Not Your Grandma's Digital Photo Frame

3. eStarling Impact 7, $99

It would be easy to describe the Impact 7 as merely a much cheaper version of the Parrot frame. Basically, that’s what it is: it connects to Wi-Fi, it works with social photo sites, and photos can be emailed to it. And it costs 20% of the Parrot frame’s price. But the Impact 7 beats the Parrot in some ways, and is lacking the Parrot’s high quality in other areas.

To begin with, the design of this frame, while decent, is not nearly as polished as the Parrot frame. The piano black finish of the Impact 7 is nice, but the mechanism for plugging in and standing up the frame isn’t easy. The kick stand flops around and doesn’t stay put, making the frame feel wobbly when upright. The AC adaptor’s plug is almost impossible to find, nestled into the groove on the left hand side behind the stand. However, unlike the Parrot, this frame comes with a remote control so you can manipulate it from the couch.

Once plugged in, the frame powers up and a previously invisible set of blue LED touch-sensitive icons appears. They’re not exactly buttons, but if you touch them (arrows that distinguish between back, forward, enter, etc.), they light up and respond.

Setting up Wi-Fi on the eStarling is much the same as on the Parrot—the process of laboriously entering the hex WEP code on a virtual keyboard via arrow buttons is painstaking. But, once the job is done, a screen pops up telling you a URL and login code. This site, accessible from any computer—not just one on the network with your frame—is the key to eStarling’s system.

When you go to the URL and activate your frame, you end up registering your e-mail address, time zone, and user name. This username creates your own site and email address. Yourname@seeframe.com. You can give out this address to anyone that you want to share photos on your frame. The Time Zone setting tells the frame when to turn off (typically between 2am and 4am local time, for firmware updates and resets).

But there are many other ways of getting photos on this frame beyond the e-mail address. Everything you can do on the Parrot frame you can also do here, though the public album problem persists with Flickr and Picasa (eStarling says private albums are permitted, but we couldn’t discern how). In addition, you can bring RSS feeds of album accounts at places like Photobucket, AOL, and even Facebook . eStarling provides feeds from other photo sources as well, such as National Geographic images.

Through this web-based interface, you can also edit photos with captions and create other amusing effects.

The most fun we had with the Impact 7 was with an iPhone (or any other phone that takes photos and sends them via email). Taking pictures on the phone and instantly emailing them from the frame was instantly gratifying—the photos showed up immediately.

For only $99, there has to be a downside. The Impact 7’s screen resolution is a widescreen 460x234, rather than the standard photo size which is not widescreen. That means most photos on the frame can’t take advantage of the widescreen shape and end up displaying truncated versions of themselves. eStarling sells an Impact 8 with an 800x600 resolution that resolves this problem, but it costs nearly twice as much.
But even though some pictures don’t fit perfectly in the screen, the screen itself is bright (though not nearly as crisp and detailed as the Parrot frame).
eStarling allows groups of people who each have one of these frames to share the same e-mail address so everyone in the group gets the same photo updates on their frames. The photos from any frame can also be accessed and displayed online via a “virtual frame.”