NU 8in Digital Photo Frame

Nu's 8in Digital Photo Frame is one more offering in a highly competitive market. This particular frame is the smallest screen size in Nu's line-up, but a high resolution and built-in memory make for a good contender.

The frame is accompanied with a power cable, remote and manual. The stand is a part of the frame itself, adjustable for up to six different viewing positions. There is also an option for a separate frame to be added on through a standard camera mount fitting on the bottom of the unit. We were a little disappointed to find there was no USB cable in the package, as this is required to transfer photos from a computer to the frame's inbuilt memory. Acquiring one is relatively cheap, however, and transferring photos from a computer to the frame was easily done.

Nu offers support for all the major memory cards, and includes the option of using a USB flash drive as a source. It also manages to integrate two one-watt speakers which serve the basic purpose of playing music or the sound from any movies of the supported formats. Once turned on, the unit will automatically begin a slideshow of any pictures in its inbuilt memory or on a memory card if inserted. Setup options are not necessary but cover a variety of options, including slideshow effects, and basic photo manipulation with zoom and rotate.

Switching between memory cards, USB flash drive and inbuilt memory is easy with the provided remote. Access speeds for the memory cards was impressively fast, though accessing pictures on the USB flash drive took significantly longer. Unfortunately, file formats are somewhat limited. The only picture format supported is JPEG, with JPEG AVI supported for movies and MP3 support for music.

The LCD has a surprisingly high resolution considering its size. Still, the fact that the screen is inset into the frame behind reflective glass makes for poor presentation. In a well lit environment, the pictures are viewable but some of the images can appear washed out. Horizontal viewing angles are acceptable but slight variations in vertical angles severely affect the picture.

The colour accuracy of the frame is acceptable, though not as good as a larger LCD screen we compared it to. The frame was unable to properly scale a 15-megapixel reference photo, resulting in a fair amount of pixelation. For the most part though, real world examples at a reasonable quality did not suffer so much. Some pixelation did occur on 8-megapixel photos, but this was less noticeable in darker pictures.

Despite a lack of comprehensive support for common file formats other than JPEG, Nu's photo frame is a capable unit that certainly has an advantage over most competitors.