The Sony DPF-V700 digital photo frame: A great slide-show player, too

If you've ever fed images from your digital camera to your HDTV, you've probably been disappointed at how they looked on the big screen. That's because most cameras can't output images in high-definition. Enter the Sony DPF-V700, $189. (Click on the image, right, for a closer look.) In our latest tests of digital photo frames, this decent-performing 7-inch frame proved adept at turning an HDTV into a megasized photo frame of superb quality.

On its own screen, the frame produced very good image quality overall, although it scored slightly lower in one image attribute, contrast, than in the others, color rendition and clarity. Its greatest distinction (besides being one of the first frames from Sony, whose HDTVs typically score very well in our Ratings of plasma TVs and Ratings of LCD TVs) is that it's one of the few frames with an HDMI output for connecting directly to an HDTV.

When connected to an HDTV via HDMI cable, the DPF-V700 successfully transmitted 1080i resolution images that looked as good on the big screen as on the device's own smaller display. That's an unusual achievement since most frames output only at low, VGA resolution, which invariably yields dreadful images on an HDTV.

As a slide-show player, the DPF-V700 has minor drawbacks. Most digital photos have either a 4:3 or 3:2 aspect ratio, squarer than the 16:9 aspect ratio used by HDTVs. When you view photos on a TV set, then, you generally must use the menu system on the frame to either zoom in and crop off images' edges or live with a letterbox effect-black bars framing the edges of your photo. Also, high-res viewing requires an HDMI cable, an extra that costs about $20.

The bottom line: This Sony is well-priced and performs decently as a photo frame, though it falls a little short of the very best models in our Ratings of digital picture frames (available to subscribers). But it's worth serious consideration if you're a slide-show aficionado who wants good quality images, but can't display them directly from a computer, which is the only other way to enjoy them in their original resolution.

—Terry Sullivan