Black Friday sales – you love em and hate em. It’s a great way to get a loads of savings on a ton of products but it’s also a great way to spend lots of time waiting in long lines – either trying to get into the store or trying to get OUT of the store. That’s how I spent a good portion of my day at BestBuy yesterday – looking for deals and sales on a wide variety of products.

One of those products was the Westinghouse DPG-0701 Widescreen Digital Photo Frame which was on sale for roughly 80 bucks at BestBuy. I had been looking for a digital photo frame for some time now and this frame had a couple of things going for it. First it measured 7 inches diagonally across which was decently large and second, it was selling for a mere 80 bucks. Ok I’ll be honest – the price is what drew me to the product.

So shaking the notion that this frame was produced by Westinghouse, I decided to pick up the DPG-0701 and take it for a spin. If you’re interested in this frame, then definitely read up on this review before taking the plunge. Let’s get started shall we?

A look around

Here’s a look at the packaging.

Here’s a shot of the DPG-0701.

 

The frame itself is very simple yet elegant in design with black borders all around the display itself.

Turning the unit around to the back side, you’ll see an on/off switch, a built in kickstand for mounting the display on top of a surface and air vents for heat dissipation.

The top of the display shows the controls for the unit. There’s a brightness control and buttons for reverse, play, and forward, as well as a dedicated menu button.

Here’s a picture of the bottom of the display.

One of the nice features of the DPG-0701 is its’ extensive support for a wide array of memory card formats. Card formats supported include:

• SD or MMC cards
• CF or MicroDrive cards
• xD Picture cards
• Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, or Memory Stick PRO Duo cards
• USB thumbnail drives via the USB port

There’s a Mini-USB port that you can use to connect the photo frame to your computer for file transfers of photos and videos. Keep in mind that there’s a limited amount of space on the frame – 16 MB of flash space in total to be exact.

The DPG-0701 supports the following file formats (spanning digital images and digital video formats):

• JPEG
• BMP
• AVI Motion JPEG
• MPEG1
• MPEG4

Setting things up

Setting up the Westinghouse DPG-0701 is simply a breeze. You connect the AC adapter to the frame (sorry – no battery compartment), insert a media card into the appropriate media reader slot and then select the picture to show on the screen. That’s the easy stuff of course. If you want some more advanced capabilities, then you’ll need to peruse through the On Screen Display (OSD) menus.

To get into the OSD menus, simply press and hold the “menu” button for 2 seconds. You’ll then see the following menu on the display.

The menu options are as follows:

• MosaicView – this menu item allows you to turn on and off the MosaicView feature. MosaicView is a unique feature from Westinghouse which allows several pictures to be shown simultaneously on the display at the same time. This is one of the cooler features on the frame which would be even better had the display resolution been higher

 

• Image Size – this menu item allows you to choose between Optimal and Original image size settings.

 

• Slide Show Effect – this menu item allows you to choose the image transition effect. You can choose from no transition, Fade, Shutter, Cross Comb, Mask, Brick, Dissolve, and Random

 

• Slide Show Speed – this menu item allows you to choose the speed at which pictures are changed during the slide show. You can choose from 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, and 60 seconds.

 

• Slide Show Shuffle – this menu item turns on and off the shuffle feature for the slide show.

 

• Video Repeat – Here you can select either one or all videos to repeat through continously.

 

• Start Slide Show – as the title implies, this starts up the slide show
• Copy File – this allows a file to be copied from a memory card to the internal flash memory
• Delete File – this allows a file to be deleted from the internal flash memory
• Set Favorite – You can set images as your favorites to allow them to be shown more often during a random slide show
• Reset Settings – sick of your current settings? Reset everything.
• Language – finally – choose the language of the device. Supported languages on the picture frame include English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

As you’ve seen in the above pictures, the menu system is a bit lacking in design but it is pretty easy to use. You use the “Menu” button to navigate up the menu tree while you use the << and >> buttons to navigate through the current menu structure. To select a menu item, you press the “Play” button. Easy enough right? (yes it’s the UI is ugly though).

Getting images to the frame

There are several ways to get media onto the frame. The first is to connect the digital frame to your PC and copy the images to the frame via the USB connection. Unfortunately Westinghouse doesn’t package a USB cable to make this happen so you’ll need to purchase one if you want to copy files to the frame directly without the use of a flash card or drive. This seems like a major ommission on Westinghouse’s part – or they really want you to use flash cards to transfer files.

Speaking of flash cards – this is the other way of getting images onto the display. You can insert a flash card (and it supports a myriad of media formats as you can tell) into the frame and then navigate through the OSD menus to inform the frame to play back images from the flash card instead of the onboard flash memory.

You can also go into the OSD menu and copy files from the inserted flash card to the local internal flash memory on the frame. We generally would recommend you using a flash card as the main storage device since they offer so much more room than the paltry 16MB of flash memory on the frame. 

Mounting the display

The Westinghouse DPG-0701 has plenty of mounting options for you to choose from. It has a built-in fold out stand which allows you to set up the frame in any location around the house. There’s also a key-hold slot near the top of the frame (when held in landscape mode only) which can be used to mount the frame on a wall. There’s also a 1/4″ – 20 threaded insert along the bottom of the frame (again when the frame is held in landscape mode only) which can be used by a mounting bracket or even some sort of tri-pod.

Media Playback

Playing back digital images on the Westinghouse DPG-0701 is a fairly painless procedure. The first step is to choose the location of your images. You can press the menu button to get to the top level menu. From there you select the storage device that you wish to use – from SD cards to the local flash memory storage.

 

Once you’ve selected the storage location, you can choose one of three ways of browsing through your content. You can view only pictures, only videos, or view all the files on the storage space. These menus will basically allow you to pick a specific file for playback. You can then use the control buttons on top of the frame to skip forward or backward through the media files.

You can also have the digital frame show a slideshow of your stored media. To get to this option, you need to press and hold down the menu button for 2 seconds to bring up the OSD menu.

Once you’re there - just select “Start Slide Show”, and you’re all ready to go.

If you have MosaicView technology turned on, you can see up to four different images at the same time on the display. MosaicView is one of the more innovative features on the Westinghouse DPG-0701 widescreen digital photo frame. MosaicView will automatically detect different picture orientations and try to fit the best ones into a single view of multiple images. Here’s an example of MosaicView in action

 

While MosaicView is a neat feature to have, it does unfortunately mean your digital images will be smaller in size during playback. This wouldn’t be a problem if the device had a higher resolution but unfortunately display resolution is the main problem with the DPG-0701. More on this shortly.

While the DPG-0701 sports a widescreen display, most images are shot in a 4:3 format which means images will either get cropped or you’ll get black bars along the sides. The widescreen format is great for the MosaicView feature but it’s actually a detriment during single picture playback.

But what about videos?

The frame also supports MPEG1 and MPEG4 video playback but this was somewhat problematic at best. I took some video footage shot from my Kodak digital camera which records in MPEG-4 format and then attempted to use the DPG-0701 to play back the content. Although the frame successfully read the video file format, playback was extremely slow and there was no sound playback. Pretty useless without the sound if you ask me.

Of course – forget about playing back DivX or XviD encoded materials unless you have some video conversation software on hand to make it into MPEG-4 material.

OK.. the picture?

The real point of having a digital photo frame is to have the ability to play back the myriad of digital images that we all collect now on a frequent basis. It’s one thing to print out digital images on photo paper, but it’s another thing to have the images being displayed live on your bedroom lamp table or your living room shelf. Therein lies the beauty of having a digital photo frame – having the ability to change the picture depending on your mood or time of day.

Unfortunately the Westinghouse DPG-0701 fails in being a good digital phot frame primarily due to one major area – the display resolution. With so many cameras shooting images in the 5+ megapixel ranges these days, you’d expect a decent resolution display right? Well unfortunately the frame’s resolution is extremely lacking. I could not find any information about the resolution specifications for this digital photo frame and perhaps that alone is very telling. Pictures are often very pixelated during playback with many fine features completely missing. Sure the pictures look OK when viewed from 10 feet back but once you’re within 1-3 feet – forget about it. They simply stink. Let’s not even get into MosaicView when it comes to the display resolution. If I think display a single image on this display stinks, can you imagine what I would think when you’re displaying four pictures simultaneously? YUCK.

So yes – that’s the ultimate deal breaker here folks. If it wasn’t for that, I would say the display isn’t too bad at all.

Summary

Ah Black Friday sales. You get some good things and you get some not so good things out them. One of the not so good things was this Westinghouse DPG-0701 Widescreen Digital Photo Frame.

Don’t get me wrong though – this display has a couple of features which do stand out – notably the MosaicView feature. MosaicView would be great IF the display’s resolution was high enough to join the images being displayed. Unfortunately at the end of the day, a digital photo frame is all about the picture and this is where the DPG-0701 fails miserably in my opinion. I can not honestly recommend this product at all – unless of course you simply don’t care about resolutions in which case – go for it. Keep in mind – you do get what you pay for here. Of course before the price break, the DPG-0701 was selling around 175 or more which is just way too much money for this device. Truth is, even at 80 bucks, it’s still too much for this device.

Despite the relatively low cost of the photo frame, this one’s going back to the store. Some of features are pretty slick but it’s not enough to overcome the low resolution of the display.

Pros:

• Easy to setup and use
• MosaicView technology
• Supports wide array of media card formats
• Nice looking frame

 

Cons:

• Low display resolution
• Clunky menu
• No battery compartment
• Video playback irksome and no sound playback

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