4. Pandigital DPF 80-2 8" Digital Picture Frame

by Barry Gerber

When I first took Pandigital's 8" digital photo frame (see specs on the next page) out of the box, inserted a CF card with my standard test images and turned it on, I was pleased to see that it immediately displayed a slide show of the images on the card. Not all frames do that. They require you to press a button on the remote control or on the frame.

What didn't please me was the quality of the image on the screen. After fiddling with the built-in menus, I was able to improve image quality to a good plus level. Basically, I boosted brightness and contrast as well as color, and I adjusted tint for a more pleasing skin tone. The good news is that you have all these adjustments at your command. Many frames come with fewer options. Brightness is always there, but contrast and color adjustments aren't.

You can easily select an image and view it on the display. Then, without leaving the image, you can enter the Setup menu, where you can make image quality adjustments. This makes it particularly easy to adjust the DPF 80-2. The unit's remote control makes all of this much easier than messing with the buttons on the back of the frame.

The DPF 80-2 comes with two easily replaceable frames, 1.25" wide black and .75" acrylic. The wood frame is held in place by two large plastic-headed screws that are very easy to turn with your fingers. The frame includes standard glass and an off-white matte. The acrylic frame snaps on from the back of the unit and has no glass or matte. I found that the glass actually improved image quality, though glare from the glass was definitely a problem. Non-glare glass eliminated most of the glare, but the image wasn't as good as with standard glass in place.

Unlike many digital picture frames with wide screen aspect ratios such as 16:9 or 16:10, the Pandigital 8" frame has a standard screen aspect ratio of 4:3. By default, most digital cameras produce images that are not 4:3. There is no way on the Pandigital frame to adjust image proportions to fit the aspect ratio, so most horizontal and vertical images are displayed with black bars on top and bottom or on the sides. If you crop and save photos at the frame's display resolution of 800x600, they will fill the frame.