1. Introduction

It’s difficult to view your digital photos on the small screens of most digital cameras. And, if you want to share photos with friends, gathering around the camera’s small screen or dragging out a laptop to create a slide show aren’t very elegant options. The solution: A digital photo frame.

Digital photo frames have dedicated LCD screens and memory card slots to accommodate most of the popular memory types. By merely slipping in the memory card from your camera or plugging in a USB Flash drive, you can enjoy your pictures, and in some cases, video and music, in a matter of seconds on a large screen.

View Slide Show

Digital photo frames come in all sizes and styles. Screen sizes range from under 6" to 15," measured diagonally. We surveyed the market and found that the most inexpensive and common digital photo frame size is 7". For this article, we rounded up five 7" digital frames commonly found either in retail stores or online.

As we reviewed the products, we noticed an interesting trend - four of the five products had a widescreen 16:9 format commonly found on HDTVs. While the widescreen format does have a large-screen area, the aspect ratio is significantly different from the traditional 4:3 format that most digital cameras create. All four widescreen models let you fill the screen with your photo, but in the process, they blow up and crop the picture so that the resulting image will not reflect your original composition. The solution is to "fit the image to the screen," supported by all four widescreen models. This maintains the photo’s original aspect ratio, but results in black vertical bars on either side of the image. If you’re going to "waste" the pixels with black bars, wouldn’t you be better off with a screen that more closely reflects the aspect ratio of your camera? Some manufacturers’ larger-screen models do have 4:3 screens, which we will look at in a future roundup.

We developed a features table (at the end of the article) to help you compare the products, and in the process, discovered that each of the products had unique features. One brand lets you print directly to a USB printer without connecting to a computer, while another brand has NTSC output to play your content on a TV. One frame has a built-in rechargeable battery, while another runs on six AA batteries. Each product review includes a photo of the front and back of the frame. Be sure to check out the attached slide show. Additional product images as well as screen shots from each product are included to help you make the best purchasing decision.