Sony D80 8 inch Digital Photoframe – Black

P. Ward

at 9:55 am

This frame’s display is spot on in comparison to my calibrated computer display for viewing and manipulating photographs. The greys are grey, and near neutral colours are not distorted with over-saturation – yet purer colours have real punch. If you don’t want to know more – then go and buy one and stop reading.

I do not care about video and sound features, I would rather have the money spent on the display itself. This is a “Digital Photo Frame” designed for 4:3 proportioned digital photos (ie most likely like yours are).

In comparison to 7 and 9 inch widescreen displays there is no contest for displaying normal shaped (uncropped) digital pics. The D80 will even show a physically larger image using more pixels than the 9 inch 800:480 pixel widescreen. I did the maths.. and checked them out… Its good for 35mm film (3:2) scans to, or DSLR pictures of the same proportion, giving only small 6mm black bars top and bottom (without cropping).

All Sony frames (I tried 3 in a store) will display standard jpegs from cameras or those edited in software such as photoshop or paintshop pro and saved as jpegs (not project files etc, I use Photoshop and Paintshop pro, I can’t vouch for very old versions of these products, or other packages. If your edits lose the EXIF data it only affects one view mode (of many) or pop-up picture data when you ask for it – which shows the date and time the picture was taken – the image is fine. My edited camera photos are fine. My scans don’t have this information in the first place but still display.

All Sony frames that I tried/checked do not allow colour or contrast adjustment. It would be nice if you could adjust contrast, saturation and RGB like in a good camera in the frame’s old age. That’s a suggestion for all manufacturers (all frames give more or less functionality in this area that I looked at)

This is a really neat, eye-catching product which does exactly what it should do, show-off digital images accurately and extremely well.

Ps – Amazon did well – delivery was to within 1 hr of the estimate.

Rating: 5 / 5

Ms. S. Smith

at 12:47 pm

Bought this for my 77 year old Mum so ease of use and good display were my priorities. My PC recognised it immediately, as if an external drive, and using XP creating a folder then dragging and dropping photos was a cinch. Wondered if the frame would need photos in the root directory but it was fine. The display is gorgeous – most of my photos taken with my Nokia N95 and look crisp and colourful. Some on an old digital camera, also good. Even ones from my Nokia 6600 are viewable if a bit grainy from the increase in size.

The manual appears to be written in English rather than translated, and is well-indexed. Mum was quite happy to read it. To be honest, I could have got the frame set up and photos on it without even reading the manual, it was that straightforward.

I stored nearly 200 images on the internal memory.

The remote control is easy to use and some of the icons are self-explanatory but the manual covers these right at the beginning anyway. It takes a standard calculator battery.

Only gripes – the auto-orientation doesn’t work on my photos, and although you can manually set it for a still image, this doesn’t seem to work in random mode nor retain the change. The answer to this is edit it first on your PC! Secondly, no mini-USB cable is supplied, so you might want to buy one if you can’t pinch one from something else (in my case, my 3G modem). Finally, I was surprised to read in the manual’s advice, that memory cards should be formatted on your digital camera, not in your PC, otherwise they might not work. I haven’t tried it with a memory card so I can’t comment, but not sure where this leaves micro-SD cards or similar from one’s phone. Not everyone has a digital camera, especially with phone cameras now being so good.

Small gripes and certainly nothing that would prevent me giving this 5 stars. I want one myself!
Rating: 5 / 5

Vincent Brotherton

at 4:17 pm

I’ve been looking for a digital frame for a few weeks and after a bit of research came to the following conclusions :-

1-Needs to look good

2-Must have a random display function

3-I need it to display photo’s not video or music

4-Easy to load pictures

The Sony DPF D80 does all of this very well. OK it’s not cheap for what most would consider to be a basic frame, but I could not find one cheaper frame that actually showed pictures in random mode that actually is random. It does not come with a mini USB lead to connect it to your PC but these are cheap enough and once connect my Windows Vista PC recognised it as a mass storage device and so I just dragged images into it and off it goes. Very easy menu and excellent picture quality.If you want to show video then this is not for you but for easy,excellent quality photo display it’s great.
Rating: 5 / 5