Review: Jessops Eight Inch Digital Photo Frame
Don Bradbury has had quite enough of trying to keep up with printing hundreds of family pictures, so he tries one of these high resolution LCD displays for playing stills, videos and music files.
| Product | Eight Inch Digital Photo Frame |
|---|---|
| Company | Jessops |
| Web | www.jessops.co.uk |
| Price | £89.99 |
| We like | Excellent image quality; good range of facilities; neat little remote control. |
| We don't like | Restricted video format support |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
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We all know the problem; the family emails you their latest holiday pics but you never get around to printing them, at which your spouse complains, so you think, I know, I'll load them onto a digital photo frame; that ought to satisfy everyone. Well in our experience it does, or it can when you've got your preferences set up right, but such a unit can offer more than simply displaying photos.
The problem is deciding which product to go for; there are so many on offer and at all sorts of prices. We hunted around and were impressed with the image quality of the Jessops 8" digital photo frame. This you can get for the quite reasonable price of £49, considering all that it offers. In comparison with others at several times that price, we thought it looked like the bee's knees so we took a deeper look.
Memory options
Besides the 8" LCD, this digital photo frame comes with a huge 2GB of internal memory, plus the capability to accept USB, Compact Flash, Secure Digital, SDHC, MMC, Memory Stick Pro and Duo external memory. It also has a mini USB port for file transfer from the PC, complete with cable. Oh, and there's also a little screen cleaning cloth included in the pack to remove those inevitable finger prints without scratching the glazed surface.
There's a range of very basic controls on the top of the frame, but we found it far easier to use the included credit card size remote control to do the job - though the frame's own brightness adjuster came in handy. There are so many functions that it takes a while to get accustomed to finding your way around the menus; you soon get used to it. If you do make a mess of setup, there's a 'return to defaults' option.
This frame doesn't run off internal batteries, which is not a big loss in our opinion as they can go flat at inopportune moments; the mains adapter plugs into the back and takes care of all the power requirements.
Loading it.
Put a compatible memory card into your PC, load your chosen JPEG (or BMP, PNG, GIF, or TIFF), MP3, and MPEG1/2/4 (or M-JPEG) or AVI files onto it, then pop it into the frame and preferably copy your files to the frame's internal memory to take advantage of the auto-resizing function. Switch the frame on, wait a second or two for it to read your first file, and you have a super picture show of slides or videos, and even the audio delight of your music coming from the built-in speakers.
Your choice of music can be played separately or it can accompany the slide shows if you put the MP3 file in the same folder on the external or internal memory - between which you can select from the menus. The 2x1watt speakers aren't exactly hifi quality, as you might guess, but for this duty they're perfectly adequate, and you can adjust the volume or mute the output.
If you want to drop the musical accompaniment, you can either delete your added MP3 file (or files if you want to pick up the next track, otherwise a single track repeats), or you can perhaps rename your file to a .MP3X extension on the PC to disable it, so that thereafter it's a simple job to reactivate the file or files when you need to by renaming back.
Similarly, if you want to preserve - but not include in slide shows - Jessops own advertisement graphics, you can rename their file extension and then just leave them in place in case you want to review them later; they do effectively summarise the main capabilities of the device.
Video formats
Limited video format support might be considered par for the course with any such device these days, and although our AVIs played fine, some of our MPEG clips were not liked and were ignored. We tried a little video conversion with limited success, so in this department it's best to make sure your video output is directly supported. Take an example into Jessops on a memory card perhaps, to check compatibility if video playback is of prime importance to you.
When attached to the PC via the provided USB cable, we were presented with three new removable devices. Copying our AVI files directly to the first of these drives, while in this mode, gave us a scrollable list of videos that all played back well. The other two drive letters were in place for when you have memory cards in the CF and/or SM slots. These can all be 'safely removed' in one move via the OS in the usual way.
As we pointed out, for JPEGs you would normally want to automatically resize the files into the frame's internal memory by one-at-a-time copying from your external memory card. We did, however, try bulk copying from the PC and they all played back just fine, with minimal cropping in a couple of cases. We might have been lucky because one-at-a-time copying is recommended, but you might try bulk copying first, though it does mean that the auto-resizing isn't functional so you consume internal memory unnecessarily. Essentially though, the setup means the frame can be used in the same manner as a card reader if you have multiple memory cards to work with.
Arcsoft Effects
With menu options for manual image rotation (or it's fully automatic if you turn the unit), or zoom-in, copy to internal memory, reorder the files by name or date, or enlist the aid of ArcSoft Effects. This is software built in to control dynamic lighting, face beauty (softens images to hide facial blemishes), and face tracking, the control you have will be, for most users, really quite adequate.
That face tracking option, by the way, hunted for the biggest full face in the picture and zoomed in on it. We also tried it with slides containing several full faces and after it had had a look around and thought about it a little, it sought to find other faces to home in on, or automatically pan around a group of them if it's zoom-in range was already exhausted. Clever stuff, which together with the decent range of transition options added yet another dimension to JPEG playback that we found rewarding.
Select Mode gives you options for card selection, photo, music, video, file management, and time. The latter lets you set up (or display) the integral clock/calendar, plus an alarm function if you need it. In clock mode the unit can also display mini photos with your preferred slideshow settings.
Sort them out
Besides file sorting and copying, setup also gives you a delete function, a factory reset option, image size for display, a 'magic window' to play four images at once, slide transition options, and slideshow speed to set the delay interval between changes. Finally, and most important, there's an option to adjust the LCD colour setup.
The latter you may want to employ to reset the defaults using image brightness, contrast, colour, and tint controls. We found it best to tweak the colour setting upwards somewhat, while turning the contrast down. This improved tonal rendition and preserve highlight and shadow detail. Auto-rotate detected the orientation of the images and displayed them correctly for still images.
Music file options included file sorting, copying to internal memory, delete from internal memory, audio playback repeat, and also set as alarm (from internal memory only).
Video playback was catered for with fast play, rewind, and up/down to select the next/previous video file required. Here you also have options for the display of file information. Video reproduction from compatible files formats was satisfactory, and the sound track was again played adequately for this function.
The alarm
A useful calendar and time display can be summoned to the screen, and of course that can be set as the default display if you want. That's useful in conjunction with the alarm facility. Set the clock to a BBC time display for accuracy if you need to, and select one of your graphics to display alongside it if you choose, or just let it slideshow from internal memory.
There are lots of options to handle, as we said, but it's all there for you to investigate. Just thank your lucky stars for the super little remote control which makes menu navigation so much easier.
In conclusion
This Jessops, high resolution, 8" digital photo frame may not offer every conceivable option you could wish for, but at the asking price of just £49 it surely takes some beating. The 800 x 600 picture display was of excellent quality; sharp, with good colour balance (after a one-off tweaking of the defaults if necessary), stable, and altogether satisfying. The pull-out support arm we found substantial and it could be fully retracted into the frame in you wanted to wall-mount. There's also a tripod bush in the base, plus a slot to hang the unit on a wall. All told, we think the device is an excellent buy, and far better that some more expensive units we've seen.
Don't expect too much from the music angle of course, and it's true that an 8" diagonal LCD in an almost 13" diagonal frame leaves plenty of border around your picture display, but in black polished plastic we think it looks rather swish. Now, who wants to buy a little-used printer?
