Review: Philips 9FF2M4 digital picture frame

Philips’ new photo frame series houses number of models - the one on test here is a 9in display supplied with a set of coloured magnetic frames so you can change the appearance to your taste.

It’s an easy enough product to use and provides you with a range of connection options to enable instant viewing of new photos.

You’ll find support for most modern memory card standards, or you can utilise the 20MB built-in memory; the supplied Photo Manager software lets you create albums that you can build and view independently, then transfer to the frame.

Photos transferred onto this internal memory via a memory card are resized along the way, which makes big savings on capacity allowing for 110-150 photos.

You’ll find a number of extra features built in, some gimmicky, some genuinely worthwhile. With photos present on the device you can copy, move and rotate, apply one of a handful of special effects or choose from a selection of frame designs to jazz up the image.

More importantly you’ll find a range of slideshow settings that controls how collections are displayed. There are more than a dozen transitions to choose from, along with a collage selection for multiple pictures, and both sequence and frequency controls. 

The crisp, sharp display is impressive; colours are distinct and vibrant. You get enough control over your images through the interface to set up and manage collections and the rechargeable battery (which lasts around an hour) means you can carry it around the house to show photos off without having to plug it in.

Despite this we’ve seen additional connectivity on other frames that we missed on the Philips. There’s no USB port, so you can’t view photos stored on flash drives without loading them through a PC, and Bluetooth (as seen in the Parrot Photo Viewer) is missing. A video out port to allow viewing of photos through a TV would be good, as would movie and music playback options.

Although Philips doesn’t offer these features, this is still a perfectly capable frame with plenty of strengths of its own. The display quality is good while the option of battery operation is useful, and in terms of fulfilling its main purpose it certainly succeeds. It's just a shame digital photo frames are still so expensive.