3. Pandigital 7.0

Pandigital (www.pandigital.net) manufactures a complete line of digital photo frames with sizes ranging from 6" to 10.4." With a suggested retail price of $119.00 and Web promotions that can sometimes drive the price below $100, our 7" Pandigital frame includes a number of features enabling it to compete effectively with the other widescreen format frames in our roundup.

View Slide Show

Product Tour

Front view of the Pandigital 7.0" Photo Frame

Like the Kodak EasyShare and the Smartparts player, the Pandigital frame features a 7" (diagonal) 480 X 232 pixel LCD with a 16:9 widescreen format. The LCD is framed with a beveled white insert that is covered with glass - just like a real picture frame. The frame ships with a black-wood outer frame installed, but you can easily swap it for the included clear acrylic frame. The frame also ships with a 12-button remote control. Like the Kodak remote, you don’t want to lose it, as some of the functions, such as rotate, zoom and volume can only be accessed with the remote control.

Rear view of the Pandigital 7.0" Photo Frame

The rear of the Pandigital frame only has four navigation buttons that enable you to navigate between menus and start/stop the media players. You can orient a traditional picture frame vertically or horizontally on your desktop. However, there is only a single wall-mount hole for horizontal mounting. The power switch is adjacent to the frame stand. The four memory slots, mini USB connector and power connector are located on the left side (as viewed in the image above). There is also a brightness control located near the navigation buttons.

Hands On

Like the other frames, basic operation is simple. Just plug in a supported memory card, turn on the power and the frame starts in slide show mode. For our tests, I copied a number of pictures, MP3 files and video files in various formats to an SD card, a USB flash drive and a CF card. I was surprised when the slide show started playing with the music found on the memory card. You can disable the music by pressing the enter button on the remote. This was an undocumented feature I discovered during testing.

The Pandigital frame includes 128 MB of internal memory. You can copy photos from your computer via the USB port, or copy them from an inserted memory card to the frame’s internal memory through the setup menu. When connected to your computer, each of the memory slots, as well as the internal memory, are enumerated as separate drive letters. Interestingly, though specified as a USB 2.0 port, both of our test computers only recognized it as USB 1.1 and, indeed, file transfers did appear to be at the slower USB 1.1 speeds. Even though it’s slower, it’s probably faster than coping individual files through the setup menu - there’s no way to tag multiple files for copying. Once the files are in the frame’s internal memory; you can delete, rotate or zoom images.

From the thumbnail mode, you can view individual images, advance forward and backwards, as well as zoom up to 16X and scroll through your zoomed image. You can also rotate the image, but once you exit this mode, the image returns to its original orientation. In both thumbnail mode, as well as in slide show mode, images were correctly displayed based on the saved file information. If you had rotated a vertically composed image with an image editor, it would display correctly on the frame.

As with the other photo frames, the music feature is basic. Selecting the music mode will display a list of file names and track lengths. The Pandigital frame doesn’t attempt to read ID3 tags. The video player pleasantly surprised me. It was able to play 640 X 480 .avi file clips at 30 FPS, which had choked the Kodak and Smartparts players.

Image quality was equivalent to the other 480 X 320 frames reviewed. We were disappointed, however, that you couldn’t tag individual files to play in your slide show. All images on a selected memory device are included in the slide show. Still the Pandigital Photo frame was easy to use, and will appeal to those who want to store a large number of pictures on the frame.