In this month’s Vine program from Amazon I was fortunate enough to get hold of an electronic picture frame for review.   When I was looking to buy a similar frame for Jayne last year I did look at the Philips ones but they were just a bit too expensive compared to the Kodak I eventually got, so I was looking forward to seeing how one of them performed.

Turns out that the pictures look absolutely stunning on it, without having to make any sort of adjustment at all.  Unfortunately the controls are all on the back which makes it a lot harder to play with than the Kodak.  Here is what I said about it, in full:

I have had some experience with electronic photo frames in the past, mostly with keeping my wife’s one updated with new photos. This compares very well on picture and build quality, but falls down on usability and features, lacking some things that cheaper frames have.

If picture quality is your overall priority then the Phillips frames are excellent, and this one is fine in use if you are going to leave it running a slideshow. If you are going to want to show guests specific photos or keep changing what is displayed this might turn out to be a bit fiddly.

The main good and bad points I found are:

Good:

• Picture quality
  Very bright and clear with good colour reproduction
• The RadiantColor feature
  Sounded a bit gimmicky but is very effective. On other frames I have found the black bars so annoying I have cropped photos to the dimensions of the frame, which I have not found necessary on this one.
• Auto-detecting of orientation
  Turn the frame on its side and pictures are rotated accordingly. Works very well.
• Internal storage
  The frame has 512MB of memory which it says is enough for 500 photos. If photos are saved at 800×600 and are therefore well below 1MB each it should hold many more. (I have only loaded a few hundred so I am assuming there is not an arbitrary limit of 500)
• Build quality
  This feels very sturdy, particularly the stand which locks onto the back and works whether the frame is in landscape or portrait orientation.

Bad:

• No remote control
  All the controls are on the back of the frame, which is a bit tricky. I got used to them quickly enough but it is still more trouble than using a remote, especially if the frame is wall-mounted.
• Portrait orientation
  A couple of niggles with this. As I said, the stand is very good for portrait orientation and the auto-detection of orientation works very well but if you use this frame as a portrait frame the Phillips logo is then sideways and looks strange. Also, there is no hole for wall-mounting the frame ‘upright’.
• Menus
  While easy to get the hang of, the menus are quite limited. They do not wrap around so to go to the last photo in a list you have to scroll all the way down. Also there does not seem to be a ‘select all’ function: just a ‘select all seen’ function which is not quite the same.

The Collage feature is good in theory, but in reality it looks poor unless you spend a lot of time setting it up. The problem is that the collage layouts are a mixture of landscape and portrait sections. If you have mostly landscape pictures they will get cropped arbitrarily for those sections. To make the most of it you will have to include lots of portrait pictures as well, in different folders, and assign those folders to the different sections of the collage – something I have not had the patience for.

Sound is poor, but would you really expect hi-fi from a photo frame? Be aware that only MP3 music files will play – if you have all your music in AAC or WMA format you will have to convert or re-rip it to use as background music. Similarly the only video format supported is .avi

Sounds like a lot to complain about, but because of the brilliant picture quality I am still very happy with this for my requirements. For me it is the lack of a remote control that is the biggest drawback – that would make such a difference to it.

A quick explanation of RadiantColor:

The frame is in 4:3 ratio.  This is exactly the same ratio as photos from my compact camera, and from my old compact camera, so they fit exactly. My DSLR takes pictures in a slightly different ratio – they are not quite so tall in landscape orientation so they do not fill the screen completely.

One solution to this is to have black bars along the top and bottom.  Another solution is to select the auto-fit mode which will stretch pictures to fit, but that distorts the image a bit. Another solution is to crop images so that they are in 4:3 ratio, although if a picture is framed just right you won’t want to do that.

Phillips’ RadiantColor feature displays the pictures but instead of having black bars it has bars that match the predominant colour of the photo along that edge.  It is a very pleasing effect and looks really good on the rare older picture that is smaller than 800×600 in both dimensions.

How can Phillips come up with something so clever and effective and then forget to put a hole in the back to wall mount it the other way?  Good job I want it in landscape mode!