4. A Thousand Words

The PV1's display screen is a color 5.6" TFT LCD with a resolution of 320x234 pixels. From the unit's menu you can adjust the screen's brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, and backlight intensity. Evaluated strictly as a digital picture frame/photo album, the PV1 is outstanding. Images are crisp and bright, and the screen's viewing angle is quite respectable. The unit provides a lot of different viewing options, too. In addition to choosing to display a single picture, you can also have a running slideshow with a user-selectable change interval. You can view all your pictures at once as thumbnails, or only view certain tagged favorites. Transition effects are also user selected: a side swipe and a bottom-to-top sweep are two examples.

Pictures on the bigger side tend to take a while to load. A 2272x1704 image that weighed in at about 1.8 MB usually took about 5 seconds to open the first time. Instead of just popping up though, it seemed to resolve into focus progressively, growing more detailed until the frame's internal processor had formatted it to the screen's resolution. Some may prefer that such operations happen unseen, but I didn't find watching the image appear slowly to be an issue. It happened the first time, but every subsequent display of the image during a slideshow never took long to load. After the first display they popped up almost immediately, like images closer to the screen's actual pixel dimensions.