Kodak EASYSHARE P76

I have over 8,000 photos on my laptop covering about the last 3 years. With two kids whom I take a couple of photos each day this number has steadily crept up over the years and we have now amassed a fortune of gorgeous photos but then there is always the debate about how to display them. Back in the old days I used to like photo albums but if you fill quite a few albums you end up with a lot of space taken up in bookshelves trying to store them and then you never really look at them anyway. We have quite a few of our favourite photos blown up and framed in various places around the house, such as walls, windowsills, mantle place etc but now even these are starting to get filled and we don't have much wall space left so we came up with the idea of getting a digital photo frame that would display quite a lot of photos at one time and would be something nice and different to look at. We asked my in-laws for one for Christmas and they were really pleased they could get us a practical gift that we really wanted.

The main thing I really liked about this Kodak digital photo frame was its simple, sleek look. Most of our regular frames are quite simple and modern and nothing too flashy so I didn't want a digital frame that looked too fussy with lots of buttons or flashing parts etc. This frame just has the screen and then a black border all around it which makes it look both contemporary and classic. There is a stand at the back so you can stand it up and then the only thing I don't like is that there is a wire out the back of the frame that you have to have in order to plug it in and power it but this can be easily hidden if you put this frame on a table or bookcase etc.

This frame stores and displays up to 1,000 photos which, ok, will not take my entire collection but 1,000 to display at any one time is plenty enough to get a cross section of the highlights of our last three years. There are a number of different ways that you can add your photos to this frame and its very simple to do so. If you have some photos already on your memory card in your camera you can put this in and view the photos on your memory card. We had a problem with our laptop a few years ago, it basically just died and we lost a whole library of photos so now as well as storing photos on our new laptop we also keep all of our memory cards when they are full and store our photos like this and just buy new memory cards all the time. This is probably quite an expensive way of storing photos but at least we know they are safe. We can then alternate our memory cards from time to time in this frame and view different photos.

The other way you can put your photos onto this frame is by using a USB flash drive that you can plug firstly into your computer to download the photos onto it and then plug the flash drive into the frame. This is probably my least favourite way of showing the photos as I don't like the look of having a little stick poking out of the frame.

The screen is a 7 inch screen so I think you get a really nice sized photo which really is nice and clear and crisp.

The fun thing about digital photo frames is that you can view your photos in a number of different ways and on different settings. My favourite is to have it on random shuffle so you get a photo from years ago that will come up bringing back good memories and then you could get a fairly recent photo so the combination is really nice. In fact there are 5 different settings for transition and duration. They are as follows:

Slowest once per day with slow pan

Slower once per hour with fade

Slow once per minute with fade

Medium once every 10 sec. with fade, pan, and zoom

Fast every 5 sec. with gentle pan

The frame was in the £50 region which I disn't think was too bad.

In conclusion this is a good looking, well displaying digital photo frame and one I recommend.