Pictorea 10.4in Pro Bluetooth Digital Photo Frame review

This photo frame from Pictorea has a generous 10.4in screen and is equipped with Bluetooth to save taking it off a wall and plugging into a Mac to add new photos.

Our review kit came with a red wood frame - other options are black, silver and light wood. The wood is bevelled and there's a fine white bevel between the screen and the surrounding black border. At a tad over 4cm deep though, it will protrude a little more than a similar non-digital frame when mounted on a wall. Whether on a wall or a desk there's a choice of portrait and landscape orientations to suit your photos.

The stand is easy to attach: just put it in place and twist until it locks.

A remote control is included and its IR receiver is well positioned in the black border around the screen. Buttons to call up the menu, navigate and select options are also on the recessed right-hand side of the frame. On the left is a mini-USB connection and two ports for memory cards to boost the built-in 256MB of memory - one is labelled for SD, MMC and Memory Stick, the other is for CompactFlash.

The screen's viewing angle is pretty good despite the inevitable reflections across the pane. Colour was fairly vivid on the default settings but better after tweaking the brightness.

However, images that were sharp on a higher-definition screen were soft on the native 800 x 600 display.

Curiously the Mac's Bluetooth File Exchange application complained that the device didn't support Jpegs or any of the other supported photo and video formats, yet they displayed without problems.

The frame scaled higher-resolution images to fit, while 5-megapixel Jpegs added a couple of seconds' delay when moving between photos. Sadly the frame doesn't resize images - Jpeg and BMP are supported - as they're uploaded.

On some photos we noticed an off-colour line along one edge of the display; it would be hard to spot from a distance but easy to spot when standing close.

While images were vivid enough the softening of photos was a little disappointing considering the product's price tag.