Sapphire DPF-T10 review

At 10.2in, Sapphire's new photo frame is larger than most.

The black bezel sits flush with the screen, and this is outlined by a thin white outer bezel. A hefty aluminium alloy stand means it can sit either horizontally or vertically, and you can mount it on a wall in either orientation too.

On the left edge are two memory card slots, which support all types of card bar the outdated Smart Media format. There's also a USB port for flash drives or any device supporting USB storage, and a mini USB port for connection to a PC.

You can use the latter to copy photos, videos and MP3s to the 256MB of internal memory, but video support is limited to motion-JPEG files in an AVI wrapper.

The responsive touch-sensitive controls are all on the front. Menus were generally easy to navigate and looked attractive. There aren't many settings - you can't adjust colours, contrast or brightness, for example - but a useful timer function lets you set on and off times to save energy. Power consumption is very low anyway, and negligible in standby.

The 800x480 resolution is more than enough to fill the small display with details, and colours are accurate, if a touch undersaturated. Viewing angles are excellent, and brightness is just about good enough to see photos in a sunny room. The built-in speaker is very quiet, but that will bother you only if you use it for video and MP3 playback.

You can set the slideshow interval to five, 10, 15 or 30 seconds, or once per day. There's no way to cycle photos every hour or two, though. There's also no orientation sensor, meaning photos have to be rotated individually when using the frame vertically - there's no way to display a slideshow in portrait mode automatically.

The price of £170 is fairly steep for a frame of this size, and there's no wireless Ethernet or Bluetooth. If you want a large photo frame to display a different photo in landscape mode each day, then the DPF-T10 won't disappoint. Kodak's 8in SV811 has similar features and is much better value, but many will prefer the DPF-T10's more stylish appearance.