In Use:
The basic setup of the digital photo frame is simple; pretty much plug and play. Getting things configured to your tastes may take a bit longer. As mentioned, using the controls on the frame requires a bit of a learning curve, so skip that and go straight to using the remote control. We'll start the discussion of the frame's use by looking at some screens used to set it up.
The image below shows the main screen, which provides three options: Photo, Audio, and Setup. Photo mode allows you to view the images in three modes. The first allows you to start a slide show and the frame will advance through all images present at the time interval you select. The second allows you to browse through full screen views of the images, and it will stay on whatever image you choose. The third allows you to browse thumbnails in a 4x3 array in order to select an image to view. With the 12 images on the screen, you use the arrow keys on the remote to navigate to the one you want, and you then press Play to select it.
The below left image shows the Audio tab. While you can listen to a random mix of MP3 files stored with the image files in Photo mode, the digital photo frame turns into a basic MP3 player in Audio mode. Here we can see that two slow jams from the great Barry White have been saved to the flash drive with my photos. In this mode you can select what file to play, and you get a fair amount of information on the screen: a basic file browser, file name, some ID3 tag data, total song length, time lapsed on current song, and even a 14-band graphic equalizer. Note how Barry is pretty much kicking all bass! Much to my surprise, the audio isn't terrible... While you wouldn't want this as your primary audio source, it does have decent sound quality at low to mid volume ranges. I could see it being useful in an office setting where you wanted to listen to music softly while watching a slide show of family photos, or maybe at a family party playing Christmas standards while showing photos from years past.
The above right image shows the Setup page. Here you can adjust the redundant brightness control, set the slide show pause time (5, 10, or 30 seconds), enable MP3 audio with the slide show, and select the OSD language (English, Spanish, or French).
Finally we have a look at the
Rosewill RDF-670B in action. The images below show one of the stock files included on the internal memory, and it shows that the image quality is decent from a wide viewing angle. This is a widescreen format image, and as with widescreen televisions, when you load a standard (4:3) image, you get black bars on either side. There is a zoom feature available that will fill the screen (and cut off some of the image on the top and bottom), but when you click to zoom during a slide show, the show is paused until you return to a 100% zoom. Considering most of my photos are in a non-widescreen format, it would be nice to set a zoom in order to fill the screen and have the slide shown continue.
The quality of the image on the screen looks great from about three feet away and beyond. It is bright, sharp, and better than I may have expected. Once you get too close, a few short comings become visible though. As you might expect, this isn't an extremely high resolution screen, and if you get close enough you can see some pixelation and effects of aliasing, such as jagged diagonal lines and a bit of a Moire pattern. There is also a bit of a wave that travels through the image, perhaps as a result of the screen's refresh rate. While these may sound like serious problems for an LCD screen, like I said, if you view the photo frame from at least arm's length it really does look nice.
