Sony DPF-D70

...any favours by buying the Sony DPF-D70 from John Lewis in Kingston, price-wise, but it was the last shopping Saturday before her birthday, so an element of desperation was creeping in. Parting with close on one hundred smackers does indeed appear to be about £10 over the top - so much for 'Never Knowingly Undersold'.

==FIRST IMPRESSIONS==

My very first impression was 'My God, isn't the box heavy?'

Refreshingly, ...
...to have that *@?>ing great SONY logo lit all the time is it?'

Well, no it isn't as it now appears, but the facility to turn it off is buried two layers deep in the menu. I don't mind my TV having a Sony logo at its base, but that's not illuminated. I can't think why you'd want a logo on a photo frame anyway. The frame is a flush acrylic slab, with a gloss black rim - other colours are available. Any controls are discrete push buttons ... more

Having wracked my brains for something to get my wife for her birthday, I remembered that in the dim and distant past she'd said, 'Oo, I quite fancy one of those", 'one of those' being a digital photo frame.

She's currently getting pretty damned good with her holiday photography, using a facility like PhotoBox to create bound albums, calendars and the like, thus opening up a whole new source of present-giving opportunities, not to be sniffed at with Christmas coming.

The trouble is with albums like these, you don't tend to put all your photos in them, preferring to showcase what you consider to be the best of the bunch.

Unlike printed photos, the rest just stay mouldering away on disk, in the same way that more hours of TV programmes get recorded that actually get watched in playback.

A means to run them all as a slideshow would be nice, and that's what digital photo frames excel at.

I don't suppose I did myself any favours by buying the Sony DPF-D70 from John Lewis in Kingston, price-wise, but it was the last shopping Saturday before her birthday, so an element of desperation was creeping in. Parting with close on one hundred smackers does indeed appear to be about £10 over the top - so much for 'Never Knowingly Undersold'.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My very first impression was 'My God, isn't the box heavy?'

Refreshingly, the packaging was an ingenious fold of cardboard with not a hint of blown foam to dispose of, so it was all immediately recyclable.

Contents were quite simply the frame itself, the AC adapter built into a UK plug, the remote control and the manual.

UPON SWITCH ON

This would have to be my first impression of any importance.

'It's not going to have that *@?>ing great SONY logo lit all the time is it?'

Well, no it isn't as it now appears, but the facility to turn it off is buried two layers deep in the menu. I don't mind my TV having a Sony logo at its base, but that's not illuminated. I can't think why you'd want a logo on a photo frame anyway. The frame is a flush acrylic slab, with a gloss black rim - other colours are available. Any controls are discrete push buttons hidden just behind the rim.

The first thing you're going to be itching to do is load some photos. Luckily, we were fresh back from my wife's birthday treat in Paris, so we had some fresh ones to look at. Loading the SD card straight from my wife's Canon IXUS 700 was a doddle. A few clicks on various menu items later and we were showing her pictures off to their advantage, with a sequence of assorted 'fades'. The frame doesn't actually have to USE the prints in the chip, and once loaded, it can be taken away. Since the camera is a 7-megapixel version, and the frame has a perfectly adequate 640*480 definition, it scales the pictures down until 640*480 is the best definition. After all, there's no point in loading 3.5 megapixel files into something that only needs 1.3 megapixels to show off its capabilities. This also means that the 256 megabytes of internal RAM can hold a shed-load of photos, possibly as many as 500 with little quality loss*, although 100 seems about the norm.

*You are after all only viewing on a 7" screen.

The frame will accept a wide range of the current camera chips, from the larger Compact Flash as in my Nikon D70 to minuscule Memory Sticks (Sony's format) and xD-Picture cards.

In all of these cases, it will downscale over-large files.

There is ONE exception. When connected to a PC via its USB port, it does not scale down photos, being merely a slave drive of the connected PC. Therefore, if your camera creates very large files, expect to fit less into the photo frame.

USING IT

The first thing most people are going to do is run a 'slideshow' of the loaded photos. This might sound like a great idea, particularly with friends round to bore with your latest holiday photos! However, it's a little like leaving the TV on when you've got guests, or having a TV in a pub. It's just plain distracting.

Now that I know it works, I think I'd rather select my 'picture of the day', and leave it displayed - you can always use the remote control to move on to the next one. This also gives you the opportunity to turn the screen on end to give a full frame view of a portrait, rather than an ineffectual stripe down the middle of the landscape format which is what happens when running a slideshow of mixed formats. Somehow, like some digital cameras, it can tell when it is upended. In most cases, it can tell an 'upended' photo fresh from the camera and run it correctly.

Personally, I'm going to segregate portraits from landscapes in a special folder on my PC and load them from there - using the camera chip directly is too indiscriminate, although you can delete undesirable shots.

Picture quality is excellent and colours are rich without being gaudy.

When you are through with watching photos, it becomes a very presentable analogue or digital clock, with or without calendar.

You can even set up a combination screen with a slideshow, clock and calendar. At first, I couldn't work out why the time kept jumping around until I realised that it was picking up the date and time data from each photo - better check that the clock is right in your camera! You can also set it to run current time settings only.

The screen format of 15:9 is almost widescreen-telly in proportions, and suits some cameras better than others. My wife's Canon is strictly a 4:3 job, whereas my Nikon allows for a wider screen format - however, they can all be made to occupy the whole screen with a 'fit to screen' mode. This does not distort the image, giving chubbier faces from my wife's camera, but rather seems to trim top and bottom, retaining the proportions of what is left.

NIGGLES?

If I have any, they're small. It has no means of working on batteries, so taking to my desktop PC to use the USB connection also involves finding yet another mains outlet spare; no mean feat near a PC.

Being yet another low voltage device, even switched off, there's a mains adapter still using a minute amount of current to unplug.

Still, not much to moan about for what is a very smart addition to the lounge (after I found out how to turn that logo off)

CONCLUSION

Well I should be grateful that it solved yet another birthday dilemma, and it does look more expensive than it is (even at JL's price!).

I'm not sure we'll be using it every night, but it beats what's on telly a lot of the time! 

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