Sony Digital 7-Inch DPF-A72 LCD WQVGA 16:10 Photo Frame

3 comments

1. 

   M. Rosen on January 20, 2010 at 10:34 am

   Surprisingly for a Sony, this is one of the least expensive 7 inch frames on the market. I’m sure the small internal memory (128MB) and the medium-resolution screen helped keep the cost down, but they don’t prevent it from being a very good photo frame. It has easy to follow instructions, a good remote and a very high-quality look. The illuminated Sony logo is a nice touch, but you can turn it off too. We got past the internal memory issue by just dedicating a high capacity SD card to it. It has quite a few display modes for clock and calendar, and several different transitions from pic to pic (fade, wipe, etc), you can have it change photos every few seconds thru every 24 hours and have it timed to turn on and off at certain times (perfect for use in an office). Lots of versatile display modes with multi pix, etc. 2 small issues: It wants to rotate photos to the correct orientation (landscape or portrait). You can turn this off, but it seems to not make a difference. This is only a problem if you have already flipped vertical (portrait orientation) images with another program. The frame will still think they are horizontal and flip them another 90 degrees. The fix is to leave your original pix as they were on the camera, and the frame will orient them correctly. You can manually rotate any wayward images, but they only retain the change if they are stored on the frame’s internal memory. The other small issue is that any of the display modes that feature a clock with a photo dedicate a lot more space to the clock than the photo. I would prefer it to be the other way around. Still an excellent unit, and no regrets.

2. 

   Jewelry Lover on January 20, 2010 at 12:11 pm

   This is the second Sony 7″ digital frame we’ve purchased. This purchase was for a present. $79 on gold box was too sweet of a deal to pass up. These frames work reliably – we’ve had our first one for about a year now with absolutely no problems and the picture is crisp and bright. I love the dark black outer border and the shiny glass front is easy to clean and looks very neat and professional – compliments any photograph.

   We bought this one as a present to give to my uncle for the holidays. We shot pics at his family reunion this summer and I can’t wait for him to be able to view them in a slideshow all day. he lives far away and so it makes me feel like we’re all closer to him each day.

3. 

   Andrew Siew on January 20, 2010 at 2:21 pm

   The DPF-A72 is probably one of the most affordable digital photo frame by Sony. Weighing just slightly more than a regular wooden picture frame of the same size, the device looks deceivably like a regular picture frame. The frame is very glossy and attracts fingerprints like mad, whereas the LCD screen has an anti-reflective matted surface.

   The DPF-A72 has a built-in memory of 128Mb, but with the demonstration software and operating system installed, the available free space is somewhere around 109Mb. 109Mb of memory may seem small to most people these days, but since the LCD screen only displays up to 480×234 pixels, the device does not require alot of memory to store the display pictures. To fill the frame completely, each picture only needs to be 480 pixels wide and 300 pixels tall, and with JPEG compression, 109Mb gives you more than enough room to store up to hundreds of pictures. For those of you who needs to display everything they own on this little photo frame, Sony has indicated that the memory card slots in the back of the frame (SD, MMC, Memory Stick Pro Duo and M2 compatible) can take up cards that are as big as 32Gb.

   There are several viewing modes to display your images (single, multiple, with clock, with calendar, etc), but the default viewing mode (single frame) seems to look the best to me with the resolution of the screen being so low.

   Color reproduction is very good considering the price of the device, but the display tends to oversaturate green and yellow, making them look forced and unnatural. I assume the more expensive models from Sony would not have this problem, but they cost so much more.

   Sony indicated that the device has a backlight life of 20,000 hours (before the brightness drops to 50 percent), so you might want to keep the backlight level at around level 5 (the default is 10) and switch the frame off when you’re not in the room.

   The device also comes with a handy remote control that runs on a single lithium ion battery, so you can control the slideshow and viewing mode without accessing the control buttons on the back of the frame.