Philips 7 Inch Digital Photo Frame

I bought this Philips 7 Inch Digital Photo frame last year and having had a cheaper make before I am really pleased with this one and can't understand the problems people have a adding photo's-just take the memory card out and load the photo's on to it and pop back in the frame couldn't be more simple.

Easy to use good picture with added extras like clock, timer etc good value for money.

The software provided was abysmally poor. It was not possible to load images on to a CF card, either 2 or 4 GB. After several attempts and many wasted hours the frame was returned to John Lewis. Thankfully they had no more in stock so I was able to obtain a refund.

Don't waste your time or money.

This product promised to be so good but simply failed to deliver. We spent ages over the Christmas period trying to work out how to get photos loaded and gave up in the end. We returned the product for a refund. Philips may have improved the product by now because it was Christmas 2006 when we tried it.

Having got used to the fantastic way Mediaplayer on my Sony Vaio laptop which displays my photos in slide show mode I was very unimpressed with the Phillips random slide show effects. The pixelating and jigsaw effects took too long to change even when set on fastest 5 second mode.

The CD with the software for downloading photos from a PC did not work, or the USB cable did not connect properly so I couldn't click and drag photos onto the frame easily from my PC

The battery life was very short but the most annoying thing was the navigation buttons to get from one photo to the next. I thought you could set it to display one photo every 24 hours for example, but this feature is not available and you have to manually change the photos. I thought the technology was pretty prehistoric compared to what is now available on laptops like the Vaio or Macs.

Well, when I unwrapped the box I thought WOW! a great digital photo frame and then I opened the box...

I was astounded at what this little frame could do - from bizarre things like a built in self timer (you could also set the brightness to dim at e.g 7pm so the glare wasn't to bright!!) to practical things like a built in battery (with a reasonably short life). I must state here that the frame comes with a mains lead so it can run off that (it also charges the battery up at the same time).

While reading all the specification I couldn't believe how much Philips had crammed into it, so the price does reflect this. (I think it retails for around £135)

So where do you begin if you want to display your photos on the frame? Well, you can simply stick a CF (compact Flash) or SD (secure digital) memory card in the back an let it scroll through all your photos. Or you can browse through them at your control (touch of a button). Or you can copy about 60 from your memory card to the frame itself (so you can put you memory card back in your camera and snap away!!)

The frame looks like it is made to a very high standard. It comes with white, silver, black and (bright) red (magnetic) surrounds for the screen. The screen itself is of such a high resolution that it can display photos of up to (aprx.) 9 Mega Pixels.

To summarise: if you want a high quality photo frame with all the extra features and a superb screen - this is the one.

We bought our Philips digital photo frame from John Lewis.

What a great invention!

Philips make a wooden frame version, and a white frame version that looks like an Apple monitor. It holds about 50 photo's, but you can leave your smart media card in the back to rotate through as many as your card holds.