The Sony DPF D1020 is a ten inch digital photo frame capable of playing videos and photo slideshows. To be honest I can't compare this model to any others because this is the first digital photo frame that I've owned, but I can tell you what functions I found helpful and which aspects I liked against what I found difficult.

On pulling the unit out of the box it definitely impresses with it's sleek and slick appearance. It is very smooth and glossy on the front (which also, as a downside, means it's a bit of a fingerprint magnet so I recommend handling it with a cloth where possible) and has a great minimalist, classy look about it.

When you first turn the digital frame on the SONY logo at the front lights up and the unit comes to life. The great thing though is that once you have it playing your desired media the logo, which is not embossed on the unit but is simply lit up from within the frame, disappears, i.e. the light behind it goes out. This is great I think because a logo underneath all your images is really frustrating and distracting I think. A definite plus for the unit based on that!

The thing that I really had problems with with this Sony frame is getting my media into a format that it would play. Photos seemed pretty easy and it just runs through all of those but I also wanted to play some video on this unit and that was really tricky. It doesn't take any of the usual .mov or .mp4 files that most editing software and cameras product, but only the rather rare .MPEG. For me this meant hours of fiddling and downloading various file converters online before I could finally get the video into a format the player could read. That was annoying!

That being said, now that I have the format down-pat it really is just a case of plug and play with the unit. I use a normal USB stick in this machine (which is great because it seems many similar units only take USB-2 which is the mini USB version and for which you need an adaptor) and it really is just a case of plugging it in and turning the unit on. It will also automatically loop your video or slideshows so that's one less thing you need to worry about. If not though you can set this up easily with the remote.

The unit will turn itself off after a few hours I guess in case you left it on and forgot. I don't find this to be a problem but if you do want it running all the time you'll need to remember to hit the play button on the remote or plug it out and back in again at the power if you want it to re-start.

All in all I am happy with this unit and am even considering buying another.