Quality Digital Camera

The DPF-D72 is another entry level DPF from Sony. The D72 and the cheaper DPF-A72 both share a 7″ display, but the D72 comes with an additional glossy glass-like panel that protects the LCD panel. Also, the D72 has an internal memory of 1GB for storing pictures, whereas the A72 comes with just 128MB for the same purpose. The D72 also supports CF cards, whereas the A72 does not.

Perhaps what sets the D72 apart from the affordable DPF-A72 is the quality of the display. At 800×480 pixels, the pixel density of the LCD display is very high, making well exposed photographs pop in front of your eyes. The image processor and the LCD screen (clear-photo LCD) also render colors faithfully, making sure the pictures look as good as they do on the frame as they do on your computer screen. Unlike the D72, the LCD screen of the A72 suffers from oversaturation in the green and yellow region, and the displayed images look somewehat pixelated with the lower resolution screen (480×234).

The D72 costs substantially more than the A72, which probably explains the difference in quality of the LCD panels. However, like the A72, the D72 comes without a USB cable, which is strange given the price of the frame. Although not entirely necessary, the USB cable allows easy and direct management of the photos in the photo frame’s memory, so you don’t have to copy the files to a memory card and feed it into the frame’s memory through the built-in card reader.

Sony indicated that the device has a backlight life of 20,000 hours (before the brightness drops to 50 percent), so you might want to keep the backlight level at around level 5 (the default is 10) and switch the frame off when you are not in the room.

The device also comes with a handy remote control that runs on a single lithium ion battery, so you can control the slideshow and viewing mode without accessing the control buttons on the back of the frame.