Sapphire DPF-T10 digital picture frame

A photo frame used to mean a static display of a single picture, but with digital photo frames it's possible to show much more than that.

The Sapphire DPF-T10 is a frame that looks sleek and stylish, meaning we weren’t embarrassed to display it in the living room. It has a 10in screen and can display JPEG and BMP format images as well as AVI video.

The screen can also be set up to display the pictures in portrait or landscape mode (that is, propped on its bottom or on its side). Most of the time the frame was able to detect that it had been rotated and it automatically rotated the pictures to match.

That clever touch aside, actual picture quality was not so good – photos were grainy and in some cases badly stretched.

The frame also supports MP3 music files, which means that you can listen to music while viewing pictures. Unfortunately the sound from the internal speakers was very tinny and when we played videos they suffered from the same problem.

However, the frame did come with some interesting features, notably the way it can be switched on by the user clapping twice. A great idea, but you have to stand right next to it, making us wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to push the power button.

The frame itself is controlled using the touch-sensitive display, which has nine on-screen buttons (they disappear when not being used) to access menus and create slideshows of your pictures.

We were also impressed with the size and sensitivity of the buttons, which were big enough to cater for the biggest of big fingers and sensitive enough for just a light touch.

The frame has 256MB of internal memory for storing video and pictures and we liked the way that we could easily transfer it straight from a camera using the USB socket on the frame, or through a computer. There are also memory card slots that accept the common SD and XD formats but not the Compactflash used by some larger cameras.