Review of HANNspree SD8073 8 inch Digital Photo Frame

Ok, this is a bit weird. It's my first proper "hardware" review, and it's for a digital photo frame.

Digital photo frames have become increasingly popular in the last year or so as technology has improved and prices have fallen. Lots of people I know seem to have them, even my parents got one for Xmas in 2007. I've kind of seen the attraction of them, but never been tempted enough to go out and buy one.

We do a lot of photography. Not perhaps a professional's definition of "a lot", but I think we do "a lot" for just casual snappers. Our first digital camera died in December 2007 after 12,500 photos. Its replacement has already racked up over 3000 photos. There's over 1,000 phone camera photos on top of that. And whilst we've been digital for 5 years, we still print quite a few photos. And put them in frames around the house. Last count we had about 20 frames on the walls. And I've got over 80 photos on the walls of my office at work. So we definitely like seeing our pictures around us.

On with the review. The SD8073 is the latest digital photo frame from HANNspree, who have recently entered the digital photo frame market. The frame has an 8" display with a resolution of 800 x 480, which may not sound much by today's monitor standards, but is pretty reasonable for an 8" photo frame. As well as displaying pictures, it also shows video and plays MP3s (like just about any device nowadays!) via a pair of inbuilt 1.5W speakers. It has 256 Mb RAM on which to store your photos, or you can plug in various memory cards and display pictures directly from them. There's a USB 2.0 port so you can transfer your pictures to the frame, it appears as another drive on your computer.

So, you can display your photos, make slideshows, watch lots of different transition effects, rotate the photos, pan around and zoom in. It's simple to use, it has a handy little remote control, and you can even use it as an alarm clock and calendar. You can stand it on a shelf or hang it on a wall. And you can change the frame surround, either dark red or dark blue.

It's a nice little frame, easy to use and set up, and most importantly photos look pretty good on it.

My only problem is that I still don't see why I need one. For a few days we would switch the frame on and watch the pictures changing. Then it becomes something in the background. Then you stop turning it on.



If you think that you need a digital photo frame, then this is a nice unit, competitively priced and with plenty of features. As this is the first one I've looked at I can't say whether it's a lot better or worse than its competitors, but I would buy one for a friend (and I'm notoriously picky when it comes to buying gadgets!)