Philips SPF4008 digital photo frame review

The SPF4008 is a rarity in this day and age: a digital photo frame from a big brand that doesn’t cost a fortune. It has an 8in screen with an 800x600-pixel resolution and can play videos in Motion JPEG AVI format. The design is elegant, although it was spoiled by a pointless promotional sticker that left a stubborn residue of glue on the frame. This is a basic error for a product that’s designed to be on display.

There’s no support for CompactFlash or Memory Stick Pro Duo cards, but it does accept the bulkier Memory Stick Pro cards along with xD and the ubiquitous SD. There’s a respectable 512MB of internal memory, which will hold around 2,000 photos thanks to the frame’s automatic resizing as it copies from memory cards.

We struggled to locate this feature, though. Despite its simple appearance, the menu layout proved awkward to navigate. Options were located in unexpected locations and it took us a long time to get to grips with the behaviour of the rear-mounted buttons.

We never found a way to copy entire folders of photos except by selecting each one in turn, which was pretty tedious. There’s a sensor to detect which way up the frame is positioned, so photos were rotated automatically. However, the frame didn’t recognise photos that were tagged as being shot in portrait mode.

Rotating them manually was another tedious experience. It wasn’t all bad, though. Slide durations can be set to between five seconds and 24 hours, and there’s a timer function to switch the frame off at night.

Fortunately, the SPF4008 performs well where it really counts: image quality. Colours were vivid and, although the brightest highlights and darkest shadows were a little lost, the overall effect was extremely flattering to photos.

Jessops’ 8in frame is just as high quality, has more memory, more card slots and better controls, yet costs just £39. The Philips SPF4008 looks a little smarter, though, and its slideshow frequency option is more versatile.