Having upgraded from a smaller Philips digital photo frame, the Sony DPF-V1000 is a welcome surprise.
Before getting in to the meat of the review, I feel it's worth pointing out a couple of improvements in the product right up front.
A lot of reviews here complain about three common gripes:
the illuminated Sony logo on the frame
when you're in date/time mode, the frame only displays the date and time the photo was taken
non-camera images don't display
I bought my frame on June 28th 2009 and all these items have either been fixed, or the other reviewers didn't read the manual far enough. The illuminated Sony logo can be turned off via the setup options now. There is a smorgasbord of date and time modes available too, most of which will display the current date and time rather than the date and time the photo was taken. And finally, the non-camera images problem seems vastly reduced now. I filled my frame with all sorts of images including straight-from-the-camera JPGs and ones that had been altered via Photoshop. Out of 400 images, only two didn't display, and they turned out to be TIFF images I'd put on by mistake. Otherwise, images taken from 8 or 9 different makes and models of camera all showed perfectly, as well as those taken from 5 different cellphone cameras.
So on to the frame itself what's it like. Oddly, bigger than you might think. OK so you can read the dimensions in the product specs but when it arrives, the box is huge, and the frame is much larger than you might imagine. The quality of the LCD panel seems to be top notch with a bright, clear display and a pretty wide viewing angle. The screw-in "foot" which makes up the frame's stand is quite long (for stability) which means that you can't push this frame up against a wall when placing it on furniture it's going to stand out quite a way. You can hang it on the wall though it has keyed notches in the back for that purpose. The frame can be oriented in landscape or portrait mode and it auto-rotates the pictures to suit. The picture display itself can be "original aspect" which shows the whole picture with black bars padding the screen where necessary, or it can be "zoom to fit" in which case the image is zoomed slightly to entirely fill the display.
The frame comes with 1Gb of built-in memory as well as memory card slots for most types of card. There is one gotcha here though which isn't mentioned in the manual, and is buried deep in the product FAQ on Sony's website : when you connect this frame to your PC via USB, you can ONLY upload images to the frame's inbuilt memory. Any cards plugged in do not show up you either need to load them up separately, or copy images to them using the frame's inbuilt copy tools. Whilst this isn't a biggie, if you don't have a separate card reader for your chosen type of memory card, it's a pain having to shuffle images everywhere. Having said that, 1Gb of onboard memory holds a respectable number of images enough that you might not need an expansion card. Realistically, I think the card slots are there for straight-from-the-camera image viewing, rather than long-term storage.
There are plenty of setup options to keep the both the nerdiest photo frame enthusiast and the absolute beginner happy. One thing I was pleased to see was the option to set the inbuilt clock to 24 hour mode. Why anyone still uses AM/PM in this day and age is a mystery to me, yet so many consumer electrical products insist on the 12 hour format. Not so in this case. As well as the clock, there's a calendar built in too, and in many of the display modes, you can show the clock and/or calendar along with the photo. Another nice feature here you can set the date display to American or rest-of-world ie. month-day-year or day-month-year respectively. The clock has an alarm mode which can be turned on or off using a slide switch on top of the frame. Seems a little pointless to me, but then I have a clock radio to wake me up in the morning.
The included remote control is a nice feature. My old Philips frame had no remote so all changes needed to be done using the frame's hardware buttons. With the Sony remote, you can fiddle with the photo frame remotely, including all the setup and display features. It has hidden benefits too for example if you've got the frame set to refresh every half hour and you decide you don't like the current picture, you don't need to wait just click 'next' on the remote and on you go.
As with most digiframes, this one has an auto on/off function where you can tell it when you want it to turn itself on and off. It has a simple and complex mode of operation for this feature. In simple mode, you just give it an on and off time and that's it. In complex mode (the default setting) you can set multiple on/off times for individual days of the week. A little too much gravy for a photo frame if you ask me.
The slideshow modes have the usual array of fades and swipes, as well as sequenced or random image mode. For the most part, you'll typically end up in random picture mode, and random fade/swipe mode. The slideshow delay has several preset options from every 3 seconds right up to once a day for the picture change. Common choices like 5 minutes, 10 minutes and half an hour are all present and correct.
You can do some rudimentary image editing in the frame although any serious amount of image touchup is out of the question. It has a scrapbook mode where you can frame the pictures with backgrounds and other add-on graphics although it does seem a bit pointless to buy a large digiframe and then deliberately shrink the images you're displaying on it ....
In short this frame has more than enough features for the technophile, whilst being pretty easy to just pick up and use for those who want to throw some photos on and be done with it. You can't argue with the clarity of the LCD panel either. All in all, a good choice if not a little pricey. Sure you're paying for the Sony name, but if they did an identical model with all the frills removed ie. no touchup mode, no alarm, no scrapbook mode and no card slots, that would be a product with more mass-market appeal. That being said, I don't think you'll regret this purchase it simply is that good.
So why 4 stars and not 5? Well the internet is full of people who either think product X is the best thing since sliced bread, or have an axe to grind with the manufacturer. Those two review types account for 5-star and zero-star reviews. Very few products warrant a full-on 5-star review because most products have one or more features that a chunk of the buyers won't like. So 4 stars is my rating here ie. it's a bloody good piece of kit but it's not perfect. I don't think the perfect 5-star digital photo frame exists yet.
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