Smartparts 7" Digital Picture Frame Review

7" Digital Picture Frame from Smartparts


Digital frames these days are very popular, they are everywhere, but stores usually only have the larger brands, but there are bargains to be found. This would be a pretty good buy for the lower end of price range and it works really well if you were to place it on a desk.

The pluses to this -
Good price point.
Picture quality is very good and sharp, not as great as the more costly units but still very good.
Has an internal storage of 128MB, which is good to get you going and also if you give this as a present to put your photo's on there before wrapping it up.
It doesn't use much power and you can set the times for it to come on and off.
The frame is a nice wood and feels sturdy, it's a great looking digital frame.
Many slideshow options.
This can read the high capacity SD cards and MicroSD cards used in an SD adapter, so you can have more than 2GB cards.
Can be wall mounted or the stand can place it landscape of portrait.
The power adapter has a small foot print.

The cons to this -
There's no internal battery, so you do need it plugged in at all times to work.
The frame doesn't auto rotate if you set it to portrait, so the pictures unless you've set them as landscape will be shrunken to fit in landscape and be slightly cropped, though it does do this well if your running a slideshow of pictures, using the PC software should correct this for you though.
There's no USB slot for a thumb drive.
Memory slot is a bit close to the edge of the device and no easy way to remove the cards once they are slotted in.
The control buttons are on the real, are small, feel cheap and aren't all that intuitive to use as they are in reverse to what you see on the screen.
There's no remote control, this isn't a big thing though.
There's no option to load photo's in a random order, it goes through them in alphabetical order, you also can't display both internal memory images and images on a memory card, it's one or the other.
The power cable gets in the way if you placed this in the middle of a coffee table, or on a window sill, so having it at the back of a table/desk is really the only good place to keep this.
You can't change the frame style like you can, though this isn't a bad thing for me personally.

Over all - This is a great little gift, it's a nice size and very simple to use. You don't need to use the computer, just stick a memory card in and your good. The software is basic if you do plug the frame into your computer, but it does the trick, optimises the images down to size to save space and sets orientation if needed as well as saying if a photo isn't a good option for the frame such as the resolution or the size. It'll then transfer the images onto the frame for you.