Fun with your digital photos, plus some unexpected uses

A digital photo frame seems like a useful idea. After all, many of us still keep framed photos around the house or on our desks, but most of the photos we take these days are digital - why not have a digital update of the traditional photo frame with an LCD screen? Show off your digital photos with an ever-changing slide show! These have been around for a few years now, but the cost has been too high for most people until recently. Now that the cost of LCD screens has fallen low enough to bring the price of a reasonably-sized digital photo frame under $100, a lot more people are interested.

But if you stop and think about it for a minute, there are some practical problems with the concept of a digital photo frame compared to the old-fashioned kind. For a start, this gadget needs power. If it plugs into a wall socket (like this Nextar model), it's going to need a power cord running to it, which will be a bit awkward in many potential locations, and a problem if you want to pass it around. If you have a model that runs on batteries, it will burn through batteries pretty fast, requiring constant replacement or recharging. LCDs are pretty durable, but the LCD backlight will degrade and eventually burn out if you leave it on all the time. Are you going to turn it on and off to avoid wasting power or wearing it out when you aren't there? Bet it won't be long before it's always off. Maybe a motion sensor to turn it on when people are around would help, although I don't know of any models with that feature. Not that these problems are unique to this Nextar model, but you might want to consider them when deciding what features you want.

This Nextar model features:
- 7” LCD with 480 x 234 resolution
- Displays photos (JPEG) and plays videos (MPEG, DivX/XVid) and music (MP3)
- Built-in stereo speakers
- Reads from SD/MMC/MS/MSPro memory cards
- USB host port and extension cable to read directly from digital cameras and other external memory devices
- IR remote control
- AV Out cable to connect to a TV
- Interchangeable frames

Like many other recent low-cost digital photo frames, it uses a 7” 16:9 aspect-ratio screen adapted from a portable-DVD display (some of the functions listed on the menu make the DVD player heritage obvious). The screen resolution is specified as 480 x 234, which seems correct. As you’d expect this resolution looks fairly coarse up close, and the brightness and contrast of the screen are only so-so and can't really be improved by adjustment. It doesn't look as good as the models with 7" 800 x 480 screens available for a little more money. However, photos appear ok as long as you're not looking closely, if a bit over-contrasty. The 16:9 aspect ratio is obviously on the wide side compared to 4:3 digital photos or 3:2 film photos, which can make photos appear distorted horizontally with the default out-of-the box settings, but this can be corrected if you change to 4:3 screen aspect ratio in the video setup. In that case the frame makes things fit reasonably well by stretching the photos very slightly horizontally, cutting the top and bottom off slightly, and leaving some narrow black bars on the side. The only way to fill the wide screen completely with a photo without distortion is to pre-scale the photo horizontally to 80% width and then resize it to about 780 x 544 on a computer.

As usual with cheap electronic products the manual is pretty sketchy, but you can figure out most things by experimentation. You can display a folder/name index or multi-page thumbnail index of photos. You can run an automatic slide show of all the photos on a card, but there's no apparent way to have the slide show start automatically when you turn the unit on or plug in a card on this model. There are no user options for the slide show other than the selectable time interval of 5, 10 or 15 seconds between photos. It uses random transition wipes between photos. You can start and stop the slide show, or step through photos manually using the remote control. Slide shows repeat forever by default, but there are several Repeat modes. There's an optional auto-shutoff screen saver which kicks in when the display stays on the menu or other static display for 10 minutes.

You can play MP3 music files from the same storage card in the background on the built-in stereo speakers while doing a slide show. The buttons on the remote let you start/stop music, skip songs forward/backward, and adjust the volume, although the small built-in speakers can't play very loud.

You can zoom and rotate photos, but it doesn't recognize the standard camera orientation data in the EXIF header of JPEG photo files. In any case it would probably be best to group your horizontal and vertical-orientation photos, and manually flip the orientation of the frame to show them to best advantage (an orientation sensor in the photo frame would really help). If you zoom, the Zoom Ratio text information remains on top of the photo - you can remove it by pressing Mute/un-Mute, but if you're running a slide show it comes back when the show repeats.

The video playback quality and functionality are reasonable, as you'd expect from an adapted portable DVD player. This unit can actually play DivX/XVid as well as MPEG video (although unfortunately not the MJPEG video produced by many digicams), and there are useful video zoom and aspect ratio options. It has an AV out cable to connect video and stereo audio to an external TV. I tried it with my HDTV and the TV display quality is quite good, although of course it's limited by the composite video interface.

It turns out that there are some hidden functions that aren't listed on the setup menus or the remote, like a sound equalizer with a bunch of different presets, a Flip Photo Left/Right or Up/Down function, and a video FF/RW. I discovered them because they popped up on the screen when my Harmony remote accidentally hit some matching codes while controlling my Citizen DVR. I experimented a bit and found that many of the Citizen control codes work with the Nextar photo frame, although not as labeled, and only a few trigger hidden functions. I'm not sure the hidden functions are really very useful for a photo frame though, which is probably why they were left out.

This model has no built-in memory. It reads photos from a memory card or USB memory device. The card slot accepts SD, MMC, and (it says) Memory Stick or MS Pro. In addition it has a USB host port, which means that you can plug in a USB digital camera, a card reader, flash memory thumb drive, or even a portable HD in FAT format and it will read the photos, MP3s and videos from it. I tried it with a multi-card reader and a USB hard drive, and both worked fine. If you wanted, you could potentially hook this thing up to a large hard drive full of hundreds of hours of videos and use it as a media player with the included remote control.

The external power supply to the photo frame is 12v DC from the plug-in AC power block. Actually this unit wouldn't make a bad in-car video player, since you can remove the smaller display unit from the larger plastic picture frame (it's only held in by clips), and you could easily add a 12v cigarette lighter power plug. You can transfer DVD movies and TV shows to an SD card in DivX or XVid format.

In summary, this Nextar digital photo frame is a reasonable value for money, recognizing that the screen is fairly small and the resolution is fairly coarse. It even has some unexpected features and uses if you want to get creative. But as a modern substitute for the old-fashioned picture frame, you might want to think a little about the limitations and how you would actually use it.