A Beautifully Framed Slide Show for Any Room in Your House

The Digital Spectrum Memory Frame MF-575 is an entry-level digital frame that is readily affordable at just $99. It’s a nice-looking and nice-functioning piece of technology that qualifies as a “great buy” in my book. It doesn’t come with a memory card, so its capacity is as large (or as small) as the card you want to purchase or that comes in your camera. Among the frames we examined, this one stood out as particularly attractive, with a rich black-and-wine wood frame surrounding the digital screen, but the frame is actually removable and can be replaced by any 4x6-inch frame of your choosing, making it compatible with any décor.

The frame is compatible with a number of card types (SD, MC, MMC, MS) as well as portable USB drives. In the very simplest scenario, for people who are not comfortable moving digital picture files around, you can pull a card out of your digital camera and insert it in the frame, and away it goes showing the pictures you just took. The more flexible and probable approach, however, is to download pictures you’ve saved to your computer (or on CD) by inserting the blank card in the universal adapter provided with the frame and plugging it into a USB port on your computer. It was fairly straightforward to do, and any current computer will immediately recognize the USB storage device and will let you drag files onto the card. I tried to use my personal USB portable drive, and the frame didn’t recognize it for some reason. It was supposed to work, but perhaps I had a confusing directory structure on the drive. It wasn’t that important, so I quickly went to plan B and didn’t bother with my thumb drive, but the frame is supposed to work with those, too. Based on my experience, however, I wouldn’t rely on a thumb drive to hold the information.

The frame will display any kind of picture in JPG or GIF format and it will even play MPEG, so you can include a wide variety of images in your slideshow: photographs or short films from your camera, pix or flix from your cell phone, scanned images, or other clips you get (legally of course) from the internet or elsewhere. It can make for an interesting show. I haven’t tried playing movies on the frame, and I’m skeptical that it will play them well, but it’s an advertised capability.

The image quality is very good, particularly for such an inexpensive piece of equipment. Like any flat-panel screen, it is somewhat directional, and the pictures are brightest and clearest when you’re square with the frame. Any other orientation leaves the picture a little washed-out looking, but that is likely the case with any such frames in any price range.

The programming interface on the frame is fairly basic, which may be a pro for most users. When you turn it on, it displays a very primitive (read: clunky) “menu” screen that you can use to customize the slide show. It works, but it isn’t very sophisticated or robust. But then, this is an entry-level frame. I expected basic functionality, and this frame delivered that quite well. The written instructions are adequate, but they’re clearly translated from Chinese to English. Fortunately, there isn’t a whole lot you need to do. It’s fundamentally a plug-and-play kind of device, and the most difficult decision in the programming is how long you want each picture to stay on screen.

Since the frame has no memory capacity of its own, the excellent price is a little distorted on the low side. In order for it to work, you will need something to plug into it. For perspective: we recently purchased a 1 GB SD card online at BestBuy for a mere $29 after rebate; they’re more typically about $50 (at the time of this writing). For our purposes, 1 GB is more than adequate, holding more than 300 moderate-resolution pictures (about 3KB per picture). That level of resolution is plenty for a 4x6 display. So, even if you pay full price for a 1 GB card, the end-price of the frame is more like $150. And that is still a good deal for this kind of thing.

The frame is advertised as an MP3 player, with the implication that you can set your slideshow to music. I didn’t try this, but a review I read at the vendor’s site said it was pretty much an all or nothing: either it acted as a player without picture or showed the slideshow without the music. When it tried to do both, it was jumpy. Perhaps that is a function of the capacity of the card and how full you have it; I didn’t look into it. But it is probably best not to expect both functions at once.


A digital frame is a nice addition to any room or office. It is a mesmerizing way to see your kids changing, revisit family vacations or holidays, view beautiful scenes… whatever your preference may be. It isn’t cheap, but it is affordable for a special splurge, and it ensures that you really do look at those pictures that may be languishing on the shelves in photo albums (if you’ve actually gotten that far with your pictures; I haven’t!) or on the computer’s hard drive (yep, that’s where mine are). There are modest limitations associated with this entry-level frame, but for the money, it is a safe bet. It performs well as a digital slide show and provides good quality images.