Jessops 10.4″ Acrylic LCD Picture Frame review

If you’re after a large digital photo frame on a budget, Jessops’ 10.4in model is one of the cheapest we’ve seen.

The wide black bezel means it measures 16in diagonally, but the single piece of acrylic that covers the entire frame gives it an elegant look. This is helped by the lack of any visible buttons, which are located on the back. Alternatively, you can use the white credit card-style remote control.

You can mount the frame horizontally or vertically by rotating the mount at the rear. It’s a 75x75mm VESA mount, so you could buy a matching wall mount, or simply use the four hooks. There are slots for every common memory card format bar Smart Media. SD cards are difficult to remove as there’s no push-to-eject mechanism. There are two USB ports: one for connecting flash drives or hard disks to the frame, and the other for connecting the frame to a PC.

Menus are easy to navigate, and there are five main modes: photo, music, video, file and time. The latter shows an ugly calendar with both analog and digital clocks. We like that the device shows a list of all MP3s and videos even if they’re stored in separate folders. We don’t like that photo filenames are truncated to eight characters, though.

Unfortunately, you can only choose four-, six- and 11-second intervals between photos. There’s no way to turn the frame on and off at preset times; there’s only a power-off timer that can be set to two, four or eight hours. The final frustration is that it uses 3W of power in standby mode.

Fortunately, image quality is excellent. Colours are accurate, and the screen is bright with none of the graininess we’ve seen on many other frames. You can also control brightness, contrast and saturation, which is rare on a photo frame.

This is a good-looking frame with impressive image quality, but there are too many other issues. The lack of an on/off timer, its high power consumption and lack of slideshow options all count against it. We prefer Kodak’s EX-1011, available for £97 including VAT from www.elitegadgets.com.