Samsung SPF-107H

I had owned a Philips 9" digital picture frame for about 3 years when it decided it wasn't going to work any more. An exchange with the Philips Help department revealed a situation which is only too common these days - "It's broken, it's out of warranty, we won't fix it, bin it". I decided to replace it.

My first port of call in these situations is usually the Which? website. This was recommending both Kodak and Sony. I decided to visit local shops to what was on offer. In PC World there was quite a selection. My Philips had been mains or battery driven which was quite useful. These dual power models are difficult to find these days and tend to be much more expensive than their mains only cousins, so I decided to forego the battery option.

The Kodak and Sony models were both in stock at PC world. Neither was very large nor particularly attractive in appearance so I looked at others. Samsung make a number of very attractive frames and one, the SPF-107H. seemed to be about the right size. This was actually misleading as although the frame is large (about 10" across the diagonal) the frame ratio is 1.71:1 compared with the normal digital picture ratio of 1.33:1. This means that most of your pictures will be displayed with a black bar at each side. Things would be a little better if you loaded it with digital images taken from colour slides where the rato is 1.5:1. The only time this wide-frame ratio really scores is with panoramic pictures of which I have a number due to the excellent Photostitch facility built into my Canon camera. So, accept the fact that most of your pictures will have black bars on each side, and that your portrait format pictures will have big black bars on each side.

The instructions supplied with the Samsung frames border on the useless but comprehensive instructions are available from the Samsung site on the Internet. This is where you run into trouble. There are two sets of instructions with no way I could find of distinguishing one from the other so I decided to contact Samsung. The first thing you have to do on their site is to identify your product from multiple lists. Unfortunately digital frames are not included in these lists so you end up pretending that you are writing about a television or something and then explaining that you are really writing about digital frames. Then you put your query. Then you wait. Then eventually you realise that you shouldn't have bothered in the first place as Samsung do not reply to you. That is the reason why I cannot recommend this frame (or any other Samsung product) to anyone. Firms which conduct themselves in this manner should not be in business.

Anyway, back to the frame. It does have an enormous 1GB capacity and you can load up to 4000 pictures on it (I have 3500 and counting at the moment). Before doing this you should reduce the size of your pictures to a height of 600 pixels with an appropriate width. Irfanview is a wonderful program if you want to do this in bulk. There are various ways of displaying your pictures or you can have a clock if you prefer. This latter is very irritating in that it jumps all over the screen and needs resetting every week due to its inaccuracy. If you like, the SPF-107H will also show pictures from your SD camera card via the slot in the back of it. Samsung's obesession with slimness means that inserting the card or any of the leads into the back of the frame is quite fiddly.

In summary, therefore, I find the product good with a very good display, probably its most important feature. Unless, of course, like me you rate courtesy and service to customers equally highly. That's where the Samsung falls down.