Review: Fidelity Electronics 15-inch Digital Picture Frame

Everybody loves to display their best pictures as large as possible, yet back in the old drop-off-your-film-and-pick-up-your-prints days, four- and five-inch prints were what most of us settled for when it was time to enjoy our efforts. Even now, while anyone can easily print 8 x 10 prints at home, the cost of all that paper and ink, not to mention the diminishing lack of wall space to display them, makes large prints impractical.

To deliver us from little pictures, Fidelity Electronics offers a 15-inch LCD digital picture frame. Compared to the 5- to 8-inch frames that have been hot gift items for the past year, this frame is a billboard. It’s bigger than the screens of most laptops where our digital pictures lay dormant.

The Fidelity frame includes a pretty standard list of features and functions. It’s built around a 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panel with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. It has a listed contrast ratio of 300:1 and a 25ms response rate—not great for watching TV, but fine for enjoying digital stills. One side of the bezel contains memory card slots for SD, xD, CF and MS cards plus a USB port for either a flash drive or connection to a PC. On the opposite side is the power switch and menu buttons. On the back is a prop for the stand, but a bracket is also included to allow you to hang it on a wall. I was particularly pleased to see that the power cord does not include one of those unsightly huge “bricks” that need to be tucked away.

The inside of the Fidelity frame is also large—there’s a generous 1GB of internal memory which can store a mountain of pictures. This is nice if you like your slideshows to include hundreds of pictures. It also means you won’t often need to delete pictures from the memory in order to add new ones. Of course the frame can also display pictures directly from memory cards.

For image files, it plays standard JPEGs plus MPEG 1, 2 and 4 video files. MP3 music files can also be played.

The frame’s menu could use a little more polish, but it’s usable. You have several options in displaying the pictures, including speed, transitions and order. The tiny navigation buttons make getting around the menu a little tricky. At one point I accidentally changed the display language to Chinese, and it took a bit of guesswork to return it to English.