data, video formats of MPEG 1 and 4, MOV, AVI files types and MP3 audio files as well so not a bad selection of uses there. It is a 16:9 aspect ratio with a 300:1 contrast ration and aSi TFT active matrix screen to show it. It has a 128 MB internal memory available in 2 memory card expansion slots. It supports Secure Digital (SD), Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC), Multimedia Card (MMC), MEMORY STICK (MS), XD-Picture Card (xD) and COMPACTFLASH (CF) memory cards which is quite a few.


To Use
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At the start I found it a little bit fiddly, other than powering it on the touch screen boarder was fine but the actual menus took a bit of getting used to and its not quite as easy as i'd initially thought it would be. That said it's not hard either just not what I was expecting.
The Image quality from my USB pen is really good and I've had many different holiday and concert images on the device and all seem to be displaying correctly although be warned that if you take images that are landscape and the device is stood in portrait mode or vice versa the image does rezise to fit the longest dimention so you do sometimes get small images show up because it just adjusts to the height and doesnt autofill the screen.
I've played mp3's on the device and the sound is surprising really. I expected it to be a bit tinny or just average but its actually quite decent all be it not very powerful but thats expected after all it isnt a sound system so you have to give it some leeway. I havent tried any .avi or movie files on it yet so I cant review that part but overall the images and sound has been pleasing.

Downside is that it doesnt have a battery option and that it has to be powered by a cable when in use so for that reason it does need to be somewhere where you can plug it in.

One great thing is that you can set viewing hours so for example yo ucan leave it plugged in and tell it to switch on from 9am till 10pm only which is handy.

Conclusions
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It's quite a good little digital photo frame and I'm happy we got it as a christmas present. It performs well the images look perfectly fine and the sound is good. Its packed with features and there are many ways to put images onto the device. It has touchscreen controls and after a bit of a play it does become easy to use.