Mustek PF-A702B

We’re not generally what my younger son calls ‘early adopters’ of new technology. So, although I had seen one or two digital photo frames by the end of 2008, it really hadn’t occurred to me that we would ever have one ourselves. I take thousands of photos, have a selection printed for albums, and a very small number enlarged to go in frames. But the majority stay, unnoticed, in archive form on my hard drive.

My younger son decided that he wanted to give us something different for Christmas to make up for his not coming home that year. He didn’t have a lot of money, being a student, but decided that, if at all possible, he would buy us a digital photo frame. He researched the available options and read several reviews. Then, from amongst those in his budget, he chose the Mustek PF-A702B.

Reasons for this choice

- Our son liked the appearance. It has a smart matt black frame with a clear perspex outer one. The height of the screen itself is approximately that of regular-sized prints.

- Photos are uploaded and shown via a standard SD card, the same as the ones we use in our digital cameras.

- It was on special offer at Play.com!

Initial feelings

We were surprised and delighted by this unexpected gift. it came in a cardboard box with a separate plug and lead, which slotted easily into one of the sockets on the frame. Instructions were minimal, but the SD card was in place - our son had put a few family photos on it already - so we placed it on a shelf and hit the ‘play’ button.

One or two of the photos looked a little strange, but we quickly realised that this was because the format of the frame - 16x9 ratio - was not the same as our normal print ratio. The effect was of a made-for-TV film ‘stretched’ to fit a wide-screen television. Happily, however, one of the buttons on the top allowed us to adjust this, enabling us to see the photos as they were meant to be.

Quality

This frame resolution is 480 pixels, which is rather less than more modern digital frames, but seemed perfectly adequate at the time; indeed, it still does. Close to, the pictures naturally look a little pixellated, but at a distance, they are quite acceptable. The colours are perhaps a bit over-bright, but, again, not bad; we realised when uploading further photos that we could experiment on the computer to adjust colours to suit the frame better.

The default option is for the gadget to scroll through the photos stored on it, with a few seconds in between each one. We often switch ours on if we have visitors, who can then see a selection of our pictures if they wish. Although digital photo frames are much commoner these days than they were at first, they still seem to be something of a novelty for a lot of people.

Uploading photos

From a Windows computer with a card reader, this is extremely easy. The card, when slotted into the computer, becomes an external drive and photos can be dragged and dropped from folders. We find it best to crop them first in Picasa or other photo editing software to the 16x9 size; obviously landscape style works better than portrait. We also usually reduce them in size so that we can fit more on the 1 gig SD card that we use, and so that they load reasonably quickly.

Uploading photos from a Mac computer is not so straightforward, unfortunately. It’s easy enough to move them onto the SD card when plugged into the computer; unfortunately Macs put extra information into the directory making them unviewable on the frame. We learned about this after becoming increasingly annoyed at the problems we were experiencing, and finally Googled to see if anyone else had experienced this problem. When we realised what was happening, my husband was able to use a non-standard editor to remove the extra information, and the photos then worked perfectly.

However, since my little Windows Netbook computer has a card-reader, I generally use that to upload pictures to the digital photo frame, as it’s so much easier!

Of course it’s entirely possible simply to remove an SD card from a camera, and plug it straight into the photo frame, to see whatever has been taken recently, although it doesn’t work so well with cards larger than 1 gig. Moreover, if the photos are bigger than about a megabyte, they’re quite slow to load in the photo frame. This is frustrating as it can take a long time to see them all.

Current feelings

We’re still very pleased with this digital frame, and have never considered upgrading it. We don’t use it as often as we used to, but I like being able to display pictures from recent events in such a simple way. Modern versions of this product have many more features and are of higher quality, but ours still works well, three-and-a-half years after it was bought. My son bought another identical model for his grandmother, after seeing how well our one worked, and she, too, enjoys it - so long as someone else puts photos on for her.

Availability

Unsurprisingly, the Mustek PF A702B is no longer made, although at the time of writing there’s a new, boxed one available from Ebay. Amazon sell what they claim is an updated version of the same thing, the Kitvision digitial frame, at £26. They also have a few similar Mustek frames at around £25. Should ours give up working, we would most likely replace it with something of the same size and similar design, as we like the look of it very much.