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“Compared this frame in stores with digital frames from...”

written by bhav on 01/12/2007

Good Points
Best image quality I've seen on a digital photo frame; bright, very
sharp, good contrast, colour and viewing angle. Interface straightforward and easy to use. Good construction-feels well made.

Bad Points
Limited on board memory (though flash cards are cheap). No internal battery. Fiddly buttons at back - joystick would be better. No orientation sensor for portrait viewing.

General Comments
Compared this frame in stores with digital frames from most of the major manufacturers (Philips 7FFxxx/9FFxxx, Kodak xx811, Samsung SPH-72H/V) and image quality seemed far better than any of these; bright, very sharp, good contrast and colour;images seem to jump out at you more than other frames. This is born out in the specs: 18-bit or 262K colour (Philips 16-bit or 65K and does seem to suffer from poor colour smoothness, particularly in dark areas - samsung and kodak are 18-bit and seemed ok); LED backlight, which in principle should give a wider colour palette and subjectively colours do look good (Kodak also has an LED backlight); 400:1 contrast ratio (Philips?, Samsung & Kodak 300:1). Another important feature for a photo frame is viewing angle, unless you happen to always sit face on to the frame; again this frame is significantly better than other frames in horizontal and vertical angle and maintains a good picture from most viewing positions, even in a relatvely small room - the only exception is the the vertical angle below the horizontal (above horizontal is good), but can't comment on how this compares to other frames. Compared to my Epson P3000 Photoviewer images do not have the same dynamic range and are cooler (comparing to a specialist photoviewer is maybe unfair), however, surprisingly, albeit subjectively, they had more impact on the Toshiba - as well you might want for a photo frame.



Downsides are only 16Mb internal memory, which is small compared to most other frames, however, flash memory cards are cheap (bought a Kingston 2Gb SD recently for £8), so given the quality of display this is a fair-compromise. There is no internal battery, so can't unplug and pass around the frame for people to conveniently view photos. Interestingly, JOBO have a 7" frame that in appearance looks identical to this Toshiba frame with 1Gb internal memory and internal battery (Li-ion 1500mAh), so it is possible that Toshiba supply the displays for JOBO. Don't like the aethetics, but that is personal preference (Philips wooden effect frames look classy). User interface software was straightforward and easy to use. However, buttons are somewhat difficult to use (there is a guide on the screen to help you to figure out which button does what), but I would have prefered a small joystick type controller, which is more intuitve (I think some Philips models have this). Range of software options seemed ok, but maybe basic compared to other frames (didn't really compare software feature set, since I was more intersted in quality of display). Does include random display and various slide transitions. Would have liked a more subtle fade option. Since the frame ratio is 3:2, rather than the consumer digital standard 4:3, the frame software crops horizontally framed images, such that you lose a part of the top and bottom of your images; so far I've not felt any of the images looked unnatural with this cropping. For vertically framed images (with the frame horizontal) the software zooms in to leave a black (or white or grey to your choosing) border of about 1cm to the left and right of the image - there doesn't seem a way of chaning this. Also if you turn the frame so that it is vertical (portrait) it doesn't automatically rotate images, so evidently it has no way of recognising orientation.



Overall, other frames may have a better feature set, but from what I've seen none display images as well as this one.